... is about surfing, which I've never done, but the book came highly recommended and I checked it out and here we are; I just found this very rich, philosophical, metaphorical, challenging. I haven't surfed but I've lived. Someday I hope to try surfing.
"But surfing has always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else. Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness – a dynamic, indifferent world.... The ocean was... endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure. And yet you were expected, even as a kid, to take its measure every day. You were required – this was essential, a matter of survival – to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning. As a kid, too, your abilities were assumed to be growing. What was unthinkable one year became thinkable, possibly, the next. My letters from Honolulu in 1966, kindly returned to me recently, are less distinguished by swaggering bullshit than by frank discussions of fear. 'Don't think I've suddenly gotten brave. I haven't.' But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back to me."
— William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
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