«Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little
torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a
hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh, the
abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun!
Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of
that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been
peering through the jeweler's loupe engraved with his father's initials
at the perfect, priceless planet itself -- at his home, the billion-,
the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth! He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.»
in Everyman - 2006
Philip Roth - 19/03/1933 - 22/05/2018
