Dan Reiter at The Millions:
No quote from antiquity sums up the metaphysical challenge of being a surfer more aptly than this one, from Marcus Aurelius, the last Emperor of the Pax Romana: “There is a river of creation, and time is a violent stream. As soon as one thing comes into sight, it is swept past and another is carried down: it too will be taken on its way.” Waves, by their nature, do not hold still. “Catching” one, therefore, can be a kind of thought experiment, a quantum paradox. To hitch yourself onto a surge of liquid energy—to soar across its frothing surface—demands both physical and mental suspension of disbelief.
Catching a wave is a tricky business in itself; to do it on the printed page requires yet another level of imagination. Which might explain why so few surf-themed books have tapped into the literary mainline. Notwithstanding the stray bubble-gum-kitsch bestseller (Frederick Kohner’s Gidget) or the outlier Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir (William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days), the canon of “surf literature” is relatively thin.
more here.
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