Last night I was again drawn to the pier and the sea. Now more than ever I feel the need to be close to the sea. I think I am beginning to understand the surfers who live for nothing more than to sit upon her just beyond where her waves break. Like meditative sea birds, they wait and watch. Sometimes they speak to one another, but mostly they are silent. They do not think; they do not speak. They are. For them there is nothing more important in life than surfing. For them it is a kind of childlike prayer to their God the sea. It is a great, powerful, and beautiful God. It is also a dumb God. Without the playful surfers, her greatness, her power, and her beauty would remain unknown and unappreciated. They are foolish looking creatures, these surfers, as odd looking to the rest of us as the seahorse. But they are at peace upon their sea. They have found, perhaps, all there is to find. Their God is simple, yet mysterious. They do not seek any greater knowledge of her, knowledge that might even destroy her mystery. Also, they do not seek that which even God cannot give. They seek no absolutes beyond their own beauty. They seek no absolute place in the scheme of things unless it be the sea. They know there is no such place. Nor do they seek absolute personal significance for their insignificant being. I think they prefer it that way. They are heroes without enemies. They are heroic, I believe, in their willingness to accept playfully the insignificance of their lives. In the morning before they work, they seek the belly of their God on which they sit and play like God’s fleas. And in the evening after their work is finished, they return to watch the reddish sun sink coldly into the sea. They do not seek immortality, for they do not seek that which belongs to nothing, not even to their God who will become brain-dead with the death of the last cosmic flea. They seek only to frolic and to play and not to brood and, of course, not to linger but to die quickly.
From the unpublished novel The Girl and the Philosopher
