Passing the time
“Passing the time was excruciating without painting. There was the hour-long morning walk, in the late afternoon there was twenty minutes of working out with his light weights and a half hour of doing easy laps at the pool—the daily regime his cardiologist encouraged—but that was it, those were the events of his day. How much time could you spend staring out at the ocean, even if it was the ocean you’d loved since you were a boy? How long could he watch the tides flood in and flow out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason? […] But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that—the longing for the best of boyhood … [when] he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers—into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future—and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go.”
— from Everyman by Philip Roth
(Painting: The Green Wave , ca. 1866–67, by Claude Monet. Thank you, Metropolitan Museum of Art . )
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