First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing . . . and Life

by Joe Moran

In his book Barbarian Days, on his life as a surfer, William Finnegan writes that the aesthetics of surfing are about how nonchalantly you solve the problem each wave presents. The surfer styles it out by making it all look natural, when every branch of physics is screaming at him to fall over. He must stay elegantly upright while climbing the wall of a wave and dancing along it and then, before it breaks, he must handle the pullout as if it were a perfectly placed full stop. “Casual power, the proverbial grace under pressure, these were our beau ideals,” Finnegan writes. “Pull into a heaving barrel, come out cleanly. Act like you’ve been there before.”