“There on the beach, with no sound but that of the ocean waves and of the wind passing high overhead, like a large invisible aeroplane, I experienced dreams of a new sort – soft and shapeless things, marvels that made a deep impression, without images or emotions, clear like the sky and the water, and reverberating, like the crumbling white lace of the risen ocean's whorls, from the depths of a vast truth: a tremulously oblique blue in the distance that acquired glistening, muddy-green hues as it approached, breaking with a great hissing its thousand crashing arms to scatter them over darkish sand where they left dry foam, and then gathering into itself all undertows, all return journeys to that original freedom, all nostalgias for God, all memories (like this one, shapeless and painless) of a previous state, blissful because it was so good or because it was different, a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death, the everything or the nothingness which – like a huge ocean – surrounds the island of castaways that is life.”