Someone once said that the sound of crushing ocean waves is louder than the engines of a starting plane. As I’m lying here on Poipu Beach in Kauai, I find this to be somewhat accurate. Everything else is quiet though, including my mind. Beach life brings back child memories of vacations with my parents in Tuscany: innocent flings and early scars from over-reaching -- the literal salt in the wounds, the exhaustion after a day out in the water, the crazy sunburn, in short: a premature "desire for anything" (as Walter Salles puts it in Central Station). All this makes me want to slightly paraphrase Pascal: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly on his beach."
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