I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

I would feel that I had made a crazy ascent into the stratosphere but had come back empty-handed and had nothing to show for it; that the experience had been as empty and vacuous as it was intense.

Sometimes, leaving the road, I would walk into the sea and pull it voluptuously over my head, and stand momentarily drowned in the cool blind silence, in a salt-stung neutral nowhere.