ABSTRACT
I shook my head to get water out of my ear and lay down on the sand in the sun. Gradually everything grew calm and there was nothing at all but the sound of the sea. All the noise in my head fell away, crumbled to nothingness, and I lost my identity. I was as much part of the beach as the mustard-tainted rock on which earlier I had piled my clothes. I felt clean inside and strangely elated. It was more than freedom and beauty of the seas and skies, more than being the last person in the world alive. Something moved across the heart like a benediction. It is hard to explain. It would be easier to describe a colour no one had ever seen. Only I felt a great exultation and a holiness I never sensed before and have only experienced once since. I felt I was given the power to do enormous good. And that delusion stayed with me for the rest of the morning. I stared at the beach, but it was not my eyes that looked out. I moved my hand, but it was not my hand that moved. I was neither up nor down. A seagull glided and swooped to its shadow on the sea. I too floated above the pebbles in a heat haze, integrated with the landscape. I wrote my name in the sand near the sea, and watched the waves erase it, and I knew the significance of things, the meaning of the whole world, its mystery and motion.
