Excerpt
Ken’s response to the proverbial slings and arrows was and is, “To the
best of my capacity I am not arrogant.” Popular conviction has it that you
are either a hero or a bum. Ken sees himself as neither.
I’m a human being with passionate desires who is naïve enough to be
able to just go on in the world regardless of people’s opinions. No matter how
gray the day was, or the past was, I could get up the next morning and start
again. And so I have seemed to get to places where I think most people don’t
go and I think the sadness of our species is that the greatest things that have
not happened, have not occurred because we have not tried.
Ken was enchanted by his new surroundings. He had never lived in a
new house and had never smelled the pungent perfumes of fresh mortar
and whitewash that a new house emits. In his memory these odours are
intricately laced with the salt smell of the Atlantic Ocean.
On the first morning Ken woke in his new bed, he opened his eyes to
a raging storm. Big balls of white fluff spun and danced past his window.
Entranced, he pulled on a pair of pants and a sweater, slipped his feet
hastily into shoes and tore out the front door. Bending against the ferocious
wind, he staggered down the cobbled street to the top of the cliff
two hundred feet above the foaming waves crashing on the rocks below.
He clung to the rocky path that led down to the beach, where the roar of
the waves pounding against the reefs drowned out all other sounds. The
wind tore the white foam from the tops of the waves, carrying it inland,
like thistledown
Libros Libertad 