"We were dutiful, if not particularly enthusiastic, Catholics. Mass every Sunday, Saturday catechism for me, fish sticks on Friday. Then, around my thirteenth birthday, I received the sacrament of confirmation, becoming an adult in the eyes of the church, and was thunderstruck to hear my parents say I was no longer required to go to Mass. That decision was now mine. Were they not concerned about the state of my soul? Their evasive, ambiguous answers shocked me again. They had been big fans of Pope John XXIII. But they did not, I realized, actually believe in all the doctrine and prayers -- all those Oblatios, Oratios, frightening Confiteors, and mealymouthed Acts of Contrition that I had been memorizing and struggling to understand since I was small. It was possible that they didn't even believe in God. I immediately stopped going to Mass. God was not visibly upset."
"What could rightly have worried my dad about me and surfing was the special brand of monomania, antisocial and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it. Surfing was still something that one did -- that I did -- with friends, but the club thing, the organized-sports part, was fading fast. I no longer dreamed about winning contests, as I had dreamed about pitching for the Dodgers. The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization. Robinson Crusoe, Endless Summer. This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancient sense of the word, toward a stretched out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians. This was not the day-dream of the happy idler. It went deeper than that. Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement."
- william finnegan, barbarian days: a surfing life
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