I love the feeling of youthful vitality and exuberance that flows through me.

There are people who swim in the sea in October at eighty, and people who feel finished at thirty-five, and the difference is not mainly a matter of years. Vitality tracks something else — appetite, curiosity, a willingness to be cold and slightly ridiculous in front of witnesses.

Youthful is the misleading half of it. What runs through a person on a good day is not age going backwards; it is the plain fact of being interested in the next thing, which is available at any point and has been temporarily mislaid by plenty of twenty-year-olds.