These two paragraphs are from Caught Inside, a book I’m about seventy pages into.

I decided right then, on the spot, that I too wanted to become vaguely bored by this place, to drink so much of its daily beauty I no longer felt that remorse you often get from visiting magnificence, about how you really ought to change your life to include such places and moments, but know perfectly well you won’t.

Walking back the sprinkler-soaked, muddy road between fields, board under one arm, I heard the low chugging rumble of the South Pacific rolling down from San Fransisco. For some reason, I saw us from above or afar and knew I was alive in a moment I’d dreamed of and wanted to inhabit absolutely; so often one says to oneself, This is it!, and yet feels, with disappointment, no different from before. But surfboards and dirt roads and farms and trains hit some giant, perfect chord for me, made me crazy with desire to be alive enough to somehow be the moment itself.
“Dude!” I said. “You hear that?”
“What?”
“Don’t you want to see the train?”

The prose is maybe a bit on the flowery side, but I can’t argue with the author’s intentions or his attention to the world around him. I’m enjoying this book immensely so far.