The poet William Blake talked about art as “seeing the world in a grain of sand.” I suppose that what he also meant was the ability to move in so tightly on something, that inside of it, we could construct an almost fourth dimension, through which to view the world and our experiences in it.

In a way that’s what New Yorker Staff writer, author and Pulitzer Prize winner William Finnegan has done with surfing.

Living the surfing life alongside the literary life,  Finnegan has reached the apex of that duality in his autobiography Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

My conversation with William Finnegan: