“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run. If I were him I would put in everything now and go until something broke.

It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one’s own body. It is humiliating before others to have a diarrhoea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit from it. But a cramp, he thought of it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially when one is alone.

What will you do now if they come in the night? What can you do? “Fight them,” he said. “I’ll fight them until I die.

They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

I wonder what a bone spur is, he thought.

“And pain does not matter to a man.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.