'Jeez, it's beautiful, really beautiful'

He sits on the bench for over an hour, calms at last. The river languishes by, stippled and quivering like the play of light on a metallic cloth. Across from him, the dormitories of the business school lance their reflections into the water, and the automobiles in the distance seem tiny and alive. He feels the earth under him germinating in the spring night, the sweet assuasive air. In the sky the stars are studded in the warm intimate velvet of the night.

Jeez, it’s beautiful out. A play of yearnings, lost and never articulate. Makes ya think. He sighs. Real beautiful, makes ya think. The woman with whom he could share this. I’m gonna be something.

Awe. Night like this makes you know there’s a God, dumb atheists. Jeez, it’s beautiful, really beautiful, it makes ya think things are gonna be okay.

He sits there, absorbed in the night. I ain’t like the other guys, theah’s somethin’ special in me. He sighs again. Boy, to … to … He fumbles for his thought as though his hand were groping for a fish in the water. Jeez to …

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)