"I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.”
It will come to no surprise to BeachGrit readers familiar with the mixed-race BIPOC icon Mason Ho, a man who personifies all that is good and worthy in surfing and so cute I want to dress him in a baby-doll nightie from Victoria’s Secret and make him my secret bottom woman, that he is a secret fan of the Russian literary giant Leo Tolstoy.
And when he’s not exploring Tolstoy’s take on the human condition, thrilling to the epic realism and profound as hell moral questioning, philosophies so timeless they’re embraced by modern influential thinkers such as Griffin Colapinto, he’s quoting the great Russian.
A caveat. Tolstoy was human. In his diaries, he set strict self-improvement goals like “limit brothel visits to twice a month” and “no gambling” — while actively struggling with both. Tolstoy lost his virginity at brothel, aged sixteen, but was so traumatised with guilt he cried his lil heart out.
“When my brothers took me to a brothel for the first time and I committed the act, I then stood by the woman’s bed and wept.”
Tolstoy suffered a succession of loveless, even hateful lovers, and often mentioned being starved of passion.
Mason Ho on Tolstoy
Talk to Mason Ho about danger about danger and, soon, he’s passing you the grass and, while sipping from a fifth of Cutty Sark, quoting Tolstoy.
“I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love,” says Mason Ho of the rock jump session featured in this treacherous collection of clips from 2025.
I like Tolstoy, also, and it’s the quote, below, that I wish to discuss with the BeachGrit reader, intellects buried deep beneath the borderline.
“At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.”
In the context of the very exciting societal transformations we face today, demographic, cultural etc, how much of our collective behavior is the second voice at work. We distract ourselves with the pleasant until the inevitable arrives.
What is the inevitable?
And what might the small acts of courage look like in pushing back against that tide, if there is a tide etc.