Claude Simon, Windmills, Flipflopping

This is a uncharacteristic quotation from Claude Simon's The Trolley [tr. Richard Howard, New Press: New York, 2001, p. 59]: . . . "that famous Parisian Jockey Club of which one member proclaimed Thanks be to God there are still some of us here who owe nothing to either merit or talent," uncharacteristic because one finds little humor in Simon, though he is immensely talented, his photo in the Minuit bulletins showing a haggard unsmiling face, the footing at Juno Beach today pleasantly gritty from seashells where we were standing letting the diminutive waves break against our shins, doing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling it would be a crime if they decided to put up alternative-energy windmills along the coastlines when there are so many other places for them to be erected, like all over the Midwest; the view of the ocean is a view of eternity, why ruin that? Put windmills on top of skyscrapers in cities, or all over the Midwest, and use tidal turbines everywhere there's a current, but don't ruin our eternal coastlines, though my initial feeling was that it would be okay to build them on Cape Cod, but over time I have changed my position, I have flipflopped.