the daring young man on the flying trapeze

I first heard it quietly while we were making salad more than two years ago, Nicki singing, mumbling really, under her breath.

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease; the daring young man on the flying trapeze.

Like the time Peter said sit down Jo or the time my Dad said which would you rather be or a wasp, the words cemented in my memory and in spite of their blandness they have never faded. And then this Saroyan inserts himself into the situation; he liked those words too, and he woke up each day in San Francisco too, and hey hey hey:

He (the living) dressed and shaved, grinning at himself in the mirror. Very unhandsome, he said; where is my tie? (He had but one.) Coffee and a gray sky, Pacific Ocean fog, the drone of a passing streetcar, people going to the city, time again, the day, prose and poetry. He moved swiftly down the stairs to the street and began to walk, thinking suddenly, It is only in sleep that we may know that we live. There only, in that living death, do we meet ourselves and the far earth, God and the saints, the names of our fathers, the substance of remote moments; it is there that the centuries merge in the moment, that the vast becomes the tiny, tangible atom of eternity.

He walked into the day as alertly as might be, making a definite noise with his heels, perceiving with his eyes the superficial truth of streets and structures, the trivial truth of reality. Helplessly his mind sang, He flies through the air with the greatest of ease; the daring young man on the flying trapeze; then laughed with all the might of his being. It was really a splendid morning; gray, cold, and cheerless, a morning for inward vigor; ah, Edgar Guest, he said, how I long for your music.

And then:

If the truth were known, he was half starved, and yet there was still no end of books he ought to read before he died. He remembered the young Italian in a Brooklyn hospital, a small sick clerk named Mollica, who had said desperately, I would like to see California once before I die. And he thought earnestly, I ought at least to read Hamlet once again, or perhaps Huckleberry Finn.

I wonder what his final count was when he died, and whether he was anywhere near satisfied with it, and whether that's possible.