Review of Sunrise with Seamonsters

1. In the tiny country of Malawi the winter is severe [...] May, June, and July, the cold months, are also the harvest months. This is the season when the village silos -- huge baskets on legs -- are filled to the brim with corn, the staple food of the Malawian. The oranges and tangerines are ripe; the second bean crop, the tobacco and tea are all being harvested and auctioned.

   Winter in Africa [July 2, 1965] - pg 12

2. The giraffes moved slowly among the trees like tired dancers. I wanted them to gallop. Once you've seen a giraffe galloping -- they gallop as if they're about to come apart any second, yet somehow all their flapping limbs stay miraculously attached -- you know that survival has something to do with speed, no matter how grotesque, double-bellied and gawky the beast may be. [...] No camera is like no hands, a feat of skill. And if you know that sooner or later you will have to explain it all, without benefit of slides or album, to your large family, then as soon as you see something you start searching the view for clues and rummaging through your lexical baggage for the right phrases. Otherwise, what's the use? And when you see something like a galloping giraffe which you can't capture on film you are thrown back on the English language like a cowboy's grizzled sidekick against a cactus. You hope for the sake of posterity and spectators that you can rise unscratched with a blossom.

   The Cerebral Snapshot [October 5, 1965] - pg 15-16

3. Slowly, it happens, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph. Nothing comes out right the first time, and you are not so much writing as learning a language, inching along in what seems at times like another tongue.

   A Love-Scene After Work: Writing in the Tropics [1971] - pg 86

4. I am calling attention to the phenomenon [of mass tourism] because it is so far from the traditional notion of travel as going away [...] The interest in travel today, which is passionate, arises out of the fact that there is a form of travel prevalent that is now very easy -- people want to find an antidote for the immobility that mass tourism has produced; people want to believe that somewhere, somehow, it is still very dangerous, bizarre, anxiety-making and exotic to travel, that one can still make discoveries in a glorious solitary way. Mock-travel has produced a huge interest in clumsy, old-fashioned travel, with its disgusting food and miseries and long nights. It has also given rise to a lively interest in travel literature and the affirmation that the world is still large and strange and, thank God, full of empty places that are nothing like home.

   Stranger on a Train: The Pleasures of Railways [1976] - pg 135

5. In the schoolroom and factory and in the long dark line of coalminers waiting to be paid, the faces stare out helplessly, trapped by circumstances, and we feel judged, because we have never been gazed at in quite that way, so immediately, across time. Moments before many of these pictures were taken, the last words spoken were "Hold still!" We can see the effect of that command in the small boy's shoulders or the man's grip on the chairback. Everyone here is holding his breath, as if for a hundred-year leap to the present.

   The Past Recaptured [1980] - pg 231-232

6. I have seen a number of photographs taken in [the 1800s], usually in China, of beheadings. Invariably the sword is shown poised over the neck (sometimes the head has been struck off and lies severed on the ground). But this beheading in China is electrifying. We see more than the sword and the head. The man has been hit with the blade several times, and the executioner is tensed to take another stroke. The condemned man, clearly bleeding -- that is blood, not hair, coursing from his twisted face -- is a goner. But look at the faces of the men who are holding his ropes and supporting his gibbet. This is hardly the routine event we have been taught took place in Imperial China. These men are as close as we are (and we are seeing something the witnesses in the background are missing) and they wear expressions of terror and disbelief. The whole affair is as shocking to them as it is -- one hopes -- to us. This is the opposite of anonymity, and after the experience of this photograph one cannot think of such an execution as something taken for granted, a ritual which we can regard as conventional and commonplace. It is almost cathartic, for those wincing men are expressing our own shock. Some of these photographs [...] are much older than their dates suggest. They give us access to the past. The Ainus, the Bedouin, the Irish peat-carriers, the Wa-Kikuyu and American Indians -- these might have been taken in the 'eighties or 'nineties of [the 1800s], or even more recently, but we may be assured that for the preceding century, and perhaps for many centuries before, the people looked exactly like this. Our glimpse is not of people caught on a given year, but of an image carried away from a much remoter past, and a few decades before they were to change out of all recognition.

   The Past Recaptured [1980] - pg 232

7. One evening, Sackville was with a group of illustrious friends at Knole House. To entertain them in front of the fire, Sackville suggested that they all write "impromptus" -- a few brilliant lines apiece -- and that John Dryden, who had probably ceased to be Poet Laureate at this point, should act as judge. The guests took pens and paper and put their minds to the task, each hoping to win with his own piece. The papers were collected and given to Dryden, who carefully examined each entry. He then announced Sackville as the winner. This was not so surprising -- Sackville, as well as being a patron, was also a considerable poet. Dryden read out Sackville's winning impromptu. It was not a poem. It went as follows: "I promise to pay Mr John Dryden five hundred pounds on demand. Signed, Dorset."

   Easy Money: Patronage [1981] - pg 260

8. The most knowledgeable railway buff I met in Simla was a man who, over a period of years, had traveled all over India on trains visiting race tracks. He seldom stayed overnight. He would hurry to Lucknow on a night train, gamble all day at the track, and then catch the sleeper to Calcutta and do the same thing. I said it seemed a difficult thing to do, all that railroading. No, he said, the difficult thing was putting on a sad face and hailing a tonga and then riding Third Class so no potential thief would guess he had five thousand rupees of winnings in his pocket.

   Making Tracks to Chittagong [1983] - pg 318

Word list:

• laburnum
• bathetic
• irrefragable
• sneaping
• ormolu
• raffish
• orotund
• oppidan