Bruce Chatwin
In the 1860s W.H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin’s question [of why such arid wastes could take such possession of one’s mind], and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.
-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
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‘Funny, you remind me of Bobby Dawes. Young Englishman, same as yourself, wandering about Patagonia. One day he walks up to an estancia and says to the owner: “If you give me work, you’re a saint, and your wife’s a saint, and your children are angels, and that dog’s the best dog in the world.” But the owner says, “There is no work.” “In which case,” Bobby says, “you’re the son of a whore, your wife is a whore, your children are monkeys, and if I catch that dog, I’ll kick its arse until its nose bleeds.” ’
-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
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The second story was about a cure for scab. The punch line was ‘Put a lump of sugar in the sheep’s mouth and suck its arse till it tastes sweet.’ He repeated the story twice to make sure I’d get the point. I lied. I couldn’t face it a third time. Finding in ‘primitive’ languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of ‘good’ or ‘beautiful,’ so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas.
-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
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[Henri Grien] did come to England aboard the ‘Waikato’ - and seems to have cursed her as well. (Shortly after, her propeller shaft broke off the Cape of Good Hope, and she was sucked south by the Agulhas Current, drifting for four months, the longest steamer drift on record. Conrad used it for his story ‘Falk.’)
-- Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
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In the weeks that followed Lieutenant da Silva worked in heat that would have driven most whites to their hammocks or their graves. Even on quivering afternoons, when the sun sucked out the colour of earth and leaves, he would strip to the waist, bark orders, and shoulder the heaviest loads himself. The blacks were amazed to see a white man work.
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah
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It was the usual suffocating afternoon in March…the Cathedral … glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish. Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky. The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse. Banana leaves hung in limp ribbons. There was no wind.
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah
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Twenty years of mission work in Angola had given Father de Lessa the appearance of a bird of prey and biblical convictions on the subject of Blacks. He had the habit of conducting scripture lessons in the form of rhetorical questions: ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin?’ he would shout. ‘Or the leopard his spots?’ Was not black the colour of night? Of the devil? Was not black skin the very mark of Cain? Dom Francisco guessed what was wrong and, one morning, sat outside the schoolroom and listened to the padre’s peroration. Then he poked his head through the window and said, ‘But blacks believe the Devil is white.’
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Viceroy of Ouidah
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I had a presentiment that the ‘travelling’ phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a resume of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
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Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensees, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
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Ib'n Khaldun based his system on the intuition that men decline, morally and physically, as they drift toward cities. The rigors of the desert, he suggested, had preceded the softness of cities. The desert was thus a reservoir of civilisation, and desert peoples had the advantage over settlers because they were less abstemious, freer, braver, healthier, less bloated, less craven, less liable to submit to rotten laws, and altogether easier to cure.
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
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As a man [Che] Guevara, for all his charm, strikes one as a ruthless and unpleasant personality. As a Hero, he never put a foot wrong - and the world chose to see him as a hero.
-- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
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