rumble tumble

He looked at the distance to the bottom of the ravine, bared his teeth and let go the cliff, to jump. But even as he bent his knees, he became aware of a difference in the air, a faint noise, new, unidentifiable. No herd of animals ever rushed so — and now louder, from higher up the ravine, louder, nearer — he stared at the corner and the hunters stopped, uncertain in their fear and pride, and stared too. They recoiled, lost pride and gladness and kept only fear and uncertainty, they moved aimlessly and clutched each other. The noise became a mighty roar. A mad creature of clods and branches, of trapped animals and rolling stones, of muddy water and foam burst round the corner of the ravine like a monstrous paw. It reared and roared higher than a man. It took the hunters, elders, men, and youths, included them, turned them upside-down, whirled them round, washed away weapons and strength. It beat ringing heads against stones, bounced faces in mud, twisted limbs like straws. It was mindless, resistless and overwhelming. And then the front wave of the flashflood was past, the roar diminishing to a vast, pouring sound. The water smoothed, washed sideways up the crumbling walls of the ravine, accepted the falling clods, beat together down the centre and poured on, the colour of wet earth streaked with yellow foam.

In the flickering smoky dimness they listened to the sedgy silence of the night outside on the wasteland that spread out to where the sea crept up on it, insinuating itself into the weak points, making inroads, isolating small islets that were demolished until nothing was left but a jag of rock and sometimes in a crevice a clump of rough grass that craved landward in the wind when the tide was low.

After our return, Reinhold [Messner] and I were hailed as victors over Everest, but this is false. Everest was neither conquered nor overcome by us — it simply tolerated us. And if we can talk about a victory at all, then it is at the most a victory over our own bodies, over fear.

It was a very personal, lonely victory in a struggle which each of us fought alone, and the victory was not achieved on the last metres which still lay before us. It had already been achieved at the moment when we took the first step out into the unknown. And it was secured and documented when we returned alive from the kingdom of the dead.

What do dogs want? They want each other. Human beings are merely a cynomorphic substitute, as we all know. Dogs who live in each other’s company are calm and pragmatic, never showing the desperate need to make known their needs and feelings or to communicate their observations, as some hysterical dogs who know only the company of our species are likely to do. Dogs who live in each other’s company know they are understood.

The one crowded space in Father Perry’s house was his bookshelves. I gradually came to understand that the marks on the pages were trapped words. Anyone could learn to decipher the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech. The ink of the print trapped the thoughts; they could no more get away than a doomboo could get out of a pit. When the full realization of what this meant flooded over me, I experienced the same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the bright lights of Konakry. I shivered with the intensity of my desire to learn to do this wondrous thing myself.

The serious dash: its unsurpassed master in nineteenth-century German literature was Theodor Storm. Rarely have punctuation marks been so deeply allied with content as the dashes in his novellas, mute lines into the past, wrinkles on the brow of his text. With them the narrator’s voice falls into an uneasy silence: the span of time they insert between two sentences is that of a burdensome heritage; set bald and naked between the events they draw together, they have something of the fatefulness of the natural context and something of a prudish hesitancy to make reference to it. So discreetly does myth conceal itself in the nineteenth century, it seeks refuge in typography.

Whereas science is positive, contenting itself with reporting what it discovers, scientism is negative. It goes beyond the actual findings of science to deny that other approaches to knowledge are valid and other truths true….The triumphs of modern science went to man’s head in something of the way rum does, causing him to grow loose in his logic. He came to think that what science discovers somehow casts doubt on things it does not discover; that the success it realizes in its own domain throws into question the reality of domains its devices cannot touch.

Down the road a ways I could see two boys from that rental shack down there, kneeling on the black road with butter knives. They were happily lancing the tar boils the heat had raised. Both boys had a look I knew so well, and the shack they came from I came from, too. We’d lived there nearly four years after General Jo’s parole came through. Such shacks pock our region, hatching batches of children the regular world will have to deal with down the line. These wild kids are reared on baloney and navy beans, corn mush and Kool-Aid, and quick, terrible rough stuff. Their lips are circled by orange or red or green juice stains and their knees and elbows generally have scabs on them from two or three scraps at recess. All they ever know is that they want, and someday they’ll learn you got, and after that the rest is sirens and statistics and nods from the wall of dead.