It can be difficult to interpret canine facial expressions, but me thinks Jack was not looking forward to the mile-long tunnel
Abstract Ort 🤓
[W]hatever the possibilities of achieving political harmony at an institutional level, I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that the frontier between them is there for the crossing.
Put an image to that — the mental frontier as, say, a rocky mountain pass or meadow — and tell me it doesn’t meliorate a harsh, divided, unforgiving thought-life.
📚 Felice Benuzzi:
To be perfectly honest, there were occasions when the thought of our impending adventure made me frightened. Sometimes, returning late to my barrack on a cold and rainy night, I thought what it would be like lying out in the dark, wet forest; dead tired, exhausted by hunger, drenched to the bone, in imminent danger of being attacked by wild beasts. That prospect I compared with the warm blankets in my bunk, the familiar oil-lamp and the good book I was now preparing to read.
At such moments it was the thought of the security offered by a regular even though an unpleasant life, the spirit which dooms the canary bird to its caged existence, a natural tendency to follow the line of least resistance, that predominated.
On the other hand, standing in the ranks at morning roll call and seeing Batian beckoning me with its shimmering glaciers, I sometimes felt like running away on the spot, to seek and to meet adventure halfway.
We poor mortals are made like this, a mixture of contrasts, shade and light, fears and exaltations.
📚 Felice Benuzzi:
Forced to endure the milieu we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality. Sometimes one felt a childish urge to assert one’s personality in almost any manner, shouting nonsense, banging an empty tin, showing by every act that one was still able to do something other than to wait passively. I have seen normally calm people suddenly rise from their bunks and climb the roof poles of the barrack, barking like monkeys. I felt I understood them, and they had my full sympathy.
📚 Felice Benuzzi:
Time was no longer considered by the average prisoner as something of value to be exploited; time for them was an enemy, but for me this was no longer so.
I was already busy with a secret plan, a plan that was slowly taking definite shape.
A prisoner of the last world war wrote in his memoirs: “At the front one takes risks, but one does not suffer; in captivity one does not take risks but one suffers.”
In order to break the monotony of life one had only to start taking risks again, to try to get out of this Noah’s Ark, which was preserving us from the risks of war but isolating us from the world and its deluge of life. If there is no means of escaping to a neutral country or of living under a false name in occupied Somalia, then, I thought, at least I shall stage a break in this awful travesty of life.
I shall try to get out, climb Mount Kenya and return here. […]
I found it fascinating to elaborate, in the utmost secrecy, the first details of my scheme.
Life took on another rhythm, because it had a purpose.
Currently Reading: No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi 📚
The night sky was clear. There was a smell of good earth in the air such as I had seldom noticed in Africa. I was thinking, the future exists if you know how to make it, and it’s up to you, as I turned the corner of my barrack at the exact spot from which I had seen Mount Kenya for the first time, and from which I had always cast a look in the direction of the peak since that first view.
Now it was visible again and in the starlight it looked even more tantalising than in daylight. The white glaciers gleamed with mysterious light and its superb summit towered against the sky. It was a challenge.
A thought crossed my numbed mind like a flash.
Laaazy morning
Kay Ryan:
It’s such an interesting paradox: we can see a voice; we hear through the eyes. But I think that’s the way it is, really, with poetry: I think poetry’s voice happens in the reader’s head. The voice need never pass over anybody’s actual physical vocal chords. I could imagine that some of Emily Dickinson’s poems were never said aloud. And come to think of it, what voice could be their mental equal? The best poet’s best voice is never transmissible outside of individual skulls, and that’s fine by me. The poet speaks to one reader at a time, forever.
There is no learning; only doing.
~ Jack Sonville ~
