Silflay hraka, you embleer rah!
Everyday, Devine & I work in the morning, after lunch we go ashore and wander in the forest, parting spiderwebs with a stick as we go. It only takes a day for the webs to return, I feel bad for inadvertently destroying such intricate weaving. Some parts of the path are so thick with sword ferns, we have to push through with some effort. I think that with every walk, we are bringing more and more spiders back aboard. They’ve begun to entomb us. Everyday we find a new web aboard, hung from one stay to another, all clearly delineated, reflective, when the sun is high in the sky.
After walking, we return to our personal projects, then around 1600, we pick up a book and read until dinner time. Late evenings are for more quiet activities, like rowing. The perfect time to do it is when the sun is about to fall below the top edge of the land encircling us. I really love rowing. I do it for transport, I do it for sport, and for scenery gazing. Internet floods and ebbs out of the bay as it wants, all we can do is work with its schedule. Sometimes we get a signal, sometimes we don’t.
[…]
READING. I read Tales from Watership Down aloud to Devine every night. The book begins with several epic stories involving El-ahrairah. The stories are lovely, but I was a bit disappointed to not hear more of the lives of the Watership Down rabbits. Thankfully, most of the second half involves them. I really enjoyed diving back into Richard Adam’s rabbit world. I have now started reading The Sea Wolf by Jack London aloud. I am enjoying it so far, although the “Might is Right” attitude of the captain is a bit tiring at times. I am curious to see what’s going to happen, since his views greatly clash with that of the main character, a literary critic and altruist.
I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What a mad fever of a book. It is a dizzying, but thankfully, quick read. It was difficult to stomach at times because of its portrayal of natives, who are frustratingly referred to as savages, and who’s country is hopelessly plundered. I grow weary of reading about resource-gobbling men with a God complex, even if it is meant as a critique of colonialists. The writing though is good, and you really do feel as though you are immersed in a sweaty jungle. At least, Aldous Huxley’s Island was a true balm. I think about many of its passages daily. Brave New World was a warning, and Island is an offering, a fictionalized manifesto on what the ideal utopia could look like, were it not for Murugan; Oh Murugan, you know not what you do…
“Animals don’t behave like men. If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.” Richard Adams (a passage from Watership Down)