Jamie > Books: travel‎ (35)

it became uncomfortably clear that if nations were ‘imagined communities’, according to the thinker Benedict Anderson, then Britain had been under-imagined. Its understanding of itself in story, culture and emotion was thin; without the state project of empire, Britain was limping beyond its sell-by date. Monarchy offered a focus for some, but the institutions of parliament, the NHS and army were battered in prestige and morale.

that feeling you never have in a Romanesque church, only in a Renaissance building, comes over me: that you yourself are the gauge by which the space is measured. That lines could be (or are being) drawn from your person to every imaginable point within that space. Accordingly you become, besides an enthralled spectator, a mechanically moving object – a split sensation that once heralded the coming of a new era more clearly than any words were able to express. (p. 166-167)

On the one hand, proud of their history, with its diversity, internal rivalries, and age-old traditions, they wish to preserve it all, to rebel against the mandatory British history that is so much less real to them, and is at best an equally voracious and tribalistic conflict of interests, which only has to be mastered because Europe still calls the shots. On the other hand, insomuch as it is still the daily reality, it is precisely this aspect of their history that must be done away with: for how can you get a modern state off the ground when it is liable to founder immediately on antiquated enmities and traumas? (p. 202)

People slaved in the gulag camps for five, ten, or fifteen years because they had used fake ration cards, or worked for the American Relief Organization during the famine that followed the First World War, or stolen a spool of thread, or perpetrated a ‘facial crime’ (such as smiling during a serious party lecture), or inquired about the cost of a boat ticket to Vera Cruz, or studied Esperanto, or possessed a piece of Japanese candy (proof of spying for the Japanese), or danced the decadent Western dance called the fox-trot. (p. 218)

At the peak of operation in the thirties and forties, the mines of Kolyma produced perhaps 50 percent of all the gold being mined at that time in the world. By comparing the number of deaths in the Kolyma mines with the corresponding output of gold, historians have estimated that each ton of Kolyma gold cost between seven hundred and a thousand lives, or about one life for every two pounds of gold. (p. 404)

Possibly, again like the Portuguese convicts, the Chinese would become the loudest racists, and for the same reason. ‘The inferiority complex of the uneducated criminal settler population contributed to a virulent form of white racism among the Portuguese, which affected all classes from top to bottom,’ the political historian Lawrence Henderson wrote of the early settlers. The Portuguese convicts became the most brutal employers and the laziest farmers, and a sizable number turned furiously respectable, in the way atoning whores become sermonizing and pitiless nuns.”(p. 240)

Some African watchers and Western economists have observed that the Chinese presence in Africa – a sudden intrusion – is salutary and will result in greater development and more opportunities for Africans. Seeing Chinese digging into Africa, isolated in their enterprises, offhand with Africans to the point of rudeness, and deaf to any suggestion that they moderate their self-serving ways, I tend to regard this positive view as a crock. My own feeling is that like the other adventurers in Africa, the Chinese are exploiters. They have no compact or agreement or involvement with the African people; there is an alliance with the dictators and bureaucrats whom they pay off and allow to govern abusively – a conspiracy. Theirs is a racket like those of all the previous colonizers, and it will end badly—maybe worse, because the Chinese are tenacious, richer, and heavily invested, and for them there is no going back and no surrender. As they walked into Tibet and took over...they are walking into the continent and, outspending any other adventurer, subverting Africans, with a mission to plunder. (p. 225-6)

“You starved us,” the woman said. “You made us eat rats.” This sort of response—sometimes heartfelt, sometimes a bitter joke, sometimes spoken with defiant nostalgia—is so commonly uttered in the South, always by whites, to a Northern visitor, that I learned not to say, “That was a hundred and fifty years ago,” but instead listened with sympathy, because conquered people feel helpless, and the proof of this is the monotony of their complaint. Their nagging on this point, ancient to me but fresh as today in their minds, gives the North—of which I was the embodiment that morning—a fiendish magnitude.

Reflecting on the Crimson Tide, I ceased to think of it as football at all, except in a superficial way; it seemed much more like another Southern reaction to a feeling of defeat, with some of the half-buried emotion I’d noticed at gun shows. In a state that is so hard-pressed, with one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, with its history of racial conflict, and with so little to boast about yet wishing to matter, it is natural that a winning team—a national champion—would attract people in need of meaning and self-esteem in their lives, and would become the basis of a classic in-group, The Tide was robust proof of social identity theory.

That was when I began to understand the mood of the gun show. It was not about guns. Not about ammo, not about knives. It was not about shooting lead into perceived enemies. The mood was apparent in the way these men walked and spoke: they felt beleaguered, weakened, their backs to the wall. How old was this feeling? It was as old as the South, perhaps, for all they talked about was the Civil War, and they were oppressed by that and everything that had happened since, a persistent memory of defeat.

As a white man I hear the word differently, as a strange ritualized artifact that has become a taboo. Declaring the word taboo is one of the ways—one of the very few ways—a black person can control a white, penalizing him for using a word that he, a black, in a subtler declaration, is licensed to speak freely. In this context, the use of the word by a white belittles (if not degrades) a black person by reclaiming the word, violating the taboo, infuriating and taking power from the black.

Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people in Travels with Charley. He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit. He was too shy. He was really frightened of people who saw through him. He couldn’t have handled that amount of interaction. So, the book is actually a great novel.

All the afternoon long the surf had thundered high upon the beach, the ebb tide backed up against the wind. With the turn of the tide came fury unbelievable. The great rhythm of its waters now at one with the rhythm of the wind, the ocean rose out of the night to attack the ancient rivalry of earth, hurling breaker after thundering breaker against the long bulwark of the sands. (p. 84-5)

We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit. (p. 59-60)

Even the garden birds that we watch with pleasure at our bird-feeders are in a state of conflict: safety or hunger. When the weather is at its worst, more and more birds throng to the table, because the alternative to facing their fear is starvation. It is easy to sentimentalize nature, to forget that the prevailing forces at work – besides the urge to hold a territory and find a mate – are hunger and fear.

In the ancient European world, from Greece to Celtic Britain, raven calls were thought to be messages sent from the underworld to the living. One can see how. That ‘caw’ has the rasp of death to it. And prophecy. Apollo is said to have listened to the utterances of a rave. The Celtic raven-god, Lugh, the god of war, was told by his fellow ravens when enemies approached. In Celtic mythology, ravens were one of the animals thought to be used by shape-shifters, themselves often old women dressed in black rags, the Mor Raegan or witch-harridans.” (p. 102)