Books

Post #154 Monday 15 March 2021 – Travelling circus

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Monday 15 March 2021

Following on from the last post I couldn’t find on the internet exactly the final passages that I was looking for from Gerald Durrell’s charming book. But I did find something related which I thought I’d post to remind people who know the book. On reflection the book seems altogether too innocent a thing to recall in these difficult times.

This summary review has been written by a person who does home schooling, which is very apt considering Durrell’s book is an account of his childhood during five brilliant school-free years on Corfu in the years before the war, filled with variety and the wonder of the natural world.

https://journey-and-destination.blogspot.com/2017/07/my-family-and-other-animals-by-gerald.html


Durrell did have private tutors though, as the reviewer reminds us in this quote and final note:

“One day, Mr Kralefsky, one of Gerald’s tutors, informed Mother that he had taught Gerald as much as he was able and the time had come for him to go somewhere like England or Switzerland to finish his education:

‘In desperation I argued against any such idea; I said I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.’

Mother was adamant and so the family returned to England with the words of a [Swiss] border official, ‘One travelling Circus and Staff’ written on their ‘Description of Passengers’ document.”

I know I put this book reference up because I was amused by the Swiss border official. But incidentally, looking at this summary review, I’m reminded it took me until first year university to discover this idea of education for myself, when a philosophy tutor, responding to me in a tutorial when I’d commented that perhaps it was a good thing we first read the great thinkers as part of the basic curriculum, had said, well maybe not, maybe it was a good thing to experience ideas thinking you are the first person to uncover these truths. His idea was a complete revelation to me. I may well have fancied myself liberated by a creative “free school” high school education but I was deeply conservative – maybe even conformist lol!

xx MG

Post #118 Monday 28 October 2019 – more on the Whitsundays

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Letters from America

Monday 28 October 2019

Following on from my earlier post about adventures in the Whitsundays, I wanted to add another image. These are the Norfolk Island pines, with their very distinctive geometry, everywhere on the Whitsunday islands. This is the ridge of the cove at Refuge Bay where we anchored overnight.

I managed to find an internet link which gives the back story to how the pines came to be here. I had some ancient recollection they were not native. https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A7952664

So it was Captain Cook who brought the seeds of the pines to northern Australia wishfully supposing they might provide timber suitable for masts.

I have always found it hard to be on the water in the Pacific and not think of Captain Cook, Joseph Banks and all the great naturalists. For quite a while one of my favourite non fiction books was a book called “Darwin’s Armada” by Iain McCalman. It’s an account of the great sailing voyages of Darwin’s peers. It’s absolutely compelling reading (if that’s your kind of thing). It’s ages since I read it but one of the passages that still stays with me vividly is an account of how the Pacific peoples must have experienced navigating, with only the simplest instruments and no charts – what resources, skills and understanding of the sea they must have had.

But then I am very partial to all things Charles Darwin (and his milieu). The Voyage of the Beagle is so engaging. Here is a favourite passage in which Darwin describes interactions with wild llamas.

Scientific method: “…if a person lies on the ground and plays strange antics, such as throwing up his feet in the air…”

xx MG

Post #104 Sunday 25 November 2018 – Theatrical diversion

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Letters from America

Sunday 25 November 2018

I recently went to an interesting piece of “immersive” theatre called A Midnight Visit.  It was held in St Peters in a huge old empty furniture warehouse.  The drama was based on the stories and poems of Edgar Allen Poe.  We had to sign a waiver before entering.  We were each given a black surgical mask to wear while we stood around in the foyer.  There was an MC called The Undertaker who then selected people from the audience to enter the performance through different doorways.  We went into different rooms and spaces which were variously got up in detailed Gothic sets reminiscent of Poe themes.  The actors moved around in the spaces performing in among the audience.  There were music and dance performances woven into some of the story fragments.  Then there were features of the warehouse set which can only be described as playful – corridors and stairwells to climb through, mysterious rooms to explore.  One room was filled with CCTV screens “secretly” relaying what audience members were doing in other rooms.  Another room had a small sunken pool filled with soft pink balls and a sign saying No Jumping, and of course people did.  At one stage there was a regal seeming actor strolling around, who would seat himself strategically and beckon a member of the audience to come over.  He would then have an extended private conversation with that person.   He beckoned me at one stage and asked me, whispering, what was I afraid of.  It took me ages to decide but finally I said “uncertainty”.  He said Oh no, you don’t need to be afraid of uncertainty, you need to be afraid of people who text and drive! Lol.

It was clever in parts, apparently developed from a similar immersive theatrical adventure which has been showing for years in an extended season in New York called Sleep No More (based on Macbeth).  A Midnight Visit was ambitious and intriguing.  I could happily have stayed on exploring for another hour.  There are some great photos included in the link here to the review in the magazine Time Out.

xx MG

https://www.timeout.com/sydney/theatre/a-midnight-visit-review

https://amidnightvisit.com/about-the-experience/

 

Post #66 Sunday 17 December 2017 – The Little Prince, complex love and the rose

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Letters from America

Sunday 17 December 2017

I have just come home from my December visit to Canberra, just in time to send out this week’s Letter from America.

It was a great visit.  The weather was pure Canberra summer, all hard blue sky although we had a huge thunder storm in the middle of the second night.  I had an unexpected pleasure from the profusely flowering roses planted right under the balcony of the hotel room.  With the intense heat during the day and the long afternoon, by early evening the scent of the roses coming up  into the room was very strong – a lovely evocative perfume which took me by surprise.  Here is a photo taken by me looking down over the balcony straight onto one of the culprits:

This beautiful flower reminded me of an unforgettable book that is treated as a children’s book (which plainly it is not), Antoine Saint Exupery’s The Little Prince.

Here is a link to Chapter 8 of the book which concerns the Little Prince’s relationship with the rose.  It is a tale of complex love and painful awakening to the meaning of things.  I highly recommend looking at it and the author’s charming drawings.  The chapter is quite short perhaps 300 words, and, as I said before, unforgettable.

http://papermine.com/pub/2005#article/34735

“The fact is that I did not know how to understand anything! I ought to have judged by deeds and not by words. She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her . . . I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her . . .”

MG
xx
never complacent in love