"In Patagonia"

[fiefoe]

Chatwin's tracing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's old steps is actually the less interesting part of the book. It's amazing how much is packed into this slim book.

• The wind had polished his nose and coloured it pale lilac.
• in Lithuanian, the aristocrat of Indo-European languages / a Lombardy poplar, the punctuation mark of man
• When the boys tied the animals’ legs, all the fight went out of them and they lay, dead weight, till the torture was over. Then, naked and gashed with red cuts about their udders, they bounded wildly into the air, as if jumping over an imaginary fence, or jumping to be free.
• a country broken by gulches and mesas, where the most unlikely colours had been spat to the surface. In one place the rocks were alternately lilac, rose-pink and lime-green. There was a bright-yellow gorge bristling with the bones of extinct mammals.
• Along the north shore were clear water lagoons of sapphire blue separated from the opaline water by a band of grass. Thousands of black-necked swans studded the surface of the lake. The shallows were pink with flamingos.
• and the leaves of their radishes were so big you could tether a horse to them.
• Homesick and dreaming of lost vigour, the old man named the flowers, the trees, the farming methods and dances of his sunlit mountain in the sea.
• the migration of the Jackass Penguin. We talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness.
• A sailor’s frostbitten nose fell off when he blew it.
• Ten miles down the coast, there was an island, the original Penguin Island, where the sailors clubbed twenty thousand birds to death...  As they came up to the Equator, the penguins took their revenge. In them bred a ‘loathsome worme’ about an inch long. The worms ate everything, iron only excepted—clothes, bedding, boots, hats, leather lashings, and live human flesh.
• Coleridge himself was a ‘night-wandering man’, a stranger at his own birthplace, a drifter round rooming-houses, unable to sink roots anywhere. He had a bad case of what Baudelaire called ‘The Great Malady: Horror of One’s Home’.
• He was not a clever man but a wise one. He was a self-centred bachelor, who avoided complications and did little harm to anyone. His standards were Edwardian but he knew how the world changed; how to be one step ahead of change, so as not to change himself.
• support the assertion that history aspires to the symmetry of myth. A similar case concerns Magellan’s landfall at San Amadis of Gaul and equally addictive... History may aspire to symmetry but rarely achieves it: the Giant Paul died of scurvy in the Pacific and his body fed the sharks; Magellan’s body lay face down in the shallows at Mactan, felled by a Filippino sword.
• The Tempest... Shakespeare’s sources for the play are the subject of brisk debate, but we know he read the account in Pigafetta’s Voyage of the vile trick at San Julián
• Into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World... But either way Caliban has a good claim to Patagonian ancestry.
• Soto made the easy switch from the theatre into politics.
• The soldiers brought the men out for justice in groups. Justice depended on whether a sheep-farmer wanted a man back or not. It was just like sorting sheep.
• Once freed of her insides, she is light enough to grow the wings of a bird and fly over human settlements shrieking hysterically. At dawn, she returns to the dish, redigests her intestines and recovers her human form.
• The Strait of Magellan is another case of Nature imitating Art. A Nuremberg cartographer, Martin Beheim, drew the South-West Passage for Magellan to discover. His premise was entirely reasonable... Fireland then is Satan’s land, where flames flicker as fireflies on a summer night, and, in the narrowing circles of Hell, ice holds the shades of traitors as straws in glass.
• black and white dolphins danced in the golden sea. The day before I had met the nuns of the Santa Maria Auxiliadora Convent on their Saturday coach outing to the penguin colony on Cabo Virgenes. A bus-load of virgins. Eleven thousand virgins. About a million penguins. Black and white. Black and white. Black and white.
• This estancia. Manager always English. Indian kill sheep. English kill Indian. Ha!’
• His father then took over his education and taught him to garrotte cormorants, club penguins, stab crabs and harpoon seals.
• he learned the stories which wander at all times in the minds of all men—of the amorous seal, of the Creation of Fire, or the Giant with an Achilles heel, or of the humming bird who freed the pent-up waters.
• he lapsed into that common failing of naturalists: to marvel at the intricate perfection of other creatures and recoil from the squalor of man. Darwin
• Poe, like Coleridge whom he idolized, was another night-wandering man, obsessed by the Far South and by voyages of annihilation and rebirth
• I left Ushuaia as from an unwanted tomb
• In the whale’s skull there is a canalita and two bones along it. The strongest harpoons came from there.
• All along the tide-mark was a crust of sea-white driftwood, and sometimes a ship-timber or a whale vertebra.
• out in the strait, sooty albatrosses wheeling effortlessly, like knives flying.
• The Yaghan tongue—and by inference all language—proceeds as a system of navigation. Named things are fixed points, aligned or compared, which allow the speaker to plot the next move.
• What shall we think of a people who defined ‘monotony’ as ‘an absence of male friends?’ Or, for ‘depression’, used the word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab’s seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow?... The layers of metaphorical associations that made up their mental soil shackled the Indians to their homeland with ties that could not be broken.
• a painting of amorous geese by Picasso’s father, Ruiz Blasco
• Admiral’s gallant but weary acceptance of Churchill’s orders: ‘I am going to look for von Spee and if I find him, my number is hoisted.’
• Shackleton’s flow was inseparable from his gun. The second bullet missed again, but hit the print. The hole is in the lower right margin.
• So while they were enjoying the Christmas festivities at the Mission, the Fathers sent two men with a cross-saw and newspapers. They cut the canoe through the middle, placing the newspaper on the ground to catch the sawdust, so the poor brutes would know nothing till all their provisions were aboard.
• he started up as a barber, which was similar to shearing sheep but better class.