"Tracks: One Woman's Journey Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback"

[fiefoe]

At various points things got so doom-and-gloomy that I felt exasperated by the author, but the exaltation later on makes up for it. (但后来她的狗死掉了。。。) Of all the travel memoirs I've read, she describes the desocialization of a lone travel the best.

• And then there were the snakes. Basso’s was home to these exquisite creatures — they courted, bred and died there, refusing to be interfered with by humans.
• One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them.


• Inside the pad is a squishy, elastic sort of bladder; when pressure is put on the foot, any hole will therefore widen. It is impossible to keep them off a leg, because they need that pressure for circulation.
• I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.
• He had the most beautiful hands I had ever seen on anybody — long tapering fingers that wrapped around his cameras like frogs’ feet.
• Before I went to Alice Springs, I had never held a hammer, had never changed a light-bulb, sewn a dress, mended a sock, changed a tyre, or used a screwdriver.
• gradually the fogs of ignorance and clumsiness cleared / vicious and distorting summer
• Practicality had won the day. I had sold a great swatch of my freedom and most of the trip’s integrity for four thousand dollars.
• I flew back to Alice in a lather of conflicting emotions. Was I being too precious about this thing? Why shouldn’t I share it with people?
• Whoops. For the rest of the journey I sat precariously on the roof of the cabin, alternately bashing him over the head screaming, ‘Whoosh, whoosh!’ and stroking his sweaty neck and crooning loudly above the whistling of the wind, ‘Take it easy, little camel, it will all be right.'
• (He had spent twenty years in Africa, walking across it in the 1920s and 1930s, living the life of a Victorian explorer. He could now refer to me as a chip off the old block.)
• As if I were made of some fine, bright, airy, musical substance and that in my chest was a source of power that would any minute explode, releasing thousands of singing birds.
• All around me was magnificence. Light, power, space and sun.
• it was just that he was there and his camera was recording images and giving them an isolated importance,
• This weakness, my inability to be terrified with any dignity, came to the forefront often during the trip, and my animals took the brunt of it.
• I learnt to conserve energy by allowing at least part of myself to believe I could cope with any emergency.
• Ants work later shifts; in that blessed hour before the mosquitoes took over from the flies, masses of the horrid little creatures would crawl up my trouser legs
• I did not perceive at that time that I was allowing myself to get more involved with writing about the trip than the trip itself. It did not dawn on me that already I was beginning to see it as a story for other people, with a beginning and an ending.
• chased him for over an hour at a run. I entered a new realm of exhaustion. I was covered with freezing mud, and shaking with fatigue by the time I grabbed him.
• But as it went on, that droning, dust-woven, meditative music, I felt transported and close to tears. The sound seemed to rise from the ground. It belonged so perfectly, it was a song of unity and recognition, and the old crones were like extensions of the earth. I wanted to understand so much. Why were they doing this for us, these smiling women?...  I did not know then that it was merely a rule of etiquette to give some little gift at the end of a dance. I felt it as a symbolic defeat. A final summing up of how I could never enter their reality, would always be a whitefella tourist on the outside looking in.
• The moon, cold marble and cruel, pushed down on me, sucked at me, I could not hide from it, even in dream.
• And somewhere, between frozen sandhills, in a haunted and forgotten desert, where time is always measured by the interminable roll of constellations, or the chill call of a crow waking, I lay down on my dirty bundle of blankets.
• rose as easily and cleanly as an eagle leaving its nest.
• Ceremonies are the visible link between Aboriginal people and their land. Once dispossessed of this land, ceremonial life deteriorates, people lose their strength, meaning and identity.
• He was a dingo-dreaming man, and his links with the special places we passed gave him a kind of energy, a joy, a belonging.
• This desocializing process — the sloughing off, like a snake-skin, of the useless preoccupations and standards of the society I had left, and the growing of new ones that were more tuned to my present environment — was beginning to show.
• So much of the trip had been wrong and empty and small, and so much of my life previous to it had been boring and predictable, that now when happiness welled up inside me it was as if I were flying through warm blue air.
• What was once a thing that merely existed became something that everything else acted upon and had a relationship with and vice versa. In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, ‘This is a rock,’ I could now say, ‘This is part of a net,’ or closer, ‘This, which everything acts upon, acts.
• boundaries of myself stretched out for ever... Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment... The self did not seem to be an entity living somewhere inside the skull, but a reaction between mind and stimulus. And when the stimulus was non-social, the self had a hard time defining its essence and realizing its dimensions.
• Above all that horrible, false, debilitating attractiveness that women hide behind.
• He burbled and disgorged his mouth bladder (a hideously repulsive pink, purple and green balloon, covered in slobber and smelling indescribably foul, that female camels perversely find attractive)
• Words are the memory twitching after the reality of the dance …
• A silk farm perhaps, where you can just sit and listen to the worms spinning money for you as you lazily build wind-chimes for select friends and when you get tired of that you can stroll down to your own huge bath in a little shoji house in your garden and eat frosty pink water-melon cut into exquisite shapes
• I’m amazed at how quickly and absolutely this sense of the importance of social custom fell away from me. And the awareness of its absurdity has never really left me. I have slowly regained a sense of the niceties, but I think, I hope, that I will always see the obsession with social graces and female modesty for the perverted crippling insanity it really is.
• off in the distance some magical, violet mountains. Have you ever heard mountains roar and beckon? These did, like giant lions.
• and leaf sighs floated down to me on the breeze and around me was a cathedral of black and silver giant ghost-gums, the thin sliver of platinum moon cradled in their branches. The heart of the world had been found.
• I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.
• PAST CAVES AWAY and dissolves behind us, leaving a few clues with which we try to reconstruct it. Hopeless task. History lives in the present.
• the journey, MY journey, would eventually be subsumed by its reconstructions.
• But no one can live too far outside the clichés of their time.