My pilgrimage begins with a 30 minute hike down to the Senqu river (you must click when you see a “q” in Sesotho). Poor timing can result in waiting in a long line to cross the river, or a four hour taxi ride standing up sandwiched between 300 lb African women who insist that I am too fat to fit in the taxi.
To make the trip in two days I must get all my ducks in a row so that every leg of the journey is timed correctly. I thought I would do a similar travel account just to give you all some minor appreciation for what it takes to leave Lesotho and get to the coast. I was reading my dear friend Betsie’s blog (who is a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin) and chuckling as I read her account of voyaging home. There was no surf to be had, but getting to the ocean and feeling at home was reward enough for six months of very intense land-lockedness. Over Christmas I was able to visit the coast with a number of other volunteers. I have just returned from the embrace of my briny beloved. In case I hadn't understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, "We thought he must have gone nuts." A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him.Happy New Year! I like even numbers better than odd by some unexplainable prejudice, so that is one more reason (apart from adventure and challenge) that I am looking forward to 2008. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself.
For a piece of writing to have its proper size is an excellent thing, or otherwise it would be lacking in intelligibility or interest or both.Ĭontext: It shouldn't be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. The second major obligation, that of being “interesting,” includes unexpectedness and suspense, for expository as well as imaginative writing should not be merely what the reader expected it would be - or why should it be written or read? - and the unexpected should not be immediately and totally announced (in other words, expository and imaginative writing should have suspense), for, if the whole is immediately known, why should the writer or reader proceed farther?īut the accomplished writer gives his selected material more than shape - he gives it proper size.
Norman macclean full#
Since full intelligibility depends upon the relations of individual statement to individual statement, the concept of intelligibility, fully expanded, includes order and completeness for a fully intelligible exposition or poem having relations has parts, and all the parts ought to be there and add up to a whole. Intelligibility, too, has its levels of obligation, on the lowest of individual statements, and even on this level the obligation is never easy to fulfill and perhaps even to genius could be a nightmare if what the genius sought to represent was “madness.” Only to a limited degree, however, can individual statements be intelligible - and in many instances and for a variety of reasons the individual statements are meant to be obscure, as in “mad” speeches. CraneĬontext: At a high level of universality, to write anything well, whether it be intellectual or imaginative, is to assume at least two obligations: to be intelligible and to be interesting. "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word : The Madness of Lear", in Critics and Criticism : Ancient and Modern (1952), edited by R.S.
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