Befuddled Young Americans

Thus when I headed south of the border again in early 1946, I did so not to seek romance or to immerse myself in learning about the country, but mainly because it was unconnected with my own personal background, and it seemed to be a likely environment wherein to start getting my head straightened out. Such an aspiration, of course, has characterized befuddled young Americans for a couple of hundred years or more, and has usually involved leaving their youthful precincts behind in favor of large cities or foreign lands, where many of them eventually fall into conformity with a new set of values, others are defeated by strangeness and go back home, and a few gain enough clarity of view to carry them on through life and whatever work they have in mind.

                                                  -- John Graves, Myself and Strangers

Memory and Photography

Vietnam

But so far as the pleasure [of meeting Albertine] was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.  -- Proust

Arabesque

Cairo floor 

These photos are from Egypt and India; text is Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. IV.


"We probably owe this splendor of ornament to the Semitic prohibition of human or animal forms in art: as if in compensation, the Moslem artist invented or adopted an overflowing abundance of non-representational forms."                                                          



"He sought an outlet first in geometrical figures -- line, angle, square, cube, polygon, cone, spiral, ellipse, circle, sphere;"

Cairo floor 2

 "He repeated these in a hundred combinations, and developed them into swirls, guilloches, reticulations, entrelacs, and stars."

Cairo floor 3

"Passing to floral forms, he designed, in many materials, wreaths, vines, or rosettes of lotus, acanthus, or palm tendrils or leaves."

Taj Mahal detail

In the tenth century he merged all these in the arabesque; and to them all, as a unique and major ornament, he added Arabic script.

Mohamed Ali mosque, Cairo

Desert Rain

One day there will be a crackling, clean, creosote smell in the air and the ground will be charged and the hair on your arm will stand on end and then BOOM, you are thrillingly drenched. All the desert toads crawl out of their burrows, swell out their throats, and scream for sex while puddles last. The ocotillos leaf out before your eyes, like a nature show on fast forward. There is so little time before the water sizzles back to thin air again. So little time to live a whole life in the desert. This is elemental mortality, the root of all passion.

          -- Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson