If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. . .

 From Marera:  Engenheira Ana Paula with Daughter Paloma, as promised

 Green Bugs:  from Zobue

Best Boleia Ever

PCVs Will and Jamie

Quissico Lagoon 1

Quissico Lagoon 2

Arts and Crafts in Quissico

Quissico Music Festival

In Moatize, with Hot Toddies:  PCVs Laura, John, and Thelma

On the road: Tete 1

On the road: Tete 2

Vanduzi Mountain

Angonia Church

Zimbabwe Bar

O.G. Life: Zimbabwe (with stripper's pole in background)

Moringa Bay Sunrise 1

Moringa Bay Sunrise 2

Moringa Bay Sunrise 3

Roxy

Moringa Bay Sunset 1

Moringa Bay Sunset 2

It couldn’t be helped. The end is near, so I have disappeared.  From this blog at least.  I’ve only got a couple of months left at site or in country, and things have just gotten a little crazy and confusing.  That’s life, I guess.  On one hand, not much has been going on, but on the other, everything seems to be happening all at once.  And, well, in the face of everything that’s happened, really there’s not a whole lot to say, not much to report.  The biggest news in the homefront is that we've got three new pups:  Nosey, Gayboozle, and The Jackal, I like to call them (only in my head, of course, and in this blog).  They're whiney, always craving attention, and always pooping in our front yard.  Luckily, they're cute.  Otherwise, I'd have been tempted to toss them slices of bife laced with something sinister.

I’ve also been reading some, as always.  Writing, a little, obviously.  And have traveled quite a bit.  I’ve actually read some of my private journal entries from last year, realized I read and wrote so much more back in Cuamba than here in the bustling city of Chimoio.  But then there’s one journal entry that only lists quotes from one of my favorite books, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino.  It’s nothing but a page of quotes, but much of it captures so many truths, which is what I love about literature, you know, how it gets at something real and true in such a roundabout way, by lying really, so that it’s all crazy and confusing, too, but in a good way.  In a playful way.  They're much more beautiful and true than anything I can say here.  Anyway, at the risk of being criticized as lazy or unoriginal or pedantic (which this blog has actually been accused of), let me just lay out some of my favorite passages with a few random comments in square brackets:

“the professor-sorcerer” reading to his students, stories “that emerge from nothingness, find a point of departure, a direction, a plot. . .” [I'm no sorcerer, but I do read to my students; we emerge from nothingness, sometimes.]

“How much do you think you have changed?  Before ‘the revolution?’ After?”  [Even if one hasn't read this book, one can't read 'the revolution' literally.  Fiction asks to be read figuratively, openly, personally.  My initial response was: Can't teach an old dog new tricks, so haven't changed much, except, of course, for this big-ass beer belly.  Some call it "xima belly."  I like to call it the "paunch of prosperity."  It's appealing to the ladies, I hear.]

“. . . the desire to narrate, to pile stories upon stories, without trying to impose a philosophy of life on you, simply allowing you to observe its growth, like a tree, an entangling, as if of branches and leaves. . .”

“. . . how many times, when the past weighed too heavily on me, had I been seized by that hope of a clean break:  to change jobs, wife, city, continent. . .”

“Wherever I went and however I introduced myself, there has always been somebody who knew who I was and what I have done, even though my appearance has changed a lot with the passing years. . .”

“. . . and if I keep skipping from one story to another, it’s because I keep circling around that story and escaping. . .”

“. . . to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others’ words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.”

“Maybe afterward you will go your separate ways and the story will again have to shift gears painfully. . . but now, since your bodies are trying to find, skin to skin, the adhesion most generous in sensations, to transmit and receive vibrations and waves, to co-penetrate the fullness and the voids, since in mental activity you have also agreed on the maximum agreement.”

“What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”