Friend of the People Mike Middleton recently sent me a box full of books (thanks, Mike!) and among them was Peter Matthiessen's The Tree Where Man Was Born.
In one part, Matthiessen writes about one of the people he's going to visit out in some rural station (the book takes place in East Africa): "But a letter sent me in Nairobi gave me confidence that we would get on all right: 'I think if you allow yourself two weeks here,' he wrote in part, 'you would be able to get a fair insight into the valley and its mysteries; if you stay longer, you might well end up at my position, knowing nothing at all. It seems the longer one stays at a place, the less one has to say about it.'"
That seems like a pretty good description of where I'm at now: I know nothing at all. Not in a bad, despairing way (some of my best friends know nothing at all).
But it could also be apathy. I'll try to get some more posts up over the coming months, possibly dealing with some of the following topics:
- a visit from my family back in December-January
- a visit from friends to Cape Town
- my new fascination with making charts for my classroom
- something on my secondary project
- the English Club
- a searing indictment of the cows and chickens who, with blatant disregard for property rights, ate all of the spinach from my garden (and cut down the okra before it even had a chance)
