My silence here has a simple and unhappy explanation: beginning two days short of Cape Town the heavy seas began to get to me, and between Cape Town and Mauritius—which we left earlier today—I alternated my required sessions here at the desktop computer, or at the nearby table where I meet with students faculty and staff, with recuperative sessions in bed. I am hoping that perhaps I may now have found the right sized patch to allow me to be both awake enough and other than ill enough so that I can fulfill my duties. But with that very sentence the boat resumed its steady rocking—big waves now, and my desk chair wants to lurch back, and my desk drawers have already swung open. We’ll see.
Cape Town’s, and South Africa’s, combination of a horrific political and social past, and a not much redeemed present, with astonishing natural wonders is hard to put together in one. It needs instead half a dozen headings or more. Our morning spent in Mauritius—which, as you may know—came, because of the heavy seas, a full day late, was half so long as originally scheduled, and came only after we had announced on the ship that no disembarkation was possible: that seems a much clearer and digestible (if I can, without excessive risk, use that word just now) mélange. Or rather it was such an extraordinary mix of so many elements—Chinese, India, African, European—that, especially given the brevity of our visit, it seemed much easier simply to take as a mélange, an impressive one, a moving one, but a kind of quick glance at a collage, the individual materials of which will have to be returned to at another time.
But now, per Whitman:
O secret of the earth and sky! 235
Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers!
Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land!
Of you, O prairies! Of you, gray rocks!
O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows! O day and night, passage to you! 240
O sun and moon, and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter! Passage to you!
Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins!
Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor!
Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! 245
Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough?
Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes?
Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
Well, no. But give us time…
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