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Loading... West with the Night (1942)| Recently added by | EadieB, MaiadosOureia, lalahoff, Valdon, razorsoccam, SpongeBobFishpants, alo1224, ErikaHopeSpencer, Laralille, Els04 | | Legacy Libraries | George C. Marshall, Ernest Hemingway |
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Information from the Spanish Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. | |
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| Epigraph |
"I speak of Africa and golden joys." -- Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act V, Sc. 3  | |
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| Dedication |
For my Father "I wish to express my gratitude to Raoul Schumacher for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for this book." | |
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"How is it possible to bring order out of memory?" | |
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Namen sind die Schlüssel für Türen, hinter denen Halbverschüttetes liegt, verschwommen für den Verstand, vertraut jedoch im Herzen. - S.14
Niemals zögern oder zaudern, niemals sich umdrehen und niemals glauben, dass eine Stunde, an die man sich erinnert, eine bessere Stunde ist, weil sie tot ist. Vergangene Jahre scheinen sichere Jahre zu sein, eine entschwundene, gefahrlose Zeit, während die Zukunft, wie in einer konturlosen Wolke, aus der Ferne bedrohlich wirkt. Dringt man in die Wolke ein, so klart sie auf. - S. 144 Ich lernte, was jedes träumende Kind wissen muss - dass kein Horizont zu weit ist, um bis zu ihm und über ihn hinaus vorzustoßen. - S. 198 Was immer der Mensch unternimmt, Würde erlangt sein Bemühen erst, wenn echte Arbeit dahintersteckt, und fühlt man dann das Bedürfnis, sein - im Wortsinn - Handwerk auszuüben, so begreift man, dass die anderen Dinge - all die Experimente, die Eitel- und Nichtigkeiten, denen man nachjagte - ganz einfach unsinnig waren. - S. 298 ...every farmer is a midwife. There is no time for mystery. There is only time for patience and care, and hope that what is born is worthy and good. p. 121 No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things--the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold--were false to you. p. 278 Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die. p. 218 I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it. They were dark days heavy-scented with gloom. All the petty joys of early youth, the games, the friendships with the Nandi totos lost their lustre. Time became a weight that would not be moved until the bodies themselves had been moved and grass roots had found the new earth of the graves, and the women had cleaned the vacant huts of the dead and you could see the sun again. Wherever you are, it seems, you must have news of some other place, some bigger place, so that a man on his deathbed in the swamplands of Victoria Nyanza is more interested in what had lately happened in this life than in what may happen in the next. It is really this that makes death so hard—curiosity unsatisfied. I wanted to call out for Ebert, for anyone. But I couldn't say anything and no one would have heard, so I stood there with my hands on Bergner's shoulders feeling the tremor of his muscles pass through my fingertips and hearing the rest of his life run out in a stream of little words carrying no meaning, bearing no secrets—or perhaps he had none. The farm at Njoro was endless, but it was no farm at all until my father made it. He made it out of nothing and out of everything—the things of which all farms are made. They wore hats, bandannas, jackets of home-cured hide, shukas, shorts, boots or no boots, and it didn't matter. Altogether it made a uniform—not for a man, but for a body of men. Each contributed to the distinguished style and colour of a regiment that had had its predecessors once in America, but had not, in this war, a counterpart.¶ They had come to fight, and they stayed and fought—some because they could read and understand what they read, some because they had listened to other men, and some because they were told that this, in the name of civilization—a White Man's God more tangible than most—was their new duty. The days that marked the war went on like the ticking of a clock that had no face and showed no time. What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.¶ No, my friend, I have not learned more than this. Nor in all these years have I met many who have learned as much. In any country almost empty of men, 'love thy neighbor' is less a pious injunction than a rule of survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop—another time he may stop for you. there was nothing but rolling downs that went on and on in easy waves until they broke against the wall of the sky. If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work. I think he could track a honeybee through a bamboo forest. But on that morning you could see nothing; mountain mist had stolen down from Kenya during the night and captured the country. You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it.¶ In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. I wonder if I should have a change—a year in Europe this time—something new, something better, perhaps. A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think.¶ It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday. Each humid, tropic day is stillborn, and does not breathe, however lustily pregnant the night that gave it birth. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (3)
▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
From book cover: 'More than a biography; a poet's feeling for her land; an adventurer's response to life; a philosopher's evaluation of human beings and human destinies'. This unusual and beautifully written memoir was first published in 1942 to huge critical acclaim. Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 and has lived in Africa since the age of four. Her father, a horse-breeder, scholar and adventureer, chose East Africa because 'it was new and you could feel the futuer of it under your feet'. She spent her childhood playing with Murani children, hunting with the Murani cheiftan and witnessing her father's patience and labour as he transformed a stretch of wilderness into a working farm. She learnt to speak Swahili, Nandi, Masai. In adolescence she was apprenticed to her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses, and at eighteen became the first woman in Africa to be granted a racehorse trainer's license.
IN 1931, Beryl Markham turned to flying. She carried mail, passengers and supplies to the remote corners of Kenya, the Sudan and was was then Tanganyika and Rhodesia. In September1936 she made worl headlines by becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west - taking off from England and crash landing in Nova Scotia twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes later. This evocative book is rare and remarkable testimony to an Africa that no longer exists. Original title: West with the night | |
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▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0865471185, Paperback)
One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life: There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo. Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:17:26 -0400) (see all 5 descriptions) ▾Library descriptions West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s. » see all 7 descriptions |
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I am always taken by the way books set in Africa become somehow about the country in a way that transforms it into almost a character in itself. I certainly felt that from Markham, that Africa was more than a place to her, that it was a spirit, a soul. Her writing style is very tactile.
Hot night wind stalked through the thorn trees and leleshwa that surrounded the clearing. It bore the odour of swampland, the smell of Lake Victoria, the breath of weeds and sultry plains and tangled bush. It whipped at the oil flares and snatched at the surfaces of the Avian. But there was loneliness in it and aimlessness, as if its passing were only a sterile duty lacking even the beneficent promise of rain.
I could feel that wind and smell the swamps. Her stories unfold seamlessly and you are there with her seeing and feeling and knowing Africa and its people. Markham is not a white woman living in Africa, apart from the native inhabitants, she is a part of Africa...she hunts with Nandi, she lives an African life.
The distant roar of a waking lion rolls against the stillness of the night, and we listen. It is the voice of Africa bringing memories that do not exist in our minds or in our hearts--perhaps not even in our blood. It is out of time, but it is there, and it spans a chasm whose other side we cannot see.
Ultimately, Beryl Markham becomes the first person to make the Atlantic flight, east to west, solo. She is fearless in flight, just as she was fearless in every other aspect of her life.
I loved this passage. She was speaking of Africa, but it rang so true to me of life itself:
Blix would see it again and so should I one day. And still it was gone. Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wonder over it, but the best you can do then is to say, 'Ah, yes, I know this turning!' -- or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.
Finally, on reading this book, Ernest Hemingway said "I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job...but she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers." High praise from a writer who would know.
Very happy that I was pointed in the direction of knowing Beryl Markham better. I have great admiration for her and strongly recommend this marvelous book. (