Mornings in Mexico

D.H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico is less a travel book, as the title might imply, than a work of anthropology and metaphysics. He observes the Mexican and American Indian rituals and dances, attends their fiestas, walks their streets, and draws his conclusions. A trip to the market, where he haggles over fruit and sandals, produces the observation that the real purpose of all the buying and selling is not money but human contact. "Only that which is utterly intangible, matters. The contact, the spark of exchange. That which can never be fastened upon, forever gone, forever coming, never to be detained: the spark of contact."

Somewhat uneven, too the extent that the last couple of chapters are acually about New Mexico rather than the Zapotec village of southern Mexico that is the subject of the rest of the book. Occasional flashes of insight, but the principal value of the book lies in its finely wrought description of a largely extinct way of life.