Word: beaching
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sometime in 1891, Robert Louis Stevenson completed a novella-length narrative about the South Pacific called The Beach of Falesa. By this time, the Scottish-born and immensely popular author was living in Samoa, at a far remove from his publishers in London and New York City; an answer to a letter sent by steamer mail took three months to return. As a result, Stevenson delegated loose authority over his manuscripts to several confidants, to speed up both the process of getting into print and the payment of his royalties. But editors on both sides of the Atlantic were perturbed...
Fortunately, Menikoff includes the original version of The Beach of Falesa, which is roughly half as long as his scholarly preface and many times as interesting. The story Stevenson intended is a bit grittier and more pungent than the one that appeared. A vagabond British trader named Wiltshire tells of being assigned to reopen a defunct post on a remote island. He is befriended at first by a man called Case, who enjoys a trading monopoly. Case persuades the newcomer to take up with Uma, a beautiful, half-naked native girl, and arranges a sham wedding ceremony. Before long, Wiltshire...
...bringing our society to a halt." Although he patiently listened to conservationists make their pitches to his Energy Department, he also helped kill a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency under William Ruckelshaus to take some action against acid rain, rather than just study the problem. Complains Ben Beach, a spokesman for the Wilderness Society: "He's got Watt's philosophy and Clark's likable personality--a dangerous combination...
...world that had neither "certitude nor peace" was evidently not spinning so rapidly in the wrong direction that it allowed no moment for a corrective or contemplative voice. Arnold took hold of that moment; he felt that it was his to take. Yet even as he wrote Dover Beach, the railroads that had spread across England like unwound threads in the early part of the century were stretching toward the sea to accelerate the world's speed. Were the Arnolds to take a hotel room in Dover, 1985, it would be in the Holiday Inn. Nothing in Dover today invites...
...sense, our Dover Beach is Dover now--a place built for easy embarkations, absent of beauty or a connection with nature, and ruled by clocks and timetables. There is nothing terribly wrong with Dover, and nothing especially right. The town is a point of convenience, which is exactly the point that the Industrial Revolution originally spied, strode toward and reached. Who in Dover today would describe the world as various and beautiful and new? Yet how is the world less so than it was 134 years ago or a thousand, or the way it will be a thousand years hence...