Word: chatwin
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Indeed, much of what the author finds in Central Australia is Greek to him. Descendants of the Lizard Man, the Bandicoot Man and the Perenty Man relinquish their secrets grudgingly. Strangers are usually given incomplete or false "dreamings." To sort them out, Chatwin attaches himself to an Australian-born son of Soviet immigrants who maps songlines in an attempt to preserve them from obliteration by mining companies and railroads. Arkady Volchok earned honors in history and philosophy from Adelaide University. He plays Bach on the harpsichord, speaks several aboriginal languages and holds the provocative opinion that his Slavic forebears make...
...Chatwin contributes his own controversial assessments. The network of harmonious songlines convinces him that Homo sapiens is not hopelessly belligerent. He reconstructs a conversation he had with Konrad Lorenz, ethnologist and author of the influential On Aggression; he ransacks his notebooks and ponders anthropological and philosophical teachings. His hesitant conclusion is that humans are fundamentally restless and, like the aboriginal, the species needs to wander...
Could all this be simply a projection of Chatwin's own footloose urgings, a legacy from generations of talented Englishmen who sought regular escape from their restrictive little island? From Cain and Abel to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, there is ample sign of conflict between homing and nomadic instincts. Chatwin is not unmindful of the persistent ambivalence. He quotes Pascal's morosely amusing thought that all human misery is the result of our inability to remain quietly in a room...
...Outback, which is currently In, Chatwin finds that rooms are few and far between. Lonesomeness and cultural dislocation are the norm, and traditional songlines are sometimes surprisingly upbeat. What would the ancestors think of the aboriginal rock band whose record Grandfather's Country reached No. 3 on the antipodean charts? Or of the highly educated tribal leader who twice a year set aside his hunting spear, put on a double-breasted suit and boarded a train for Adelaide, where he read back issues of Scientific American...
...riches of The Songlines are varied and artfully stashed. Chatwin's physical journey over Australia's parched hide corresponds to his intellectual excursions, which are full of surprising turns. He travels light, living off his readings, his impressions and quotations from such diverse sources as Herodotus, Buddha, Heidegger and a Caribou Eskimo who said, "Life is one long journey on which only the unfit are left behind." What this furry philosopher ignored was that the unfit are frequently poets, abandoned to new perceptions. Like turning Australia into a metaphor for mind, thinly cultivated at the edges and wildly alive...