Word: overgrown
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...Diego's Mission Valley canyon, relatively new $250,000 Spanish-style residences with courtyards and swimming & pools often sit next to 60-year-old wooden bungalows and duplexes that initially cost as little as $10,000. The flames that leaped out of the valley and slashed through the overgrown chaparral made few distinctions when they reached the canyon rim. Abraham Nasatir, 80, a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University and an expert on California lore, watched the fire consume some 500,000 historical papers he had collected. He was working on a nearly finished history...
...sight of the lost Maya city of Copan rising eerily out of the Honduran jungle. The pioneering American archaeologist was amazed by the art objects that lay around Copan's crumbling pyramids and palaces. "Architecture, sculpture and painting, all the arts which embellish life, had flourished in this overgrown forest; beauty, ambition and glory had lived and passed away," Stephens wrote. "All was mystery, dark impenetrable mystery...
There are certain words that English ought to have but does not. One is a word for the opposite of memory. Oblivion is not quite it. Forgettery? That swampy region in the southland of the brain where everything we have forgotten now lies, overgrown with kudzu, something like an enormous automobile graveyard...
...heavy irony....Ah, the daiquiri bird which incubates its eggs on the wing; ah the fredonna tree whose root grow at the tips of its branches, and whose fibers assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle...
...aside: "I know this. Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest." Braithwaite's--and the novel's--wisdom lies in his realization that the overgrown byways of literary history may not lead anywhere in particular, but the stroll itself yields immeasurable self-understanding. He does find many guises of his subject along the way, just as he finds many stuffed parrots while rummaging through the museums of Rouca, but Flaubert probably succeeded in his artistic...