Driftwood 6


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page 53  Now imagine that Syd read that book, before his break in Formentera. Being near the shore of an island, and thinking seriously about such a story, perhaps looking for inspiration, if one behaves strangely when a real powerful electric storm is raging, it shouldn't be an incomprehensible sign of "inner torment" (to use Nick Mason's words about the Syd anecdote in Formentera... Nick wouldn't understand that behaviour even if Syd had been a world-famous climber).

What may surprise us is that Hearn's book contains some "opaline" descriptions of the sea, similar to those used in the Ibáñez's book:  And from the shining flood also kindred green knolls arise, — pretty islets, each with its beach-girdle of dazzling sand and shells, yellow-white …

With evening, the horizon assumes tints of inexpressible sweetness, — pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk and fire …

… perhaps for an instant your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also. — Lafcadio Hearn, Chita: A Memory of Last Island In particular the last excerpt may lead one to think of the pebble, and then of the opal, as an imaginary vision of something under the sea, if the idea we had of the opa|el before was an excessively materialistic real polished pebble. Both ideas seem good, since one may conceive of carrying even a chimeric stone, but if we have to think as shipwrecked men, our stone is a pipe dream, seen in painful hypnotic solitude.

 sources → Hearn, Lafcadio. Chita: A Memory of Last Island. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889. 7, 22, 26. Print. http://www.archive.org/stream/chitamemoryoflas00hearuoft#page/6/mode/2up] [#page/22/mode/2up] [#page/26/mode/2up]