Three for Friday

Holidays are in the air today, the first weekend of August, the month when folk love to take vacations.

Here in Ireland, however, where we are still sodden after the wettest July on record, shops are slashing prices on their summer wares and thoughts are turning to autumn. But today’s travel tales are not weather dependent. They can be enjoyed curled up indoors or stretched on the beach.

First up is an essay on travel writing by Geoff Dyer, written as an introduction to the Canongate edition of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.  Dyer has interesting things to say about this genre of writing and some of its exponents. I also like the essay because he cites one of the most striking passages imagining the trophies of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s hunting exploits.

Dyer And West

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Instead of a short story this time I have included a travel tale in the form of a modern quest for a historical figure, Doubting Thomas, who was reputed to have journeyed from Palestine to southern India in the year CE 52. The account is by William Dalrymple, whose books of Indian history are marvels of research and dramatic narrative.

The essay features in a book entitled Where the Rain is Born: Writings about Kerala, ed. Anita Nair (Penguin India, 2002). As a bonus you’ll find on the facing page of the scan an affecting poem which alludes to the Syriac branch of Christianity established by Thomas.

Doubting Thomas

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Straying from the theme of travel I have chosen a salute to the pleasures of August by Amy Clampitt. For me the poem evokes this month’s gift of early blackberries crowding shoreline paths. Eaten straight from the bramble the clusters of sweet, dark juice have the tang of salt. Their sweetness foreshadows the harvest of September.

Here, Clampitt rings variations on the colour blue, its beauty tinged with love.

A host of bluebells

Blueberrying in August

Sprung from the hummocks 
of this island, stemmed, 
sea-spray-fed chromosomes
trait-coded, say, for eyes, 
of that surprising blue
some have, that you have:
they’re everywhere, these
mimic apertures the color
of distances, of drowning—

of creekside bluebells
islanded in the lost world
of childhood; of the 
illusory indigo that moats 
these hillocks when
the air is windless.

Today, though, there is 
wind: a slate sag occludes
the afternoon with old,
hound-throated mutterings.
Offshore, the lighthouse
fades to a sheeted,
sightless ghost. August 
grows somber. Though the blue-
eyed chromosome gives way,
living even so, minute to 
minute, was never better. 

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May these texts brighten your weekend and make a happy start to your vacation! Do let us know of any great travel writing/writers you discover on your way. Or, if you’re staying at home, share the titles of any books that made you feel you were on holiday.