Click On The Link At Your Own Risk .... July 9, 2019

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for contributing to your addiction if you click on the link.

I simply don't have time for this.

Link here.

I never should have clicked on the link.

I can't quit watching ... and it's 30 minutes long. And now I'm hooked.

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The Book Page

One of my favorite openings to any book was from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa:

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hils. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

I was reminded of that when reading Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene, volume II: 1939 - 1955, page 153:

Greene swore in Ways of Escape that for the first six months in Freetown [Sierra Leone] he was a happy man, for he was in a land he loved: though the evidence of his letters suggest his happiness and his love were intermittent. Yet in retrospect, he felt able to quote Kipling: 

"We've only one virginity to lose. And where we have lost it here our hearts will be."

'At thirty-one in Liberia I had lost my hear to West Africa.' -- Graham Greene, letter.

Greene's liking for West Africa is best expressed in Hargreaves's conversation in The Human Factor:

It's what politicians call a realistic policy, and realims never got anyone very far in the kind of Africa I used to know. My Africa was a sentimental Africa. I really loved Africa ... The Chinese don't, nor do the Russians, nor the Americans ... How easy it was in the old days when we dealt with chiefs and witch doctors and bush schools and devils and rain queens. My Africa was still alittle like the Africa of Rider Haggard.

And the Africans liked the eccentric British.