Read Online Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban - Free Book Online
Authors: Russell Hoban
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up nose to nose with other cars, always stopped a little way back so as not to challenge anyone. If I take the turtles to Brighton I’ll have to drive the van but that’ll be all right. The turtles are depending on me.
Something’s
depending on me.
I was looking at a book on shamanism at the shop, by Mircea Eliade. In Siberia and South America, wherever they have shamans, they’re always the unstable, the epileptics, the weird ones of the group, people prone to terrors and depression as I am. But unlike me they get initiated into power and a place of importance, they become seers and healers. There’s something between them and animals, a bond, a connection, channels of power. Speech with animals, magical transformations. Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding? Swimming with Pangaea printed on my brain and bones, the ancient continent that was before the land masses drifted apart. That’s part of it too: there were no seas between, the land was one, there was one thing, unbroken. Now there are thousands of miles of open water and the strong ones, the swimmers, the unlost, are driven to trace the paths between, maintain the ancient connection. I don’t know whether I can keep going. A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.
A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts the navigator, that’s what the sign on the Port Liberty model says. That’s how life seems to me sometimes. At other times it’s a confusion of fixed and flashing darknesses. More darknesses than lights Ithink. Port Liberty doesn’t exist and Pangaea having separated will never again come together. Unless he is already doomed, Fortune favours the man who keeps his nerve.
Beowulf.
Of course it’s easy to keep your nerve when you’ve got a grip that can tear the arm right off a sea monster. Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing. It doesn’t feel that way now but then I haven’t reached that point yet. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise, said Blake. If the coward persists in his cowardice does he become brave?
Maybe I could stop smoking, that would give me more years to get brave in. It’s getting to my legs, they seize up on me now whenever I climb stairs. When I stopped smoking for nine days not long ago I could run right up the stairs in the Underground like other people.
I’ve met several other men who were divorced and didn’t see their children any more because their wives had left the country. It didn’t seem to bother them all that much. I feel as if it’ll kill me but then when I was with the children I felt that being married to Dora was taking my life away. Maybe I’m just one of those people so accustomed to being miserable that they use the material of any situation to fuel their misery.
Sometimes I think it must help to have a conviction in one’s birthplace, to feel a significance in having been born in one place rather than another. Perhaps if more of my childhood had been spent in Polperro I’d feel stronger about it. My father retired there to paint, met my mother in the teashop where she worked, married her and died two years later. I was one year old when Mother and I came to London and I still can’t see the point of my having been born in Polperro. I’ve never been back there.
For some time now on bad days I’ve been falling back on a news item I read last month. An important witness in the current American government scandal was said to be desperately afraid of going to prison because he’s so good-looking that all the homosexuals will be after him. I have many problems but not that one.
16
Neaera H.
The one beach pebble I have from my
Something’s
depending on me.
I was looking at a book on shamanism at the shop, by Mircea Eliade. In Siberia and South America, wherever they have shamans, they’re always the unstable, the epileptics, the weird ones of the group, people prone to terrors and depression as I am. But unlike me they get initiated into power and a place of importance, they become seers and healers. There’s something between them and animals, a bond, a connection, channels of power. Speech with animals, magical transformations. Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding? Swimming with Pangaea printed on my brain and bones, the ancient continent that was before the land masses drifted apart. That’s part of it too: there were no seas between, the land was one, there was one thing, unbroken. Now there are thousands of miles of open water and the strong ones, the swimmers, the unlost, are driven to trace the paths between, maintain the ancient connection. I don’t know whether I can keep going. A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.
A confusion of fixed and flashing lights confronts the navigator, that’s what the sign on the Port Liberty model says. That’s how life seems to me sometimes. At other times it’s a confusion of fixed and flashing darknesses. More darknesses than lights Ithink. Port Liberty doesn’t exist and Pangaea having separated will never again come together. Unless he is already doomed, Fortune favours the man who keeps his nerve.
Beowulf.
Of course it’s easy to keep your nerve when you’ve got a grip that can tear the arm right off a sea monster. Am I doomed? Flashing darkness is pretty much the same as flashing light really. Fear isn’t at all the same as courage but after a certain point perhaps being afraid of everything is the same as being afraid of nothing. It doesn’t feel that way now but then I haven’t reached that point yet. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise, said Blake. If the coward persists in his cowardice does he become brave?
Maybe I could stop smoking, that would give me more years to get brave in. It’s getting to my legs, they seize up on me now whenever I climb stairs. When I stopped smoking for nine days not long ago I could run right up the stairs in the Underground like other people.
I’ve met several other men who were divorced and didn’t see their children any more because their wives had left the country. It didn’t seem to bother them all that much. I feel as if it’ll kill me but then when I was with the children I felt that being married to Dora was taking my life away. Maybe I’m just one of those people so accustomed to being miserable that they use the material of any situation to fuel their misery.
Sometimes I think it must help to have a conviction in one’s birthplace, to feel a significance in having been born in one place rather than another. Perhaps if more of my childhood had been spent in Polperro I’d feel stronger about it. My father retired there to paint, met my mother in the teashop where she worked, married her and died two years later. I was one year old when Mother and I came to London and I still can’t see the point of my having been born in Polperro. I’ve never been back there.
For some time now on bad days I’ve been falling back on a news item I read last month. An important witness in the current American government scandal was said to be desperately afraid of going to prison because he’s so good-looking that all the homosexuals will be after him. I have many problems but not that one.
16
Neaera H.
The one beach pebble I have from my
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