bonwert2004

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West With the Night

Beryl Markham

一个特立独行的女性,虽然还没能读到她的原著,先摘抄一些《夜航西飞》里的句子及介绍。

 

“飞行在黑暗中，山丘、森林、巨岩、平原都是同一种东西，而黑暗本身是无止境的，地球不再是你的星球，而是一颗远方之星。远方的星星至少还发亮呢。这一刻的飞机才是你的星球，而你是其中唯一的居民……”

——Beryl Markham《West With the Night》

One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life:

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.

Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
----amazon.com editorial description

It seemed to me beyond the realms of possibility that I should travel so far that I should "go such a long way." This was linked up with the limitations and poverty of our conditions of life. My longing to travel was no doubt also the expression of a wish to escape from that pressure, like the force which drives so many adolescent children to run away from home. I had long seen clearly that a great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of these early wishes, that it is rooted, that is, in dissatisfaction with home and family.

Kibii into Arab Ruta--Beru into Memsahib!--this stilted word that ends my youth and reminds me always of its ending-- What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta, who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.

When you fly, you get a feeling of possession that you couldn't have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you--all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you're alone in a plane, there's no one to share it. It's there and it's yours.

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book,... you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds.

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Beryl Markham-Flew over Atlantic

For most of her eighty-three years, Beryl Markham was indeed fearless. As a child growing up in Africa, she faced down a marauding lion. As a trainer, she forced high-strung racehorses to obey her. As an old woman, she drove her car through a machine gun fire during an attempted coup in Kenya. She wanted to keep a luncheon date. It was simply her nature to confront danger.

 

 “There’s a coolness to her. She’s not a very trusting person.” Writer Judith Theuman. “I think any person who’s lived by her wits would probably have developed that coolness. Look at the astronauts. I mean, it’s a quality that you see it in fliers. You see it in sailors, or you see it in hunter, and Beryl was of that stamp.”

 

“She was beautiful. She was very seductive. She was well born. And she was strong and ambitious and fearless and smart. So, you know, it’s a lot to take.”

 

 

Through the darkness, wedged between extra fuel tanks that had been fitted into the cabin for the long journey, her small plane bucking fog and storms and headwinds, the Atlantic Ocean black beneath her, Beryl Markham flew west with the night, completely alone.

 

“You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book or shuffle a deck of cards, or care a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have crossed continents, each man to see what the other looked like. Being alone in an aeroplane, for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness. Nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage. Nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces and hopes rooted in your mind. Such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.”

 

Beryl Markham died in Kenya this past August. She was eighty-three. Her ashes were scattered from a light aircraft over the hills at Inguro --- her beloved childhood home. In Washington.