When the Going Was Good by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [Waugh, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718197766
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

A Journey to Brazil in 1932

(From Ninety-two Days)

One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life. For myself and many better than me, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is there that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.

Just as a carpenter, I suppose, seeing a piece of rough timber feels an inclination to plane it and square it and put it into shape, so a writer is not really content to leave any experience in the amorphous, haphazard condition in which life presents it; and putting an experience into shape means, for a writer, putting it into communicable form.

So for the next month or two I shall be reliving my journey in Guiana and Brazil. Not that it has ever been out of my memory. It has been there, ill digested, throughout a crowded and fretful summer, obtruding itself in a fragmentary way at incongruous moments. Now, in this seaside nursery, it will be all laid out, like the maps and photographs and drawings on the writing table, while falling leaves in the autumnal sunshine remind me that it will soon be time to start out again somewhere else.

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