Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin
Charles Bruce Chatwinwas an English travel writer, novelist, and journalist. His first book, In Patagonia, established Chatwin as a travel writer, although he considered himself instead a storyteller, interested in bringing to light unusual tales. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hilland his novel Utzwas shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2008 The Times named Chatwin #46 on their list of "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945."...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 May 1940
Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.
I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession. 'As sanitary engineer?' No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.
And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.
I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.
It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.
Anything was better than to be loved for one's things.
For life is a journey through a wilderness
I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'
I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.
I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.
Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the things of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, Wendy said. They gave their children the land.
I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.