South East Seasons
I've read some Jane Austen & George Elliot recently but last weekend it was time to let my literary journey depart from English soil. I picked up Burmese Days by George Orwell for something closer to home. It was worth it just for his descriptions of the seasons.
Of the crescendo to the hot season that is April, he writes:
The heat rolled form the earth like the breath of an oven...The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it- horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching one and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia and China, cloudless and interminable.
Wording the wet season, Orwell says:
Meanwhile, it was raining almost without cease. They sky was leaden, and innumerable whirling storms chased one another across the maiden like squadrons of cavalry. Burmans passed, under vast wooden hats in spite of which their bodies streamed water like the bronze gods in the fountains.
At the basic level, I'm living the cycles of a two-season land. If you've visited Cambodia, you'll know that the dry season is the appropriate period for a wedding. But if you've ever watched a Hindi film you'll know the wet season is the time for unexpected romance.
There is something that stirs in the when everything is turned upside-down. For example, an event as simple as getting home becomes a minor war against storms and flood. Think about it. In the South East, this is the month when the rakish office boy scampers home scowling, his thin skirt sticking to his narrow shoulders and his best leather shoes filled with water. In that same moment, the labourer, wearing nothing but a cloth wrapped around his waist, strides home with his face turned upward to the streaming sky, letting the tonic rain fall all over his chest.
Cars and clubs go some way in separating the rich and keeping their daily lives an envious mystery. Yet there are strange moments even in a groaning, materialistic city like this, when an ordinary young man, bronzed and buff, may turn a dozen heads.
Of the crescendo to the hot season that is April, he writes:
The heat rolled form the earth like the breath of an oven...The glare sent a weariness through one’s bones. There was something horrible in it- horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching one and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia and China, cloudless and interminable.
Wording the wet season, Orwell says:
Meanwhile, it was raining almost without cease. They sky was leaden, and innumerable whirling storms chased one another across the maiden like squadrons of cavalry. Burmans passed, under vast wooden hats in spite of which their bodies streamed water like the bronze gods in the fountains.
At the basic level, I'm living the cycles of a two-season land. If you've visited Cambodia, you'll know that the dry season is the appropriate period for a wedding. But if you've ever watched a Hindi film you'll know the wet season is the time for unexpected romance.
There is something that stirs in the when everything is turned upside-down. For example, an event as simple as getting home becomes a minor war against storms and flood. Think about it. In the South East, this is the month when the rakish office boy scampers home scowling, his thin skirt sticking to his narrow shoulders and his best leather shoes filled with water. In that same moment, the labourer, wearing nothing but a cloth wrapped around his waist, strides home with his face turned upward to the streaming sky, letting the tonic rain fall all over his chest.
Cars and clubs go some way in separating the rich and keeping their daily lives an envious mystery. Yet there are strange moments even in a groaning, materialistic city like this, when an ordinary young man, bronzed and buff, may turn a dozen heads.
posted by pip @ 4:48 pm
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