“The Songlines” Bruce Chatwin. Penguin Classics
In Aboriginal belief, an unsung land is a dead landa: since, if the songs are forgotten, the land itself will die.
The sensation of being mauled by a big cat may, as we know from Dr Livingstone’s experience with a lion, be slightly less horrific tha one imagined, ‘It causes’, he wrote, ‘a kind of
dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror. It was like what patients under chloroform describe who see all the operation but feel not the knife… This peculiar state is probably produced in all animals killed by the carnivores; and, if so, is a merciful provision by our benevolent creator for lessening the pain of death’.
Tags: Bruce Chatwin, Penguin Classics, Songlines
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