Here in Kauai, I am reading about another set of islands. The Antilles is a very small book – Derek Walcott’s Nobel Lecture. Now that I don’t go for work, I am doing what I promised myself I would do – catch up on world literature. The book is tiny, but it is a way to gain insight into the mind and preoccupations of a Nobel winner – his prose is at times angry as well as self-defensive about the place his beloved Caribbean occupies in the minds of the rest of the world. I was reminded of another book, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place – powerful anger against what the tourists have done to the islands.
In Walcott’s lecture, I found the following sentence:
The traveler cannot love, since love is stasis and travel is motion.
Having been on constant move for the past 4 months, I need to think more about that sentence.
Ram
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