| No matter how heavy my baggage, I always take (at least one) book with me when I travel. This trip I picked a lightweight tome with a heavyweight theme...Norman Mailer's 'The Fight'...at once a sporting book (discussing, as it does, the 1975 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship which took place in Kinshasa, Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman)...and something deeper...as much a look at Mailer's psyche than those of Ali and Foreman. Beautifully written...it's so easy to become caught up within its pages that I managed to ignore the small child kicking the back of my seat for a few hundred miles. |
, by a Dutch priest who had worked as a missionary in the Belgian Congo..."Bantu philosophy, he soon learned, saw humans as forces, not beings. Without putting into words, he had always believed that. It gave a powerful shift to his thoughts. By such logic, men or women were more than the parts of themselves, which is to say more than the result of their heredity and experience. A man was not only what he contained, not only his desires, his memory, and his personality, but also the forces that came to inhabit him at any moment from all things living and dead...
In the presence of a woman who is finely dressed, an African might do more than salute the increase of power that accrues to the woman with her elaborate gown. To his eye, she would also have taken on the force that lives in the gown itself, the kuntu of the gown. That has its own existence. It, too, is a force in the universe of forces. The gown is like the increment in power an actor feels when he enters his role, when he senses the separate existence of the role as it comes up to him, much as if it had been out there waiting for him in the dark. Then, it is as if he takes on some marrow of the forgotten caves. It is why certain actors must act or go mad - they can hardly live without the clarity of that moment when the role returns."
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