on the blue water
April, 1936
Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and
those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it,
never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet
them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely
holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the
taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue.
Wine, when your tongue has been burned clean with lye and water,
feels like puddle water in your mouth, while mustard feels like
axle-grease, and you can smell crisp, fried bacon, but when you
taste it, there is only a feeling of crinkly lard.
You can learn about this matter of the tongue by coming into
the kitchen of a villa on the Riviera late at night and taking a drink
from what should be a bottle of Evian water and which turns out
to be Eau de Javel, a concentrated lye product used for cleaning
sinks. The taste buds on your tongue, if burned off by Eau de
Javel, will begin to function again after about a week. At what
rate other things regenerate one does not know, since you lose
track of friends and the things one could learn in a week were
mostly learned a long time ago.
The other night I was talking with a good friend to whom all
hunting is dull except elephant hunting. To him there is no sport
in anything unless there is great danger and, if the danger is not
enough, he will increase it for his own satisfaction. A hunting
companion of his had told me how this friend was not satisfied
with the risks of ordinary elephant hunting but would, if possible,
have the elephants driven, or turned, so he could take them head-on,
so it was a choice of killing them with the difficult frontal shot as
they came, trumpeting, with their ears spread, or having them run
over him. This is to elephant hunting what the German cult of
suicide climbing is to ordinary mountaineering, and I suppose it is,
in a way, an attempt to approximate the old hunting of the armed
man who is hunting you.
This friend was speaking of elephant hunting and urging me
to hunt elephant, as he said that once you took it up no other
hunting would mean anything to you. I was arguing that I enjoyed
all hunting and shooting, any sort I could get, and had no desire
to wipe this capacity for enjoyment out with the Eau de Javel of
the old elephant coming straight at you with his trunk up and
his ears spread.
Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and
those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it,
never really care for anything else thereafter. You will meet
them doing various things with resolve, but their interest rarely
holds because after the other thing ordinary life is as flat as the
taste of wine when the taste buds have been burned off your tongue.
Wine, when your tongue has been burned clean with lye and water,
feels like puddle water in your mouth, while mustard feels like
axle-grease, and you can smell crisp, fried bacon, but when you
taste it, there is only a feeling of crinkly lard.
You can learn about this matter of the tongue by coming into
the kitchen of a villa on the Riviera late at night and taking a drink
from what should be a bottle of Evian water and which turns out
to be Eau de Javel, a concentrated lye product used for cleaning
sinks. The taste buds on your tongue, if burned off by Eau de
Javel, will begin to function again after about a week. At what
rate other things regenerate one does not know, since you lose
track of friends and the things one could learn in a week were
mostly learned a long time ago.
The other night I was talking with a good friend to whom all
hunting is dull except elephant hunting. To him there is no sport
in anything unless there is great danger and, if the danger is not
enough, he will increase it for his own satisfaction. A hunting
companion of his had told me how this friend was not satisfied
with the risks of ordinary elephant hunting but would, if possible,
have the elephants driven, or turned, so he could take them head-on,
so it was a choice of killing them with the difficult frontal shot as
they came, trumpeting, with their ears spread, or having them run
over him. This is to elephant hunting what the German cult of
suicide climbing is to ordinary mountaineering, and I suppose it is,
in a way, an attempt to approximate the old hunting of the armed
man who is hunting you.
This friend was speaking of elephant hunting and urging me
to hunt elephant, as he said that once you took it up no other
hunting would mean anything to you. I was arguing that I enjoyed
all hunting and shooting, any sort I could get, and had no desire
to wipe this capacity for enjoyment out with the Eau de Javel of
the old elephant coming straight at you with his trunk up and
his ears spread.