Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Tuesday 22 October 2019

"Good travellers are heartless,"

wrote Paul Theroux*.
But he contradicts himself throughout -
and here quotes Herman Melville:

Not until I visited Honolulu
was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives
had been civilized into draught-horses,
and evangelized into beasts of burden.
But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces,
and are harnessed to the vehicle of their spiritual instructors

like so many dumb brutes.

What a wonderful and telling  use of the term Spiritual Instructor.

* in The Tao of Travel, p.70

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