Treasure Island

There are 2 posts tagged Treasure Island (this is page 1 of 1).

Georgia for your health

I spent the morning reading a bit more about Robert Louis Stevenson, who, it turns out, moved to Samoa due to chronic health problems. It seems to me that it was a common thing in the past to suggest that people suffering from bronchitis or other respiratory infections were told to go someplace else “for their health.” Not only did Stevenson live in Samoa for his health, he also spent time living in France.

Imagine! Your doctor pulls a thermometer out from under your tongue, looks at it, sighs, and says, “You’d better move to Paris.” He says it “Pair-ee.”

The nineteenth century really was a different world. Seriously, though, when did doctors stop telling people to get some “sea air” or “more sun?” And was that all quackery, or does it actually help sick people to move half-way across the globe? I wish doctors still did that. “You’ve got a cold. Here’s some heroin and a ticket to Hawaii.“

With the healthcare system we have in America, though, your GP would probably tell you to go somewhere shitty, like Texas. Or Georgia.

Now that I’ve finished up Treasure Island, I’ll be switching gears a bit and tackling a seminal work of Russian literature, Dead Souls by Nokolai Gogol.

This is a book that I know next-to-nothing about, and I’m looking forward to “going in blind.” I can already guess that I’m going to get confused by the characters’ names — Russian names all sort-of blend together when I read Russian novels, and this book has been described as “Dickensian,” which means there’s going to be a britzka-load of characters.

Still. Russian literature has always been surprising. When I read The Brothers Karamazov way back in the day, I was amazed at both the humor and the characterization. I’ve always had a bit of a preconception that Russian literature is as dry and bland and a frozen parsnip, but there’s always something that winds up amazing me.

I hope Dead Souls does the same.

Mornings for the past few days have been filled with dense fog and unearthly quiet. The days between Christmas and New Years are a kind of temporal limbo, and I’m afraid its affect the weather patterns.

Home is the sailor…

Here’s a poem called “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

If you think that’s morbid: The poem is also the epitaph on his grave stone where he lies buried on a mountainside in Samoa. It honestly reads as if he wrote it specifically for the purpose, doesn’t it? Like he knew he was going to die and thought, “Better have some fire-ass lyrics ready!”

Here’s what his grave looks like:

If you had to write a poem for your tombstone, what sort of poem would it be?

Reading Treasure Island (#870 on the list) has been an absolute treat so far. A lot of the books I’m going to be tackling for this project aren’t what you’d call “fun.” Some of them, I know, are going to be a lot more like “work” than the actual work I do. (Looking at you, Proust!)

Treasure Island is a straight-up adventure story, though, and I’ve honestly wanted to keep the story rolling, staying up late in some instances to listen to it. I feel…young again (?) when I’m tucked into bed listening to the adventures of young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver.

I’ve been both reading a physical copy of the book and listening to the audiobook version, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of with books I’ve read recently. I mostly listen to audiobooks when I’m falling asleep, or, as happens with stark regularity, when I randomly wake up at 3 AM and can’t get back to sleep.

I kind of enjoy reading in multiple formats. I particularly like it when I wake up in the morning and find out how many “pages” I listened to at night — it gives me a strange sense of accomplishment.

I’ll never understand people who don’t like audiobooks or say that listening to audiobooks is not “reading,” but I know they exist. The argument seems to be that media aren’t interchangeable and can’t be labeled as “reading,” which is just semantics. I wonder if the clown who wrote that article thinks reading in “braille” doesn’t count because you don’t use your eyes?

Like many people probably told Robert Louis Stevenson towards the end of his life, “That’s a strange hill to die on.”