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sby 's review for:
West with the Night
by Beryl Markham
Beautifully written memoir by a fascinating woman. She grew up in East Africa. She was attacked by lions twice. A leopard came into her hut and tried to kill her dog, but she rescued the dog. She was almost trampled by an elephant. She trained racing horses. Then she learned how to fly and became a pilot. She scouted for elephants by plane for hunters, which was dangerous and risky. She was the first person to fly westbound over the Atlantic Ocean, from Ireland to North America.
"If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work."
"You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents-each to see what the other looked like.
Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind-such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stronger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."
"If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work."
"You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents-each to see what the other looked like.
Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind-such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stronger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."