Green Market Press Blog

It looks increasingly as if Congress will do nothing to reform the practices that nearly brought down the U.S. and world economies.

If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Karen and I have decided to buy Edinburgh Airport.

BAA has just sold Gatwick to something called Global Infrastructures Partners (or GIP), and is under orders to sell two more of its seven airports. We’ve decided to leverage Rebecca’s piggybank (sorry, hon) and become international financiers.

We already have a name (the most important thing)—Interstellar Derivatives Investment Opportunities Trust (or IDIOT). Now all we need is a few people with billions to burn, a thirst for adventure, and faith that two crazy kids from Indiana—with nothing but guts and vision—can still make it to the stars. “We’re Interstellar” is our motto.

So if you have money, send it in.

Why Edinburgh? Well, we like Edinburgh and we think BAA is probably more likely to part with its airport there than with Heathrow, which makes lots of money. Even with the haggis concession, Edinburgh Airport can’t be making big bucks. Plus it’s so far out in the county that you have to take a plane from Deacon Brodie’s to get there.

None of this matters, of course, because we won’t keep it long. Why would an airport buyer want actually to run an airport, and deal with lost luggage and cranky passengers? We’ll probably keep it just long enough to attend next year’s Tattoo, load up on single-malt scotch, and restock our sweater supply on the Royal Mile. Then it’s bye-bye, Bobby Burns.

We’ll either resell the airport for a huge profit (in which you will share), or move it to a warmer climate and turn it into a tourist attraction. After all, the QE2 is on its way to Dubai to be a hotel. Why shouldn’t Edinburgh Airport have its day in the sun?

If you have to think much about this, you obviously don’t belong in our world of romantic, high-flying global finance (you poor gutless, visionless sap). But if you believe in the dream—and want Rebecca to get her piggybank back—send in the big money.

You can trust us. Karen and I have one big advantage over those other guys who want your bucks.

Neither of us is named Bernie.

I read and copyedited Mike Daley’s memoir. Then he asked me to write a jacket blurb for it, and I was in trouble.

Book reviewing—even the brevity of a blurb—has always been murder for me. I used to do it sometimes for a newspaper, but always felt I had to bring to it at least as much commitment as the author had to the text. This sounds noble, but in fact was a fatal flaw. A review took weeks, and I didn’t write very many of them. I made about 25 cents an hour.

After saying a thoughtless yes to Mike’s request, I remembered all this. Jeez, I was going to have to read the whole manuscript again, and this time not as a copyeditor but as an actual reader, invited to spend some hours or days with something called Way Out There: Lyrical Essays.

From the editing several months earlier, I had retained a strong impression that this was a good and thoughtful book, well worth reading. Also that a few parts of it might be too lyrical for easy comprehension—Mike is a fine poet and there were some leaps in the essays that might throw off a reader expecting prose.

But behind my yes was a sense that I had read several extraordinary pieces. One was called “ For the One Among Us Who Will be the First to Die.” Superficially, this was an account of some young Catholic seminarians on a day’s skating expedition up a New England river. But into it Mike had woven strands of friendship, the stirrings of first love, a near-death experience, and his own decision not to enter the priesthood. Woven it seamlessly into an amazing narrative. I read it again, and it took my head off again.

Curiously, Mike (with whom I was corresponding occasionally) was not quite as high on it as I was. His favorite was the account of how he became a poet. That was certainly fine, and of deep interest to him and to me as another poet, but maybe not quite as compelling to the general reader. There are many accounts of literary awakening, each valuable. There is only one account I know of—Mike’s—in which a young seminarian sees, in the gaily colored coats of his fellows skating away from him, the revolution about to engulf his own life. Mike didn’t write that, I thought; it was written through him, and this is the miracle.

Buoyed by that recollection, I sat down and re-read Mike’s book. All of it was better even than I had realized while editing. Mike is a skilled writer, and I had edited quickly. Now I had to slow down and notice his great command of language and of detail—how he observed a flower and the way salmon from a purse seiner leave a shine when slapped down on the deck of the buyer’s boat. When Mike described walking into elk country, I had to take the steps hesitantly with him and be aware of his precision in describing the pressure of water on his legs while fording a stream. The narrative opened up, and even what I had thought were obscure passages gave up their insights.

Some of the essays deal at length with the big themes—mortality, in “A Hungarian Notebook,” and the nature of education in “Wild Art.” But some of the best are the shortest. I kept re-reading “The Duckabush, the Dosey, and the Hamma Hamma,” in which Mike talks about the logic (or illogic) of creating parks instead of living within the natural world. “It’s difficult to understand,” he writes, “the purpose of setting aside portions rather than demanding limits on progress.” It is indeed.

In the end, I sat down and wrote the blurb, straight off, on the first try.

In a fat manila envelope on my attic shelf reposes Copy #9 of Savonarola, by William Van Wyck, published by Peter Titus of the Black Manikin Press in Paris in the early 1920s. It was inherited from my Uncle Bill, who was a friend of Van Wyck’s in Paris at that time.

Back in October, 2007 (could it have been two years already?), Karen and I had the Great Book Sort-Out, to reduce our inventory to manageable size. Many of these books came from Bill’s, after his death in 1984—some of them we had read, some we knew we would never read. We needed our house back.

So Karen, as I recall, checked more than 1,200 volumes on the web site for Abe Books, and then we drove a hard bargain with a bookseller. (Well, perhaps not all that hard. He was more than fair to us, and we didn’t expect to get the full Abe Book’s price, so it was an amicable transaction.)

Bill had several books by VanWyck, and we let them go. Among them was an expensive Chaucer set he produced, with art by Rockwell Kent. But I hung onto Savonarola. Abe Books listed only one other copy for sale, #10, which it priced at $600. I held mine back from the sale, not so much for the value, as because it was a genuinely rare book. Only 10 copies were printed, and it tickled me to have one of them. My copy has a humorous inscription from Van Wyck to Bill, and I liked keeping it as a memento of their friendship. Besides, I thought, I might actually read it.

There is a mystery about Van Wyck. Who was he, anyhow, and what happened to him? He published a number of “art” books in Paris in the 1920s, but nothing about him personally shows up on Google, and he’s not in any authors’ directory so far as I’ve been able to find. He seemed simply to disappear after the “lost generation” years. A William Van Wyck did publish a biography of Robinson Jeffers in 1938, which sounds like a subject that might interest my man. But I haven’t followed up that slim lead yet.

I suspect he may have been a grandson of Augustus Van Wyck, who was a noted jurist in New York and ran for governor there unsuccessfully in 1898. Augustus died on June 9, 1922, leaving $500,000 to his son, William, who by my hypothesis would be the father of the young Bohemian in Paris. (My son Karl, who is my chief research assistant in such matters, checked probate records to discover the bequest.) If my supposition is correct, it might explain why young Bill was able to spend a considerable sum for that time in publishing very fancy books in extremely limited editions.

I probably could track him down. Amazon’s “Open Library” offers an edition of Savonarola published by E. Benn in London, 1926. There’s probably a Van Wyck family association and Savonarola is dedicated to a sister, Jessica. Somewhere in the literature of the Lost Generation his name should be recorded. I wish I’d asked Bill, but Van Wyck wasn’t on my radar then.

It may be that Google’s spiders, in their relentless march through the world’s web sites, will browse this one and eventually put me in touch with a Van Wyck scholar. But I love a mystery. And I can wait.

“I’ll never be like this again. I’ll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea. I’ve been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back.”

[Tiffany vanquishes the evil Queen, in Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett]

61 DEGREES NORTH

Only once I went as far north as I could
and saw the Yukon stampeding north all night
like a green freight train. Too long.
No sunsets came, and every time
I looked out, that damn river was still there.
 
I don’t want many things to last forever,
or to live without sunsets going up
like shouts of gold. I think I know
why prospectors went dumb or crazy. Those days
were as near eternity as I want to come.
 
©2009 William Bridges

By BILL BRIDGES
Indianapolis Star Correspondent
 
WHITEHORSE, Yukon, Aug. 3, 1986—Whitehorse may seem an unlikely place for Hoosiers to vacation, but consider:

A modern, friendly city of 17,000 which is also the capital of Canada’s huge Yukon Territory; shirt-sleeve or light-jacket summer weather; no air pollution; beautiful scenery, and good motels, dining, and shopping with the favorable Canadian exchange rate and no sales tax.

 And the days right now are nearly 19 hours long so you’ve got plenty of time to enjoy everything.

Whitehorse International Airport is a 2½-hour flight on Canadian Pacific from Vancouver and Expo 86, as well as the gateway to far northern Canada and Alaska.

The first tourists had it tougher. Those heading for the Klondike gold fields in 1898 had to pack in 1,000 pounds of supplies over the Chilikoot Pass from Skagway, Alaska, and then sail north down the Yukon River some 400 miles to Dawson.

The area still breathes the history of the pell-mell rush for gold, and it’s a good idea to read up on it before you go. (You can still drift down the Yukon to Dawson, but notify the Mounties first.)

Whitehorse is a little like Franklin or Shelbyville with mountains. [Are you paying attention, Steve Polston?] The Yukon—surely one of the world’s greenest, coldest, fastest rivers—sweeps past the downtown and past a main tourist attraction, the beached river steamer Klondike, which now is a Canadian national memorial.

The steamer has been well restored and is worth a tour. Atlas Tours runs a 2½-hour city excursion, which includes the Klondike, a dam with one of the world’s longest wooden fish ladders, and a look at Miles Canyon where some of the boats of the early gold seekers came to grief.

The tour also takes you past Yukon College and the suburb of Riverdale where the beautiful lawns are sod imported from Alaka’s Matanuska Valley.

There are plenty of hotels. The Sheffield—part of a chain which serves the main northern tour stops—is the biggest and fanciest. Its dining room is good and has an enormous salad bar. If you want to dine more quietly and possibly better, try the prime rib at the Cellar in the Edgewater Hotel (for $14 Canadian or about $11 U.S.).

For great cinnamon rolls, the Talisman Café on Second Street is the place.

Main Street, running down to the old White Pass and Yukon Railway depot, is broad and attractive and has some good shops. Books on Main is best for books about the North but Mac’s Firewood has a lot also and is open on Sunday mornings.

The Yukon Gallery in the Sheffield Block has a good selection of art, but for Inuit Eskimo items go to Northern Images, 311 Jarvis Street.

Whitehorse is not a lot to look at architecturally except for the beautifully done territorial government buildings, which contrive to make metal siding looks like classic barnwood. There’s a nice display of art in the lobby and you can get lunch and 25-cent coffee in the cafeteria.

Evening entertainment is a bit limited, but since the sun doesn’t set until after 11 p.m. that’s not too much of a problem.

The Frantic Follies in the Sheffield block is an entertainly corny production based (very loosely) on the Gold Rush era. On a recent evening, the cast had great fun teasing a woman from Rushville, Indiana. To Yukoners, we’re the people from a remote area.

Many of the tourists in Whitehorse come up the Pacific coast to Skagway by tour boat from Seattle or Vancouver, and then take a bus over the White Pass to Whitehorse. Some go on to Dawson on the Alaska Highway (an excellent two-lane road).

Some then complete the “loop tour” to Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska. Hardier souls can go north on the Dempster Highway to Inuvik on the Arctic Ocean or fly to even more isolated parts of Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Tourism has been a little slow this summer, and Whitehorse hopes the Yukon Pavilion at Expo will stimulate it. Otherwise, one hotel owner said with a laugh, “it’ll be a hard winter. Back to moosemeat, I guess.”

The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) enjoys a reputation on several levels.

Among poets and other writers, he is regarded as a superb artist. On the popular literary scene, he is known for a few poems, notably “Candles” and “Ithaca,” which was said to have been the favorite poem of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: “Ithaca has given you the lovely journey.” In the gay literary community, I imagine he is revered for his poems about his life in the louche quarters of Alexandria, his home.

Cavafy, who wrote in modern, demotic Greek, often about antique times, poses some problems for translators. But a certain tone of voice—wry, world-weary—comes through, as in these last lines from “Ithaca,” translated by Rae Dalven:

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.
 
Whatever the episodes of his nighttime life in Alexandria, Cavafy was a serious professional and a diligent public servant in the Third Circle of the Irrigation Office. Robert Liddell has written a fine account of a life without a great deal of outward event.

 But the best description of Cavafy, and the excuse for this quick sketch, is by E.M. Forster, who portrayed him thus:

 “ . . . a Greek gentleman in a straw hit, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly. “Oh, Cavafy . . . !” Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated and yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, and yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexsius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibility and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or with George Eliot, of the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.”

DAYBREAK

In earliest morning
two branches twist
in a black wreath
against blue light.
The pattern is almost tangible,
like the corner
of an antique tablecloth,
a dark reverse of lace,
or the bosses of a rich seal
signifying day.
 

©2009 William Bridges

For a time, in the fall and early winter of 2006, I was driving a 38-mile round trip three days a week to the pulmonary lab of St. Francis Hospital in Beech Grove, Indiana.  I had been referred there by Dr. Michael Busk for “pulmonary rehabilitation,” and it was a comforting routine—so much so that I was disappointed one day when Bev, the lab’s director, called to say that my late-afternoon session was being cancelled because too many of the staff were sick.

 For most of my time, there were no other patients in the late lab. About 2 p.m., on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I put on my gym shoes and threw a Taipei shopping bag into the car with an apple, bottled water, a cell phone, and taped music—Patsy Cline, Newfoundland folks songs, Cole Porter. Then I headed north to the Indianapolis suburb where the lab was located. Arriving at the hospital (old, slightly shabby), I parked in the lot for pulmonary/cardiac patients and walked to the basement lab, through a drab cement patio with a few cigarette butts under the tables. These were not from patients or the pulmonary staff, the lab workers emphasized.

 Rehab was a scheduled 10 weeks, with two opening class sessions, followed on each ensuing day by 90 minutes of exercise. This took place in a narrow room with a desk at one end, a warm-up area at the other, and exercise equipment in between.  I shared the class sessions with Ray, a retired plumber trying to kick a 50-year cigarette habit, and Ralph, who looked and talked like an old farmer but was really a retired office-supply salesman. Between them, they took an astonishing array of breathing medicines. After the first week, they went off to other sessions; except for one brief glimpse of Ralph, I never saw them again.  I did my warm-ups and cool-downs, my treadmill and exercise-bike time, alone until almost the end, attended by a shifting cadre of therapists who took careful heart-rate and blood-pressure readings and listened to my chest. It was as routine as an Army morning formation.

I didn’t know for sure why I was there. It seemed at first as if I might not get in. Ann, the “intake” therapist, had trouble deciding, even with my help, what my goals should be (a requirement for Medicare reimbursement). When I did a six-minute walk up and down the lab corridor, she shook her head. “We don’t usually see figures this good,” she said. But I had been referred by a respected physician, and she eventually wrote down “undiagnosed asthma” and admitted me.

 Near the end of my lab time, I asked Patti—the cheery therapist at my family doctor’s—to explain just what rehab was supposed to do. She said it was educational and that the exercise would build me up. But it’s also socialization, she added. “Some patients never see anything but their own four walls. Going to rehab gets them out and improves their lives.” When I passed this comment on to Ann at the lab, she said, “And here you are, all by yourself!”

 The lab workers had their own routines. Mary, a gifted and empathetic teacher who referred to the lab as “the service,” gave lectures on lung function, exercise, diet, and “the main event”—how to have sexual intercourse, even if tethered to an oxygen tank. Karen, the pharmacist, talked about medicines and gave us her phone number in case we had questions. Ann and the other therapists had their routines of checking vital signs and charting patients’ progress toward their goals. Much paperwork was filled out.

 And behind all this, unnoticed except by those paying attention, were the routines of the lab itself—the filling of shifts, decisions on which patients were ready to leave the program, and occasionally office politics. “We’re all going to be out of jobs!” Mary exclaimed one day, about some unspecified internal crisis. There were also seasonal routines, and jokes. At Halloween, a hospital employee came through with his son in costume, passing out candy. Thanksgiving came and went. “What did the hen say to the scrambled eggs?” Mary asked us. “You crazy, mixed-up kids.”

 I progressed and began moving toward a home-exercise regimen, the main purpose of rehab, the therapists explained. I started walking through my neighborhood, and also did some short uphill runs that boosted my heart rate to an athletic 140. I had been a runner once—it was exhilarating to try it again at 71, and I loved the feeling of flying over the ground. But Mary was unhappy. “It’s too hard on your knees,” she said, and reluctantly I had to agree. It was about this time that Bev called to cancel the session because of staff illness. “That’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll keep exercising at home.” “But don’t run,” she ordered. How did she know I’d been running? At the next session I told Mary and Dana, another therapist, that I’d figured something out: “You people talk to each other. I’ll bet you even have staff meetings to discuss the patients.” “Right,” Dana said. “It’s called communication!”

 Although patients were encouraged to talk about their own routines, it was more unusual for lab personnel to do so. Being a writer I asked questions—from how they spelled their names to what was going on in their lives outside the lab. And they were not unwilling to talk. Jean, I discovered, lived in the same town I did and served on a civic beautification committee with a good friend. She was well into a second marriage. The first husband, she said, “worked too hard and never read anything.” Mary had wide interests in nutrition and in slightly new-age health care—and in walking, if not running. “You know, the bottom of your foot is called the sole,” she said, with a laugh at her own dubious etymology. Ann found out I liked Patsy Cline, and brought in some tickets she couldn’t use for a performance by a Cline impersonator. Dana, the mother of three sons, told me she volunteered “at the Boys School.” Mishearing, I said, “You work with delinquents?” “No!” she said, cracking up. “I meant at my boys’ school. But maybe you’re not so far wrong.”

 Friendly people, professionals, doing their routines with patients.

 “What are your readings now?” with a gesture toward wall charts showing levels of dyspnea (breathlessness), exertion, and pain, the last calibrated from “none” to “the worst pain possible.”

“No, don’t start the six-pound weights today. We’d have to kick you out of the program.”

 “I’m hearing rales in your chest. Better take your Albuterol [a fast bronchodilator] before we start.”

 Routines.

 I had routines of my own that had nothing to do with the lab. Knowing exactly where I would be at 3 p.m. three days a week, I organized the rest of my life around these times. I drove back from St. Louis for a Monday session. Working one week in Orlando, I went to the hotel spa at the appointed hour.

 Back home, I worked out my route to the lab. The way to it was partly familiar, partly strange. I had known the road north to Greenwood since college days, when it lay among now-vanished farms—a friend and I once took an hour to travel it in a car with a cracked block and no water in the radiator. From Greenwood a bypass led to Emerson Avenue, which I knew as far as St. Francis Hospital South; my wife, Karen, was having minor surgery there just as I was starting rehab. But from that hospital to St. Francis North in Beech Grove, my knowledge was spotty.

So I made maps. From Greenwood to County Line Road was an area of old and new business—South Park and Emerson Pointe. St. Francis South was at Stop 11 Road, where the Interurban had halted until it went out of business for good in 1940. There were mysteries, like the rusted water tower with a single word, PIPE, painted on its reservoir. From there, Emerson curved up and over Interstate 65, descending into a confusing intersection with Southport Road, and then into a woodsy stretch as far as Edgewood Avenue. (Who lived in the neat white farmhouse at the corner of Edgewood?) Todd Road led off to the Smock Golf Course, which I had never visited but where, I knew, there was a martin house that Karen and I had donated to a bird-loving golfer friend. So much history, so many routines.

As I approached Beech Grove, the going got steadily more urban (although with such touches as a Japanese cherry tree, its fruit glistening in the autumn rain). In Beech Grove itself, Emerson Avenue was being reconstructed. When I began driving to the lab in October, I followed temporary lanes and corridors of cones—when I finished in December the new highway was done and the workers had gone on to other jobs. Living in Taipei, I once walked the same street to work for a year, attuned to its rhythms of traffic and change. Now I was doing it again.

 Near the end of rehab, Karen and I drove north one day, looking for a Christmas tree. We turned off Interstate 65 at Southport and a minute later were in the Southport Road/Emerson interchange that I was seeing every other day from a different direction. “Oh, I know this place!” I exclaimed, pointing out landmarks to Karen like a native guide exhibiting his expertise to a tourist.

Over the weeks in the lab, I never reached the first pain threshold, or got beyond the lowest level or two of exertion and dyspnea. But I did advance several levels in treadmill walking, biking, and weight-lifting, and established a daily home-exercise schedule.   

On a Wednesday, eight weeks into rehab, Ann approached me as I trudged on the treadmill. “I have some news for you that you may not like,” she said. “You’re kicking me out?” I asked. “You saw this coming, didn’t you?” she replied. “But yes, you’ve met your goals. The patient-review committee got together yesterday and decided we can’t keep you any longer. We prefer to call it graduation.”

 The next day I came in for a final evaluation, doing the six-minute hallway walk again—300 feet further this time. My systolic blood pressure zoomed from 130 to 180, but the diastolic “resting” pressure stayed at 80, right where it was supposed to be. I came back one more day for an exercise session with Mary, during which a fire alarm went off. We stayed in the lab (steam had escaped from a compressor), but Mary checked it out on the phone with her boss. “There are firemen in the hall with hats and everything,” she said.

 The firemen left, and Mary and I—alone at last—finished the exercises. As I did my cool-down routine, I heard her rummaging in a filing cabinet behind me for a graduation certificate. And then I heard the scratchy sound of “Pomp and Circumstance,” on a tape recorder.

 “You’ve been a good patient,” Mary said. “We’ll miss you.” And with that we both went off to our own lives and other routines.

Georg Eberhard Rumphius is not a name likely to be fresh in most people’s memories. This will be the briefest of sketches, mostly to remind myself not to forget about him. It draws upon a note I wrote in August, 2008, to my son Karl, asking him to do a little research. (This is not an uncommon request, since he is a librarian, and I firmly believe that all librarians get up each morning in the hope that they will receive an inquiry from me that day—why else bother to get up?) I wrote, with some abridging and editing:

“What I need is a little research on Georg Eberhard Rumphius (or Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, 1627-1702, the “blind seer of Ambon,” as he’s sometimes styled). I’ll send along the titles of a couple of articles. The main one may or may not be titled, “The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet,” but I know that it’s by Tim Flannery, in the 12/16/1999 New York Review of Books. 

“So what’s this all about? It goes back to 1999 when Flannery wrote his review of Rumphius’s masterwork (that’s the Curiosity Cabinet), which was the fruit of a lifetime of scholarly labor on the island of Ambon in the Dutch East Indies. In 1999 it had just been printed in English for the first time, in a lavish edition selling for about $250. I was so captivated with Rumphius’s story that I talked Ron Schuetz [the Franklin College librarian] into ordering a copy of the Cabinet, so I would have easy access to it.  Presumably it’s still in the library, unless some sub-sub put it out on the 10-cent table.

“The story behind it is an astonishing one of scholarly persistence. Rumphius went to the Far East as an agent for the Dutch East Indies Company, but there wasn’t a lot to do on Ambon (now the Indonesian island of Amboina) except natural history. There was a lot of that, though, and Rumphius got busy with observations and drawings of flora and sea life.

“Then about the time he was done, the MS was destroyed in a fire. Then he went blind from glaucoma, but kept on working with the help of his wife and assistant. Eventually the rewriteen manuscript went off for publication in Holland.

“This time the ship was sunk by French privateers and the MS lost. But Rumphius had learned his lesson and had made a copy. Eventually this did reach Amsterdam, but for some arcane geopolitical reason the government wouldn’t allow it to be printed. In fact it didn’t get into print for about half a century after Rumphius’s death.

“Had I world enough and time, I’d write a biography of Rumphius. His book is magnificent, but there may not be enough personal information about him to sustain a ‘life.’ In fact the Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet may be most of what remains of this toiler in the uttermost parts of the sea.”