Earthart e Markham

Por causa da Amelie Earthart que hoje há 75 anos iniciou o seu voo à volta do mundo ao longo do equador (e desapareceu misteriosamente) lembrei-me da Beryl Markham, outra pioneira da aviação.
Escreveu o West with the Night, apontamentos sobre o meio colonial que era o seu, os seus contactos com a população e a natureza quenianas, as aventuras da aviação e as tricas da sua sociedade.

Será que existe em português? Emprestaram-mo na Califórnia, e desde então tenho pena de não o ver na minha estante, à mão de semear para mais uns momentos de deleite. Quero voltar àquela noite em que ela, ainda miúda, se resolveu meter com um porco selvagem. Uma descrição deliciosa.

Só para verem do que ela era capaz, aqui vão alguns bocadinhos de fina literatura:

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.” 

 **

“All this, and discontent too! Otherwise, why am I sitting here dreaming of England? Why am I gazing at this campfire like a lost should seeking a hope when all that I love is at my wingtips? Because I am curious. Because I am incorrigibly, now, a wanderer.”  


**


“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”