V2nd - Chapter 9 - a sentence that would not fit on Twitter

[Michael Bailey]

p296-8: If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again,
he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of
picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best
furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the
comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for
character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so imcomparably
African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between
Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black
corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain,
for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to
substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless
hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his
retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a
world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming
reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen
years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design
whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year
after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach
between Luederitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each
morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no
more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow
sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that
choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of
low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with
the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of
track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable
iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally,
humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments
he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Suedwest-afrika's (actually
he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's
contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced
to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular
Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies,
enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a
beach alien as the moon's antarctic; restless concubines in barbed
wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would
never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of
rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns;
the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary
cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

-- 
- "Only thing that makes life a gain
is a southbound ticket on a southbound train"
- (what I have heard every time till I looked it up today)

Well, the only thing that makes me laugh again
Is a southbound whistle on a southbound train - Bob Dylan, "Freight Train Blues"