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November 10, 2006
On Frankenstein and Krakatoa
Another interlude -
Ive been reading Simon Winchesters Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, prompted by a vague memory of the book The Twenty-One Balloons. Winchesters book has a great more geology than Id anticipated (but, alas for du Bois fans, no diamonds) - and it takes the book five chapters to get to the Boom.
(Note: 'Boom, sooner or later. BOOM' - Commander Ivanova, Babylon 5)
Second note: it was heard nearly 3,000 miles away (as contemporary science writer E. M. Aaron explained, this would be like hearing the noise of a Philadelphia explosion in San Francisco.) According to Winchester no technologically-produced sound in the 20th or 21st century has equalled it.
Winchesters book also brought to mind another flight of fancy, by direct mention:
It is said that Byron composed his most miserable poem, 'Darkness' - Morn came and went-and came and brought no day-under the influence of that dismal year [after the eruption]; and Mary Shelley may have written Frankenstein while gripped by a similarly unseasonable melancholy.p. 293 Krakatoa
You be the judge:
By the quantity of provision which I had consumed, I should guess that I had passed three weeks in this journey; and the continual protraction of hope, returning back upon the heart, often wrung bitter drops of despondency and grief from my eyes. Despair had indeed almost secured her prey, and I should soon have sunk beneath this misery. Once, after the poor animals that conveyed me had with incredible toil gained the summit of a sloping ice mountain, and one, sinking under his fatigue, died, I viewed the expanse before me with anguish....- from the last chapter of Frankenstein
(I though at first that the final, ice-bound section of the book referred to sunsets like the ones Krakatoa produced, but not so, only the mood of disaster and cold ...)
Spragues Browsing collection has all the books mentioned, except for The Twenty-One Balloons - for that youll have to go to Honnolds Special Aviation collection. (Honest! :D Check it in Blais.)
Yours,
LV
Posted by lisav at November 10, 2006 01:07 AM