Diorama – Carol Bensimon

Mesmerized by the majesty of those beasts, Mickie Akeley faltered several times before finally shooting her first elephant. OceanofPDF.com When i was nine years old, i was painfully jealous of a guy named Gerald Durrell, who I called Geraldo. It wasn’t just because he’d written A Practical Guide for the Amateur Naturalist, my favorite book as a child, but because on page 8 there was this black-and-white photo of him at age ten, holding a stump with both hands, an owl sitting on top. The owl’s face was the strangest I’d ever seen.

In the photo, Geraldo looked proud (Check out my owl!), and the fact that they were both facing the camera, bodies turned sideways, created a strange symbiosis between boy and bird. By then, I’d seen a few burrowing owls perched on fences around São Gabriel after sunset, but never close enough for it to be called an encounter. Whenever I tried to get closer, they flew away. That wasn’t the only reason I envied Geraldo. Before he began traveling the world as an adult, he’d had a childhood bedroom that was part zoo, part museum where he kept aquariums full of seahorses, crabs, frogs, a collection of butterflies, beetles, jars, tweezers, lenses, test tubes, and his first killing jar (a device used to kill insects quickly and with minimal damage).

As for me, I didn’t have access to the glorious animals I saw in the pages of his book, but I made do with the unpopular ones. I think that a true naturalist must view everything objectively, wrote grown-up Geraldo in the opening chapters. No creature is horrible. They are all part of nature. I underlined this passage on June 9, 1988, sitting on the Persian rug in the living room, unsure what exactly objectively meant, but feeling like those were important words for any future naturalist.

The house was eerily silent. My father had disappeared into the small storage room near the barbecue area, at the back of the property.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillan.com/piracy. OceanofPDF.com diorama (noun) b. A small-scale representation of a scene, etc., in which three-dimensional figures or objects are displayed in front of a painted background, the whole often being contained in a cabinet and viewed through a window or aperture in the front; hence, any small-scale model of a scene, building-project, or the like.

(Oxford English Dictionary) OceanofPDF.com Whenever we came home afterwards, I had to read aloud from your favorite book about the changing seasons, said Vera, even though you knew it by heart from the first line to the last, and she added that I never tired of the winter pictures in particular, scenes showing hares, deer, and partridges transfixed with astonishment as they stared at the ground covered with newly fallen snow, and Vera said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard?

Ale když všechno zakryje sníh, jak veverky najdou to místo, kde si schovaly zásoby? Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end? —W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (translated by Anthea Bell) All that remains of The Iliad is a catalog of ships. —Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale) OceanofPDF.com SKUNK BONE OceanofPDF.com In 1857 an english parson published a book about all the things you can find along the shore, and thousands of people started hunting for seashells: whelks, scallops, spiraled conchs, and clams that looked like razors.

They scrubbed and polished those empty houses until they were shiny like porcelain.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 226
• Language: English (en)

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