Midnight in Sicily
Calm. I like that word. I liked all the words in 'Midnight in Sicily' passage as well. It was as if Robb bottled some shallows of the ocean, took them home, poured them onto paper and let it dry into words. Reading it was like bobbing in the waves. On the surface you see all the thousands of frantic ripples racing against each other, a chaos of miniature troughs and peaks, but all the while your body's floating slowly under the surface, rising and falling to the rhythm of the currents. The letters in Robb's piece are rippling with the wonderfully entertaining Letizia and yet underneath, is the slow peaceful rhythm of history, the history of Sicily. The rhythm of time is a nice one. Nice and calm. Take every short sentence in the passage, imagine them as the ripples on the surface. Take the first long sentences in the second paragraph, imagine it as a wave, and finally take the forth paragraph as a dive under the surface. There, a complete summary of the passage. I suppose I should try and explain this a little more, just incase there was a trace of ambiguity left in my translation. There will be no escaping my ocean metaphor though. Whether or not it was Robb's intention, the nautical flow of the text almost left your fingers
to rhythm of the currents, silently humming out from old, peeling walls with elderly, green creepers, from the sea-salt ridden wood, from the worn pebbles lying dead on the roads. If you listened to these currents, you would hear that before it was 'dog*censored*' it was horse manurer from travelling sales wagons, that before it was horse manurer it human waste from primitive sewage systems, that before it was 'syringes' it was opium pipes imported from Great Britain.That these struggles and anxieties of yours, were here before you and they'll be here after you. "May as well relax a little before I get back to them.", thought Letizia's workers and those before them. Welcome again to my Veg-O-Matic ocean metaphor- it slices! it dices!......ah yes, back to my commentary. In the second paragraph when Robb describes Letizia's intervention team, a wave comes rolling through. It's a beautifully powerful wave, for it only takes one sentence to pull you up the face, over the lip, and drop you down its back. Just as we were being overwhelmed by Letizia's ripples, there appears a group of old, blue overall workers "leaning on rakes and sitting on park benches, smoking or muttering or staring into space". What?......How can these people be relaxing, lazing around when there's so much to do! Rubbish to clean, parks to build, places to
Some common words found in the essay are:
, Below Letizia's, Tyrrhenian Seas, Welcome Veg-O-Matic, Homer Goethe, I'm Robb, Homer Robb, rhythm currents, rising falling rhythm, surface rising falling, slowly surface rising, dive surface, intervention team, horse manurer, bobbing waves, ripples surface, frantic ripples, rising falling, falling rhythm, history sicily,
Approximate Word count = 898
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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