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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When the birds stopped in spring to build nests, people would feast on eggs, wearing cruel and satisfied smiles on their faces.
The tonality of the Wayo Wayoan language was sharp and sonorous, like birdsong, with each utterance ending in a light trill and a plop, like a hungry seabird that swiftly dives and breaks the waves in search of prey.
Linguistics
Sometimes Alice wished she still felt lust; as anyone who has once been young will know, desire is the best antidepressant in the world, dulling the force of memory and keeping a person in the present.
The islanders did not have writing, nor did they think that the world had to be remembered in written form. They thought that life was a kind of resonance between story and song, and that was good enough for them.
Creatures that died from eating bits of the island eventually became part of the island. Atile’i thought he too might end up becoming part of the island. So this is what hell was like, he thought. So this is the land of death.
Hades
Sometimes she’d be on the last line and make a mistake and have to crumple up the page and start over. But Alice liked this feeling: the characters had to settle in her mind a bit longer before they could take shape on the paper, stroke by stroke, like stalks of grass rustling out of the ground until she cut them down with the mower and waited for them to grow again.
About a dozen years before, people had started promoting “green living” or “slow living,” and so forth, but this was just the latest fad. The people of this island basically pursued whatever was popular, not because it was significant but because it was “the latest.” Saying “this is the latest” to Taiwanese people was like casting a spell on them, or like playing the melody of a magic flute that made whosoever heard it follow along.
It was the day before the big race and without realizing he steered his craft into the “North Pacific Gyre.”
No, the race was over, he was headed back to LA
one senior reporter fond of gesticulating on camera like she was playing mah-jong had somehow failed to make it back to the five-star hotel the night before. Still in the same outfit, she was stunned by a piece of hail the moment she stepped out of the tent and was immediately rushed to hospital. The incident later became tabloid fodder. Once squawky, she reportedly became unusually quiet, soft-spoken and lucid after the incident, and was soon relieved of her regular duties.
Many thought the wave explained why they did not seem to remember hearing anything during the hailstorm: though its source was near, the sound of the hail was nothing compared to the sonic force augured by the wave. That wave spoke with a cosmic voice, as if the risen moon had been silently storing up sound ever since time began and now let it out, all at once, in one great burst.
Atile’i tried to say a few words to her in reply, but she did not understand, either. Then, out of gratitude, he started to imitate the birdcall he had learned while lying there just now to take his mind off the pain. Atile’i pursed his lips and let air through his lips and throat to produce a sound that was at times resonant, at times warbling. This was the sound of thanksgiving. The woman looked at Atile’i with surprise, as if she had seen a bird that could speak a human tongue.
“A sound can fly over any land, like a wave on any sea,” Atile’i remembered the Sea Sage saying. Without a doubt, the Sea Sage was truly wise.
“There are only two kinds of people who would loan money to Anu: angels and fools,” Dahu said.
I don’t think it really matters if she understands me or not, because to Wayo Wayo islanders words can be smelled, touched, imagined and closely followed with your gut the way you follow an enormous fish.
Linguistics
Elders say that the first Sea Sage created the language of Wayo Wayo by imitating the sounds of seabirds. They say he could describe over a thousand kinds of waves, from finely pleated ripples to intermittent swells, from breakers smooth as blubber to surf like sparkling foam, from windblown rollers to impromptu undercurrents that flow when schools of fish swim past, and from wavelets born of the shallows to benthic volcanic tsunamis. Since the waves come in as many shapes and sizes as there are kinds of fish, and since seabird calls are beyond the ear of the common man, the difficulty of the
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A language that one group of people uses to communicate thoughts and intents sounds to another group like the calls of a screech owl or a muntjac. If we really tried learning birdsong the way we learn French or Russian, taking, say, two classes a day and keeping it up, would we eventually be able to talk with the birds? The very notion makes me all the more determined to learn the language of Wayo Wayo.
Communication proceeded slowly. They had to go back to square one to relearn how to refer to everything. There were new things, and new names for old things. It was difficult for both Alice and Atile’i. But Alice realized that there can gradually be dialogue, even between languages that are quite far apart. Sometimes one doesn’t have to use language as it’s commonly defined. For instance, Atile’i would use his speaking flute to help him express himself or his emotions when Alice didn’t understand what he meant. Atile’i would play the flute with feeling and Alice would understand immediately.
Maybe it could be translated like this: No beach, no matter what the island, can hold the waves. This was a maxim and an admonition. It would undoubtedly also count as a truth, even under scientific examination. Waves could not stay on a beach. There was often a fine line between proverbial wisdom and stating the obvious, between a truth and a truism, Alice thought.
Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the wilful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, without the ecological memories other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which they live. People don’t realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive.
