Status Updates From En la Patagonia

In the 1860s W.H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home[...]. Years later he [...] wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter in Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin's question, and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primeval calmness which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.

I said as much to a friend.
"Lots of people say that," he said. "Last year an old White émigrée came to our place in the country. She got terrifically excited and asked to see every room. We went up to the attics and she said: 'Ah! I knew it! The smell of my childhood!'"
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》patagonia as the dustbin of history, the place where every lost exile ends up.

The city kept reminding me of Russia - the cars of the secret police bristling with aerials; women with splayed haunches licking ice-cream in dusty parks; the same bullying statues, the pie-crust architecture, the same avenues that were not quite straight, giving the illusion of endless space and leading out into nowhere. Tsarist rather than Soviet Russia.

At lunch we sat under a painting of one of General Rosa's gauchos, by Raymond Monvoisin, a follower of Delacroix. He lay swathed in a blood-red poncho, a male odalisque, cat-like and passively erotic.
"Trust a Frenchman," I thought, "to see through all the cant about the gaucho."

Also reading this as space western research. I'm collecting words and experiences.