The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [38]
Oh Ajit. How misplaced my pity had been for him that night, thinking that because he could not read, his education had been lesser than my own. That was his Camel College, the lesson of the desert that he had smiled about so enigmatically that night: that the desert brings to you exactly what you need to learn.
Seeing his face grinning at me in my memory, a little smile passed my lips. He had been the perfect tutor, instructing without effort, the embodiment of his life’s lesson. Smiling, I walked on through the street in the twilight, feeling in my heart like a man long gone from a place, being finally welcomed home.
Writer, photographer, and part-time metaphysician, Matthew Crompton has at various times called Cleveland, San Francisco, and Seoul home, though he’s most comfortable in a perpetually itinerant state. His travels have taken him through all the worst hotels on three continents, though he counts himself lucky to have caught giardia only once. His writings and photographs have been published in Asia, Australia, and the UK; it’s agreed that women, zoo animals, and most Marxists find him irresistible. Follow him at goingaroundplaces.wordpress.com.
GARY BUSLIK
Lanterns of Fear
It was a trip down memory lane—a dark path indeed.
FOR OUR HONEYMOON, MY WIFE AND I TOOK A CARIBBEAN cruise. I don’t remember much about it. It was a long time ago. I thought if the day ever came when I’d need to remember, all I’d have to do is pad over to our media room cabinet, pluck out a few slide trays, set up the old projector, and have a look-see. I thought my wife would want to put down her book, pop us some Orville Red., and join me down memory lane. I thought when the projector click-clacked and such-and-such picture dropped into place and blazed in Technicolor onto the dining room wall, she would reach over, clasp my hand, and coo, “Oh, I forgot about that! That was the day you bought me that ruby heart pendant. I forgot all about that!” And she would lean over and kiss me, just as she did that day in the St. Thomas jewelry store. That’s what I thought.
Undoubtedly, prehistoric showmen cast fire-shadow images on cave walls. But the known history of projectors began with sixteenth-century experiments in optics and lighting, at a time when the mystical and magical power of projected images—the Inquisition had burned Bruno at the stake for his devotion to imagistic magic—was giving way to scientific enlightenment.
The camera obscura, a device that with mirrors and lenses captured the images of external objects on a surface inside a dark box, so fascinated Renaissance Europeans that artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt included the wondrous invention in their paintings. From this obsession with capturing and casting reality came, in 1659, the “magic lantern,” the first projection device using both an artificial light source and a lens—and therefore the modern slide projector’s first direct ancestor.
The popularity of this invention spread around the world, resulting in its becoming, by the nineteenth century, a commercialized source of public and home entertainment—in the case of children, not always pleasant. The writer Marcel Proust, for example, recalled his childhood fear of the magic lantern slide shows his great-aunt projected on his bedroom wall: “It substituted for the opaqueness of my walls, an iridescence of many colors. But my sorrows only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room. Now I no longer recognized it and felt uneasy in it.”
In her autobiography, sociologist Harriet Martineau records a similar childhood reaction: “Such was the terror