So this language, with its echoes of nomads and emperors,
pashas and ghazis, sultans and riches, and country matters,
with its verbs of more than forty tenses, including the very useful
one for innuendo that I wish we had, its oblique politenesses, this
language with its own poetry of front- and back-rhyming vowels,
this old tongue that contains within it all the past of Anatolia,
is, for me, a shorthand.
The repetition of
this language and the recast as this old tongue embrace,
indeed contain and make more apparent, the cascade of with
its echoes, with its verbs, its oblique politenesses, and
with its own poetry.
Ulysses is
the description of a single day, the sixteenth of June 1904, a Thursday,
a day in the mingled and separate lives of a number of characters
walking, riding, sitting, talking, dreaming, drinking, and going
through a number of minor and major physiological and philosophical
actions during this one day in Dublin and the early morning hours
of the next day.
Whether naturalists or cowboys, whether bluegrass
aristocrats or racetrack touts, whether distinguished academics
or little girls gone horse-crazy, all readers with an interest in
these large, remarkable animals are bound to be fascinated by Budiansky's
knowledge, by his original thinking, by the authority with which
he says what many other scientists lack the wisdom or the courage
to say, and by the ferocity and tenderness of his voice.
He'd been just as deeply engaged by the challenge
of rocks, for instance-scouring quarries throughout the country
before settling on green chert from the California Gold Country
for the boulders at the head of the stream, Montana Kinnesaw for
the flanks of the watercourse, clean-cut slabs of Tennessee Blue
Ridge sandstone for the footpaths, and carnelian granite from South
Dakota for the staggered waterfall.
