Sometimes life is too much with us, and politics are too late and too soon, and your fingers are too cold to type. But sometimes reading a wonderful sentence can cheer you up for a whole day. Sentences are a gift, and for these two I am grateful to Gideon Lewis-Kraus.
They can be found in a Times Magazine article about archeologists finding bones on a island of Vanuatu, and how their discovery and interpretation caused a ruckus in the anthropological world. That was all interesting, but the best parts, for me, were these two sentences:
“A meaningful national identity [of Vanuatu] has been constructed from a common appreciation of ceremonial pig-tusk bracelets and the taking of kava, a very mild narcotic root that looks like primordial pea soup and tastes like a fine astringent dirt.”
“Kava is a cloudy green tonic, served in little miso bowls meant to resemble coconut shells. The custom is to collect your shell, retire to the corner of a nearby shadow, take the entirety at one draft and then spit the particulate remnants; by nightfall, when even the city is blanketed in thick dark, the only regular sounds are the screech of the fruit bats and the hock of spit.”
Pictures from Wikipedia.
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