Sedulia's Quotations

Abley: Humboldt hears Atures language's last speaker, a parrot

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt arrived in South America....Humboldt and his companion... would spend five years exploring....Having spent a few months in the coastal lowlands around the small city of Caracas, the two men ventured by foot, mule, and canoe into the vast interior. Before Humboldt, no European or North American had realized what an incredible diversity of animal and plant life flourished in the tropics. In what would soon become Venezuela, Humboldt found pristine forests, broken occasionally by Indian settlements....

Only forty-seven Indians were left at the village of Atures when Humboldt... arrived there....San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures, to give the place its full title, had been built in 1748, taking the last of its names from the Indian people of the region. Barely half a century later, the Atures had disappeared. Humboldt found that the families living in the wretched settlement spoke languages called Guahibo and Maco. According to a Guahibo tradition, the Atures, hunted by yet another people, ... had fled to an island in the Orinoco. There they died out....

In the village of Maypures, Humboldt was delighted to see ... "tame macaws around the huts of the Indians, and flying to the fields like our pigeons...These macaws, whose plumage glows with vivid tints of purple, blue and yellow, are a great ornament to the Indian farmyards"....

Amid the shadows of the huts in Maypures, Humboldt was shown a talking parrot. It too was a trophy of sorts....It was an old bird, a feathered survivor. But the local people insisted that "they could not understand what it said." When Humboldt asked why, he was told that the parrot "spoke the language of the Atures"....The Atures language had died out among humans. It was last heard coming from a bird's beak.

    --Mark Abley (1955-) in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2005). 

It is not certain that the Atures people had died out. This 1991 book says that the Piaroa Indians "have historically been called the Atures people." In 2000, American artist Rachel Berwick exhibited two parrots she had taught to speak from Humboldt's description of the now-extinct Maypure tongue.

Chris Kraul reports from Venezuela: Corpse takes ride on motorcycle

On a recent day, the cemetery was the scene of a macabre ritual that has become a regular occurrence whenever a young gang member is buried, Gonzalez said. It provided another example of the lawlessness here.

During the funeral procession for a 25-year-old gunshot victim, friends suddenly halted the cortege and removed the corpse from the coffin to give it one last joy ride around the cemetery on the back of a buddy's motorcycle.

   --From an article by Chris Kraul in the Los Angeles Times (6 September 2007), on graverobbing (the bones are sold for voodoo rituals), among other problems at a city cemetery in Caracas, Venezuela.

Quetzalcoatl: Learn to think for a long time how to change the world

Learn to think for a long time how to change the world.

       --Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god. Quoted by Mary Pipher (1947-), Writing to Change the World  (2006)

Alfonso Cuarón on films that begin when the lights come on

A friend of mine told me once that he stopped believing in the films that finish when the lights come on, and that he only cared for the films that begin when the lights come on.

  --Alfonso Cuarón, director of the film Children of Men, about the last pregnant woman on earth

Octavio Paz on American vs Mexican realism

I had a heard a good deal of talk about American realism and also of their ingenuousness, qualities that would seem to be mutually exclusive. To us a realist is always a pessimist.

  --Octavio Paz (1914-1998) in The Labyrinth of Solitude

Jorge Luís Borges: The library of Babel

I have traveled through the cities of Europe, I have forgotten thousands of pages, thousands of unsubstitutable human faces, but I keep thinking that, essentially, I have never left that library and that garden.

--From The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luís Borges (1899-1986)

He recorrido las ciudades de Europa, he olvidada miles de páginas, miles de insustuibles caras humanas, pero suelo pensar que, esencialmente, nunca he salido de esa biblioteca y de ese jardín.