Nehaveigur

I have never seen a movie by Werner Herzog’s but after reading his memoir I will have to. Here are some of his insights:

We weren’t backpackers who carry practically an entire household on their backs in the form of a tent, a sleeping bag, and cooking equipment; we walked long distances almost without baggage. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot […] Our way of walking, Bruce [Chatwin]’s and mine, forces us to seek shelter, to throw ourselves at the mercy of strangers because of our utter defenselessness. I can’t remember he or I ever being turned away because there is a profound, almost holy, reflex of hospitality that only seemingly obliterated in our civilization.

On walking: Again and again (and again), the significance of the world is derived from tiny details never otherwise noted; this is the stuff from which the world may replenish itself. At the end of a day of walking, the wealth of a single day is past counting. When you walk, there is nothing between the lines; everything is in the most immediate and rabid presence: the fences, the meadows, the birds not yet fledged, the smell of newly chopped wood, the puzzlement of the deer.

This is remarkably similar to what Chris Arnade says.

On the transience of languages and how even simple images may not be universally intelligible, something that anyone making something like the Pioneer plaques should take into account.

I have visited a temporary holding pen for nuclear materials in New Mexico, where radioactive barrels are stored in vast salt mines […] How do we warn future generations not to enter the mine? In the space of a few thousand years, no one will speak or understand our languages in their present form. It’s even possible that all our languages will be gone […] As long ago as my 1969 film, The Flying Doctors of East Africa, in a sequence on a campaign of preventative medicine in Uganda, I showed how the inhabitants of a remote village were perplexed by the posters that were used. They had neither newspapers nor books nor television. Grown curious, I asked what they saw on the public health poster of an oversize eye, and the answers varied from a rising sun to a big fish even though the previous image had been used to demonstrate how to protect the eye from infection.

Finally, there’s this story:

The parrots from Alexander von Humboldt’s 1802 journey up the Orinoco, where he came to a village, all of whose inhabitants had been killed off by the plague. Their language had died with them, but the neighboring village had for the past forty years continued to look after their parrot. This parrot still spoke sixty distinct words of the inhabitants of the dead village, their dead language. Humboldt copied them down in his notebook.