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Nick Jaffe’s Followers (9)
Nick Jaffe
Goodreads Author
Born
Australia
Website
Twitter
Genre
Member Since
January 2020
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The Years Thunder By: A voyage across two oceans and a continent
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
“Cormorant was my way of trying to know the world as it was before – a wilder place, where magic showed itself in weather and animal encounters”
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
“A culmination of various impulses – for time alone, for wilderness surfing, and for something I thought of as “full nature immersion” – the expedition before me also represented a living experiment. I had the notion that traveling in an ancient mode, removed from the ceaseless roar and electronic thrum of contemporary life, I could connect to the most basic aspect of my nature. Not so much my nature as an individual, but my nature as a member of our species shaped by longstanding, elemental human practices and by the elements themselves. I”
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
“I imagined being on watch onboard a frigate, wearing a woolen pea coat and drinking coffee from a tin mug. I thought that it was something Hemingway would do, or that I was like Jack Kerouac in the merchant marine in Lonesome Traveler.”
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
“Another admission: I am romantic, I dream-up radically impractical journeys just to try and feel or to intuit something from a past that may well have never existed – or not in the way I imagine it. Combined with this I have a tendency towards depressive states. My episodes have never been so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed and face the day, but after my time at the lighthouse and losing the woman whom I thought I loved so much, and drinking to bad effect every night, I felt a shift come on that scared me.”
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
“set a pot of water to boil on the camp stove and walked out to the farthest point under the cliffs. I dug a pit and thought of the latrine back at the San Carlos camp – flies in there, flies in the kitchen. I washed my hands, first in the sea, then rigorously with soap and fresh water back at my camp. This is what it takes, I thought, to get some solitude. You travel days and days down a desert coastline and sail off by yourself. I saw not a soul, nor evidence of anybody besides the weirdly placed panga on the cliff top. And for all this effort I felt not free exactly, but at least not put-upon. There was no conversation to make, just an enveloping silence with the crash and roll of small waves to break the feeling of looking at a giant photograph. I was finally outside of the day-to-day, and perhaps outside of myself for a moment as well.”
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
― The Voyage of the Cormorant
