ago that was, no one can tell you for certain. The jungle devours its bones. It quietly swallows up sacred manuscripts as it gnaws on the more stubborn stones of the temple. Textiles, woven baskets, painted pots, and even ornaments of hammered gold ultimately dissolve on its tongue.
But the small-bodied, dark-skinned peoples have been there for many centuries, that is beyond question, forming their friable little villages of palm-frond huts and smoky cooking fires, and hunting the abundant and lethal game with their crude spears and their deadly poison-tipped darts. In some places they make their orderly little farms as they have always done, to grow thick yams, or lush green avocados, red peppers, and corn. Lots of sweet, tender yellow corn. Little hens peck at the dust outside the small carefully constructed houses. Fat, glossy pigs snuffle and snuggle in their pens.
Are these humans the best thing in this Savage Garden, warring as they have done so long upon one another Or are they simply an undifferentiated part of it, no more complex ultimately than the crawling centipede or the slinky satin-skinned jaguar or the silent big-eyed frog so very toxic that one touch of his spotted back brings certain death
What have the many towers of great Caracas to do with this endless sprawling world that comes so close to it Whence came this metropolis of South America, with its smog-filled skies and its vast teeming hillside slums Beauty is beauty where you find it. At night, even these ranchitos as they call them-the thousands upon thousands of shacks that cover the steep slopes on either side of the roaring freeways-are beautiful, for though they have no water, and no sewerage, and they are crowded beyond all modern questions of health or comfort, they are nevertheless strung with bright, shining electric lights.
Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this Is it for beauty that they do it Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks
It doesn't matter.
We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world.
Look down upon the river that flows past the small outpost of St. Laurent, a ribbon of light glimpsed here and there for an instant from the treetops as it makes its way deeper and deeper into the forest, coming at last upon the little Mission of St. Margaret Mary-a gathering of dwellings in a clearing around which the jungle patiently waits. Isn't it beautiful, this little cluster of tin-roofed buildings, with their whitewashed walls and crude crosses, with their small lighted windows, and the sound of a single radio playing a thin song of Indian lyrics and merrily beating drums
How pretty the deep porches of the little bungalows, with their scattering of painted wooden swings and benches and chairs. The screens over the windows give the rooms a soft drowsy prettiness, for they make a tiny tight grid of fine lines over the many colors and shapes and thereby somehow sharpen them and render them more visible and vibrant, and make them look more deliberate-like the interiors in an Edward Hopper painting, or in a child's bright picture book.
Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assembly-line aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the haphazard.
But you won't find much of that here!
This is Gretchen's destiny, from which all the subtleties of the modern world have been eliminated-a laboratory for a single repetitive moral experiment-Doing Good.
The night sings its song of chaos and hunger and destruction in vain around this little encampment. What matters here is the care of a finite number of humans who have come for vaccination, surgery, antibiotics. As Gretchen herself has said-to think about the larger picture is a lie.
For hours, I wandered in a great circle through the dense jungle, carefree and strong as I moved through impassable foliage, as I climbed over the high fantastical roots of the rain trees, as I stood still here and there to listen to the deep tangled chorus of the savage night. So tender the wet waxen flowers growing in the higher more verdant branches, slumbering in the promise of the morning light.
Once again, I was beyond all fear at the wet, crumbling ugliness of process. The stench of decay in the pocket of swamp. The slithering things couldn't harm me and therefore