a jib set on a stay to a bowsprit cap, astern.
Have you ever felt the wind on you face,
the sun burning your skin,
the sea-salt in your hair. And its taste on your lips, the Grand Large,
"So throw off the bowlines, and Sail away from the safe harbor." _Mark Twain
It is refreshing, when you discover that writers, poets, and artists, and viewers like you as well, " liked" and are following your blog, eventually stopped by your blog, so I want to thank you for that, extra-large. And it's encourage me to persevere on writing. To the ultimate, a point in a journey for an autodidact like me, of becoming a writer. So, in that instant, I gave up on essays, I made decision, to become a writer, thanks to all of you, the little few that have clicked on the Like/Follow, whom I consider being my critics, in that regard.
The Milky Way. It was the summer of 1853, way back before "light pollution," which has now become a major problem, and on the edge of the great Sahara desert, Eugene Fromentin looked up on a moonless night, and was overwhelmed by the richness of the light coming from the galaxy we call the Milky Way. Even more so, during the day, he said that he became almost "drunk" on the sheer amount of light overwhelming him from the sun. Fromentin was born in La Rochelle, France in 1820, and like others before and after him, developed a strong affinity for a landscape and a people so different from his native land. His legacy is primarily his paintings. It was the Romantic period, and the label, which now has negative connotations, of "an Orientalist" has been applied to him. Lesser known are his writings. This is the first work of his that I have read, but it will not be the last. I found in Fromentin the keen eye of a painter who could also convey his observations in words, presenting an objective description of the new scenes he was experiencing. Somehow, the "politics" of the third decade of the French presence in Algeria was rarely even implicitly conveyed. People, just like the Milky Way, and the heat, were depicted in a matter-of-fact manner.