Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I myself brought into being the shimmering late afternoon hush, the ripening sun, the very Pacific that, way below, at the foot of the cliff, shattered its foamy peripheries with the sound of a thousand distant cinema organs. I’d never get used to California. After three years, still the enchanted visitor. However frequently I had been disappointed, I still couldn’t help it, I still tingled with expectation, still always thought that something wonderful might happen. Call me the Innocent Abroad. All the same, you can take the boy out of London but you can’t take London out of the boy. You will find my grasp of the local lingo enthusiastic but shaky. I call gas “petrol”, and so on. I don’t intend to go native, I’m not here for good, I’m here upon a pilgrimage. I have hied me, like a holy palmer, from the dishevelled capital of a foggy, three-cornered island on the other side of the world where the light is only good for water-colourists to this place where, to wax metaphysical about it, Light was made Flesh.
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