JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Journal June 12, 2006, Supplemental
There must be some reason to these thoughts I was having awhile back about the opening scenes to the upcoming movie HALO. I was thinking of how the story goes behind the military person that inspired Master Chief. It begins with the real MCPO arriving at his post on some planet. It is an isolated post in some kind of wasteland, desert, mountainous region. He arrives, talks with a few people, walks around. The structure is some kind of pre-fab building with a lot of walkways and observation positions, a lot of defensive positions. You can hear the clanking of deckplates and gratings as people walk around. MCPO finds a place to sit down his gear and look out over the land. He places a photo of an attractive blond woman, a weather forecaster, on a ledge in front of him and wistfully remembers better times. After awhile, he is sent on some kind of recon mission
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 12 June 2006 excerpt ends]
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: Saturday, September 03, 2005 7:30 PM
Chechaquo
This is an excerpt from To Build A Fire that made an impression with me early on and has felt especially relevant for the past few years:
But all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all--made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 3 September 2005 excerpt ends]
http://www.online-literature.com/london/101
THE LITERATURE NETWORK
Literature Network » Jack London » To Build a Fire
To Build a Fire
