This is a book I bought at the Brown Bookstore on Thayer Street
last summer, while on my visit to RISD with my father.
I have always loved the Brown Bookstore. I think it is one of my favorite
bookstores after the English Bookstore in Paris, and the Dillons in
New Malden Mall in London. Of course, now in Seoul, we have the
Kyobo Bookstores which have evolved so much since the 1980s!
Well. This book was on sale and since I was working on a public design
for Jeju Island in my class for Professor Ahn, Sang-Soo, I was really
drawn to it. My team was working on the aspect of "wind" that
typified and characterized the essence and nature of Jeju-do.
And the more we researched into this "wind" thing, the more
fascinating it was! It was more fascinating than the spider project
I was working on the year before for an Illustration class.
There was something so inherently seductive about the "wind" -
it's just so out of your grasp! It's got that quality of sand falling
through your fingers; it entices you, it calls to you, and yet you
can never catch the wind. Unless you can fly or something,
you will never be able to beat it. You can just enjoy it for what it is.
But you can't possess it. Hmm... hence, the attraction.
I read up a little bit about Mr. Beaufort on Wikipedia. What a
fascinating man he was! So full of action and curiosity!
(And what Josh Lyman(sp?) called "a mind at work; gravitas"
in one of the episodes of West Wing...)
* * *
There was another book that I wanted to read in the library of the
cruise we went on last summer, which I didn't quite get around to.
It was called Stickeen, John Muir's Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier.
I don't know why, but my memory has somehow clustered these two
books in the same mental category for that summer.
Maybe some day, I will get to read that book.
It recalls to me two books I taught in class called,
"Journey to the Center of the Earth" and "The Call of the Wild."
