Andy Weston

“On the map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southwards in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Tayegtus mountains, which from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length - seventy five miles on their western and forty five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across - projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani.
As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre , subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold.
Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of Greece.
Nothing but the bleak Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the bare and waterless inferno of rock.

The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

“I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can't imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year's festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's "Monolith."
The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the music and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan.
He smiled. That's good stuff, he said.
Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat.
It's nothing I've ever heard before, he replied, but I like it. He pulled his elbows in tight and shimmied, moving his head gravely from side to side, transfixed by pleasure. The priest, swaying his own ass to the beat—he was nearly eighty, but on mushrooms he was a jaguar-said, I was thinking about you, believe it or not; look at this.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires

“Out of bedrooms and wards
long lines of the dead walk towards you
asking you,
‘Who were you to decide
that our innings was over?
Who gave you the umpire’s white coat
and upraised finger?’
Did you think we would never speak
from the graves you gave us?”
― Michael Rosen

“Thou too art doomed..”
― Ernst Raupach, Non disturbare il sonno dei morti