Urban Development

When I moved to my current home in July, 1980 the place was on the outskirts of the city, just over five miles from downtown.  The area was sparsely populated and traffic to our house was almost nonexistent.  The brief drive to work was less than fifteen minutes.  Now it takes more than two hours to reach downtown Panama.

Thirty years later, the landscape has changed considerably.  For the last two decades the city has been expanding rapidly and towers are sprouting like forest mushrooms.

Snapshot of one of four apartment towers being built in front of our neighborhood in El Bosque, even as we speak. Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

We are currently experiencing every large city’s hallmarks; never-ending traffic, blaring ambulances and police cars sirens, and blaring car horns.  The cacophony of the urban noises is definitely deafening to our ears.  It will get worse as “progress” continues its path where we live.  Gone are the days of quietness and serenity.

In a little more than three decades we have been devoured by the city.  I have mixed feelings about urban development in Panama.  On one hand hand, it’s good to have abundant jobs for construction workers, more taxes are streaming towards the public coffers, and the wheels of abundance are moving forward.  That’s well and good.

On the other hand, you have bumper-to-bumper traffic, deafening noise pollution, and a glass, steel and cement jungle asphyxiating you.  I’m increasingly feeling like the biblical prophet Jonah inside the belly of the whale.

This shot was taken from inside my car. Since there was a bright sun light behind the tower, I used the tainted glass of the vehicle to filter the excess of light. It worked. Photo by ©Omar Upegui R.

“But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached.  As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slanting tore him along, ‘into the midst of the seas,’ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and ‘the weeds were wrapped about his head,’ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. 

Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—’out of the belly of hell’—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.  Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding.  And what was that, shipmates?  To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!  That was it!” (Moby Dick: or, The White Whale—Herman Melville)

As the saying goes, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”  True, modernization is taking place in Panama City, but we are paying the high price of losing our innocence of peacefulness and quietness.  The city is relentless in its indomitable growth.  Good Day.

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Moby Dick (1956) – The Movie

Yesterday was a rainless, hot and humid day.  The hours dragged forever making it a slow and long day.  But not all was gloomy and fruitless yesterday.  In fact it was a serendipitous day.  By serendipitous I mean being lucky in making two unexpected and fortunate discoveries.  As usual, I made my daily forays into the unfathomable depths of the Web to find themes for my blog.   I found two; one was an unbelievable story of a nefarious British trader who brought the Barings Banks to its proverbial knees.  His story was written for posterity in a book called Rogue Trader, and it was so successful, it was later adapted to the silver screen.  But that’s another story for another day.

The second discovery was a classical motion picture produced by John Huston.   The name of the picture is Moby Dick, a 1956 film adaptation of Herman’s Melville’s famous novel.  It was directed by John Huston with a screenplay written by Ray Bradbury and the director.  The film starred Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, and Leo Genn.  Orson Well had small part, but it was an eloquent part in which he played the character Father Mapple, who addressed a mesmerizing sermon about Jonah, the whale, and the mercy of Almighty God who listened to Jonah’s repentance and saved him from the fury of the beast.

As you are probably aware, I’m reading this great American novel, albeit it’s a difficult read.  I turn the pages of dictionaries as much as I’m turning the pages of the novel itself.  But that’s fine, I know that my English is rusty and needs to be augmented.  Watching the movie will help me understand the book, plus I greatly enjoyed the brilliant performance of Gregory Peck and the rest of the cast.  John Huston was a knack in the producing unforgettable motion pictures.

Below is an extract of the eloquent sermon addressed by Father Mapple on a Sunday morning to the churchgoers of New Bedford in 1841.  It’s a magnificent example of exquisite English literature.

“Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and ‘vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;’ when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Johah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding.  And what was that, shipmates?  To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood!  That was it!

Delight is to him; who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burn, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.”

Even though Norman Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851, it’s still applicable today.  His assertions of preaching the truth to the face of falsehood and plucking the sins from under the robes of Senators and Judges are true even to this day more than ever.  I’m planning to write about this very subject when the ideas are clearer in my head.  Lies, half-truths, and fabricated stories of alleged acts of corruption have become the standard of our journalists.  The high standards of the journalism of ore are slowing fading away into oblivion.

If you have not seen the movie Moby Dick (YouTube), now is the moment to enjoy one of the finest motion pictures produced by John Huston based on one of the Great American Novels and a treasure of world literature.  Au revoir!

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When a Stove is not a Stove

Ever since I started studying English, 59 years ago, I thought a stove was a kitchen appliance which people used to cooked their food.  Whenever I read the word stove, my mind associated it with cooking food.  Well, yesterday I found out that is not necessarily so.  Another definition for stove is:  smashed, broke, destroyed or otherwise damage something.  This unusual expression  is used to indicate extreme damage origin.  The expression of stove up is original from downeast Maine.  Another meaning is to break a hole in, specially in the hull of a boat.

During the early days of whale fishing, sea-dogs used the idiom, “a dead whale or a stove boat.”  The word stove had nothing to do with kitchens or cooking.  It meant stoved in, crushed, demolished, by the mighty slapping of a mad harpooned whale’s tail coming down a  fragile wooden boat.

Herman Melville used this outdated idiomatic expression in his novel, Moby Dick:  or, The White Whale:

“Me thinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.  Me thinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul Jove himself cannot.”

It took me several minutes to digest this paragraph.  Words like lees, stove boat, stove body, stave and Jove were driving me crazy.  The dictionary came to my rescue and enlightened my head.  Now I can appreciate the literary jewels inside Herman Melville’s writing style.  As I read the book, I’m removing the dust from these forlorn words, polishing them up, and giving them the luster they had when they were written 161 years ago.

It’s hard work I know, but the discoveries are marvelous.  Good Day.  For now, I’m calling it a day.

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