Wednesday, July 16, 2008

DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Most newspaper writing today is disposable, it's of less substance than magazines or (gasp) blogging. But like any broad encompassing statement, there are exceptions. I found this recently and stopped to re-read the paragraph. It's self-aware like meta text and reads like a narrative magazine article. I am surprised most of all, to find it in the New York Times. Here.

"Ten years ago, I stood in a clearing in the Cameroonian jungle, asking a hunter to hold up for my camera half the baby gorilla he had split and butterflied for smoking. My distress — partly faked, since I was also feeling triumphant, having come this far hoping to find exactly such a scene — struck him as funny. “A gorilla is still meat,” said my guide, a former gorilla hunter himself. “It has no soul.” So he agrees with Spain’s bishops. But it was an interesting observation for a West African to make. He looked much like the guy on the famous engraving adopted as a coat of arms by British abolitionists: a slave in shackles, kneeling to either beg or pray. Below it the motto: Am I Not a Man, and a Brother?"

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