the empty copper sea

Please don't even suggest such a sacrilege as translating the eloquent snippets of wisdom of John D. MacDonald into Spanish.

Long ago a picture must have been an event. Capturing a living image has become too ordinary a miracle, perhaps. They go about with their automatic-drive Nikons and OM-2’s and their Leicaflexes, and put their finger on the button, and the hand-held machinery makes a noise like a big toy cricket. Reep, reep, reep, reep. A billion billion slides, projected once, labeled, and filed forever. Windrows of empty yellow boxes blow across the Gobi, the Peruvian highlands, the temple steps at Chichicastenango. The clicking and whirring and clacking is the background sound at the Acropolis, at the beach at Cannes, on the slopes at Villefranche. All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, “Mom, I don’t know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?”

“Throw them out, dear.”

John D. MacDonald

WOW! That's heavy, man!