While lying in bed this morning following an uncommonly profitable overnight sleep and while listening to the equally uncommon rain upon the roof of the townhouse, I fashioned a new elucidation of the quip “Why did the chicken cross the road?” I am that chicken, the coward, the one without the nerve to undertake a dangerous situation.
The dangerous situation is a meld of features; namely, my weak knees (one of which is scheduled for surgical replacement), the traffic along the Overseas Highway (which demarcates access to the pathway where I wish to cycle) and finally my lingering uncertainty about the necessity, advisability and sustainability of a project to investigate and discover what is on the other side of the road (when I am already safely within a private and lush 40-acre tropical hammock adjacent Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico).
Key Largo is a census-designated place in Monroe County, Florida, United States, located on the island of Key Largo in the upper Florida Keys. The population was 12,447 at the 2020 census. The name comes from the Spanish Cayo Largo, or “long key”. It is both the first island and town of the Florida Keys to be reached from the Overseas Highway to Key West. It was also the location of one of the stations of the Overseas Railroad.
According to the Köppen climate classification, Key Largo has a tropical monsoon climate.
The 1948 film Key Largo, starring Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, and Humphrey Bogart, was set there. The 1981 hit single “Key Largo” by Bertie Higgins was inspired by the film, not the namesake city. Conversely, the 1984 single “Smooth Operator” by Sade references the city, rather than the film. The song “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys also references Key Largo.
The physical, natural and pragmatic constraints which thwart me crossing the road to get to the other side are clearly a legacy of my overall decline, a descent which is predictable for one such as I approaching his 74th year. The impediments (worthy though they may be of deference) are however a manifestation of a far greater confession; and that is the superfluity of imagining that one can go to the ends of the earth for any purpose greater than the discovery of that from which one departed in the beginning. It is I believe a theme of a novel The Magus (1965) by British author John Fowles; namely, the illusion and ambiguity of life. In 1999 the novel was featured on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels: it ranked as No. 71 on the Readers’ List and No. 93 on the Critics’ List of the top 100 novels.
Nicholas Urfe is a young Englishman, who has taken a teaching position on the Greek island of Phraxos, following the previous instructor’s suicide. For Nicholas, it is a chance to sample different surroundings and an opportunity to escape from a relationship with his emotionally unstable lover Anne.
The novel was adapted for film with a screenplay by Fowles, directed by Guy Green, and released in 1968. It starred Michael Caine as Nicholas Urfe, Anthony Quinn as Maurice Conchis, Anna Karina as Alison, Candice Bergen as Lily, and Julian Glover as Anton. It was filmed on the island of Majorca. The adaptation generally was considered a failure as film; when Woody Allen was asked if he would do anything differently with his life, he said he’d do “everything exactly the same, with the exception of watching The Magus“.
Mysteriously I have never forgotten watching the film which I did with my long-standing prep school friend F. Max E. Maréchaux in 1968 at an exotic theatre deep in Old Toronto’s financial district somewhere near Bay and King Streets. I recall the theatre was virtually empty. I imagine in retrospect that it were in black and white but it was not. The movie left me with the impenetrable conclusion that one must leave the place whence one comes only to discover not the place whither one goes but rather the place one left. It is a theme I have later modified to include the adage, “There ain’t no ship to take you away from yourself; you only travel the suburbs of your own mind.” Granted the theme is ripe with paradox and abstruseness. And not unexpectedly it has predominantly been disregarded. I do however propose to adopt the assertion for the moment because it satisfies my present circumstances; and further it affords the relieving intellectual character of practicality sufficient to overcome the more visceral appetites. If ever there were an example of codswallop and taradiddle this is it! Nonetheless I continue to attach myself to the prescription because if nothing else it enhances the nutrition of what is before my eyes and at hand, an achievement or dissection which I consider of no small consequence. Too often tourists and interlopers such as I are overtaken by the seeming necessity immediately to leave the place to which they resort to unveil some greater enhancement. Staying on the same side of the road is but an inelegant enlargement of detail, the significance of which is overlooked in one’s haste to see the full picture and to eat everything on the buffet.
But I shall relent. I see that I have expired into a state of endless protraction.