Up, Down and Out in Canda: A Personal Retrospective

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8314

[VirtueOnline] 28 May 2008--My mind, like everyone else's, I suppose, resembles a manufacturing site where all sorts of planned movements and processes take place in the illuminated foreground, while at the rear, more or less in the dark, are piled heaps of clutter; clutter, however, of which various bits may pop up into consciousness through one or other of the processes that we label association of ideas. As I wondered what to call this piece, two such items popped up into my mind together. One was the haunting KJV version of Acts 27:27, where we read that before the shipwreck "we were driven up and down in Adria (the Adriatic)" - a rare case, incidentally, of KJV over-translation, for "driven across" is all that the Greek means.

The other was the equally haunting title from the pen of old Etonian, social critic, beautiful writer, master satirist George Orwell, "Down and Out in Paris and London". Suddenly my own title was fully formed in my mind. Earlier I had thought I might steal Duke Ellington's "Echoes of the Jungle" but this fits even better.