"...[the] crucial moment when we believe we have another person's measure... Up to that point all is curiosity, guesswork, a hankering after confessions. Hunger for the other person, the lure of their hidden depths. But secret potential has been decoded, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorizing. It all becomes comprehensible reassuring. Now the routine of a relationship, or a difference, can takeover. Their body reduced to flesh and blood mechanism, desirable or otherwise. Their heart to a set of predictable responses.
At this stage, in fact, a kind of murder occurs, for we kill this being of infinite and inexhaustible potential that we encountered. We would rather deal with a verbal construct than a living person..."
Andreï Makine The Woman Who Waited Hodder & Stoughton (2006) pp.3-4
Makine unpeels his narrator's pre-conceptions gently shifting his perceptions...a description of the moments that shift our minds. Set against the narrative is the unfurling of the seasons of Siberia, landscaping the two protagonists.
Read this book.
photo of Siberia by hulilung at http://media.photobucket.com/image/siberia/huliling/Landscapes/SIBERIA.jpg?o=36
"...and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs.Ramsey could not help exclaiming, 'Oh, how beautiful!' For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right , as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.
That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her husband loved."
Virginia Woolf To The Lighthouse Penguin 2000 p17
Godrevy Lighthouse from the beach at Gwithian.
The UB Post featured this report in February. Whilst the extreme weather in China featured in mainstream news programmes no mention of the likelihood of deteriorating conditions in Central Asia were considered or mentioned.
Aid to Herders in Severe Winter Storm Areas
Description of the 1999/2000 winter one of the worst in the Mongolian records
Video: Icy Winds of Change - Mongolia. This video features what can happen in a bad Mongolian winter