Oct 19 2026 03:00 • Humid afternoons in a shared cabin

The Persistent Architecture of Violence

Young drifts through a world of sun-bleached rock and salt spray, where the beauty of the Mediterranean is haunted by the mechanical ghosts of mid-century warfare.

This landscape is what you see from Spain to the immense knife-edge passes of Afghanistan, from Yugoslavia to Aden; in spring it is beautiful with small flowers, and at all times of the year the colours in the rock change as the light shifts. I wish I weren’t conditioned to associate this kind of landscape with other memories: jet planes banking around headlands, skimming through valleys, bombing or rocketing, leaving behind them the roar of engines, plumes of smoke and mourning columns of refugees. The gull seemed to be consciously challenging the bow wave, which only had to rise two centimetres to turn it into a lump of feathers cartwheeling to destruction, just as Second World War Japanese kamikaze planes, shot down by American ships, cartwheeled and broke up in

— Slow Boats to China

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