Light Years A Girlhood in Hawai'i

by Moore, Susanna

• ISBN13: 9780802118622
• ISBN10: 0802118623
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-18
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

New from the author of In the Cut, the luminous self-portrait of a childhood and adolescence in Hawai’i. Susanna Moore can’t remember the first time she saw the ocean—it has been there for as long as she can remember.  Moore was born in Hawai’i and raised in a paradise of light and color, five days’ ship travel from the U.S. mainland.  As a child she spent endless sun-speckled days in the shade of the palm trees with a bundle of books, the sound of the ocean and the calls of her brothers and sister drifting through the grove. In Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai’i, she weaves reminiscences of her childhood with some of her favorite pieces of literature—excerpts from Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, Treasure Island, Kon-Tiki, To the Lighthouse, and many others. Although Moore now lives in New York, the sea remains her constant companion. Light Years marks her return to the island world where she walked to school barefoot and explored love as a young girl.

Table of Contents

Oh God! For we were all swallowed up in a moment	p. 1
From Robinson Crusoe	p. 18
From The Discovery of America	p. 28
From The Last of the Seris	p. 34
From Sunflower Splendor	p. 37
One knows not what sweet mystery about this sea	p. 39
From Moby Dick	p. 47
From The Voyage of the Beagle	p. 50
From Sir Francis Drake	p. 52
From Typhoon	p. 54
From The History	p. 62
The sicknesses are now gone, vanished, expelled, and sailed away	p. 65
From The Golden Bough	p. 70
From Joseph Conrad	p. 72
From Death in Venice	p. 73
From Leaves of Grass	p. 75
From To the Lighthouse	p. 76
From Goethe's Travels in Italy (1786-1788)	p. 80
From The Portrait of a Lady	p. 82
Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging sea	p. 83
From Rudyard Kipling's Verse	p. 91
From Tarka the Otter	p. 92
From Poems	p. 95
From The Kon-Tiki Expedition	p. 99
From The Complete Poems	p. 104
From Letters	p. 107
From The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse	p. 112
Say - Sea - Take me!	p. 113
From The Poems of Emily Dickinson	p. 120
From The Waves	p. 121
From The Legends and Myths of Hawaii	p. 122
From The Poetical Works	p. 130
From The Moonstone	p. 131
From Treasure Island	p. 133
From Cape Cod	p. 141
From Notebook	p. 145
From The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent	p. 146
Being at sea is so queer	p. 149
From the Letters	p. 158
From Six Months in the Sandwich Islands	p. 160
From Works and Days	p. 166
From The Letters of Rachel Henning	p. 168
From Villette	p. 174
It seems to me: the sea and myself and nothing else	p. 177
Acknowledgements	p. 189
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