The breaking open of a crucial bale of hay on a crusty, frozen February dawn will clarify all of our labors in these warm early June fields.
Darwin spent half of Annie's life researching barnacles, but all that we see — and maybe it's enough — is his prizing open of a single shell, disclosing within a galaxy of rainbow-tinted ooze.
Admittedly, the most dangerous transgressions taking place in Mallory Towers invariably involved the cracking open of a tin of sardines a few minutes after midnight, but the jolly hockey sticks life still appealed.
During that time he giddily and compulsively gazed northward, at maps of Siberia: "I was subverted by the sudden falling open of a vast area of the forbidden world," he tells us here.
(There's a reminder here of the founding image of surrealist oculism: the slitting open of a woman's eye – replaced at the last edited moment by that of a cow – in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1929 film Un chien andalou).
It's not the most pertinent place to be sitting talking about death, horror, the scariest films ever made and the precise tools and vegetables best employed by sound studios to recreate the breaking open of a human head.
