A Twist of Lime

Re-reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar in the name of escapism. Astonishing how far away it feels with all the pre-Euro currencies in Europe, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Ceylon, and so on. One passage caught my eye, it feels like a metaphor worth seizing on for the immediate future. This takes place as he observes Sri Lanka go by from a train to Colombo from Galle.

“The rain let up, and in the villages of grass huts with steeply pitched roofs the lime kilns were sending clouds of smoke into the palm groves. It was another example of Ceylonese improvidence. They dynamite coral from reefs and burn it to make lime. But the broken reef lets in the sea to erode the shore. The government had begun a program to cement the reefs, but the paradox is that cement is made with lime, and, as no cement can be imported, the reefs that are dynamited for the lime to mend others must themselves be replaced. The call it the cement industry; it is an industry that is entirely self-consuming: nothing is achieved.”