WALLACE
WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL
The Malay Archipelago; The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise; A Narrative of Travel With Studies of Man and Nature. 2 volumes. Macmillan & Co., London, 9 March 1869:
“The Durian is, however, sometimes dangerous. When the fruit begins to ripen it falls daily and almost hourly, and accidents not infrequently happen to persons walking or working under the trees. When a Durian strikes a man in its fall, it produces a dreadful wound, the strong spines tearing open the flesh, while the blow itself is very heavy”
Then he goes on for a while about this, and then he says:
“Poets and moralists, judging from our eastern trees and fruits, have thought that small fruits always grew on lofty trees, so that their fall should be harmless to man, while the large ones trailed on the ground. Two of the largest and heaviest fruits known, however, the Brazil-nut fruit (Bertholletia) and Durian, grow on lofty forest trees, from which they fall as soon as they are ripe, and often wound or kill the native inhabitants. From this we may learn two things: first, not to draw general conclusions from a very partial view of nature; and secondly, that trees and fruits, no less than the varied productions of the animal kingdom, do not appear to be organized with exclusive reference to the use and convenience of man.”
Of course, the Durian is a perfectly adapted species, and may outlast the cockroach. I have a backpack that contained a Chinatown-procured Durian for a couple of hours seven years ago, and which still reeks of a sick conflation of menses, hot-breaks-on-cement, and a three-week-old catbox. And this is just the discharge from the outer shell… I won’t tell you what it took to remove the last traces from the inner regions of oral cavities. The Durian was designed to kill and frankly, I don’t have any idea how the rest of us are still at it.
It is a prurient fruit, armed like an iron maiden. I am not a partisan of roguefort or other Bleugh Cheeses but it has been pointed out that the Noble durian is the Gorgonzola of the East. My only brush with eating it was a Durian cookie I consumed in Thailand. I was too polite to decline it, and yet even in this innocuous package I could taste notes of rotten onion and baby shit. Absoultely fresh it is meant to have a cascading effect on the tongue. But what I really want to know is, what possessed you to walk around with it in your rucksack for so long (a yucksack by the end) and did you know what you were getting into or did you find its forbidding face so enticing that, one way or another, you couldn’t refuse?
What possesses one to go near forbidden fruit? It was to impress a boy, of course?
We ate it after a birthday dinner of fish stew, as discordant a dessert as one could imagine. And yes, the onions, the baby shit, the menses, the brakes (with parapraxis as digestif, apparently) were all present, bookending its trek down the pipes. But for a split second right at the back of the palette, it all changed into a grandmotherly bosom into which the nose is buried in a springtime meadow, with custard and lilac and freshcut grass and other delicacies majestic. Just for a second. Then it went back to shite. But it worked… I mean, I got laid.
I suppose it was difficult to tell which end was up.