Nightfall in the tropics

“…nightfall is a sudden affair. No lengthening afternoon and lingering dusk…no sun hovering reluctantly above the horizon – no long and indeterminate twilight. With admirable despatch the sun drops out of the sky like a golden bullet. Day yields to night without a struggle.”
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Imagined fears in darkness

"It is remarkable how confidence returns with daylight."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Drama and real life

"Perhaps the art of storytelling has led us to expect the wrong thing…all that is irrelevant has been conveniently removed. Life is so shapeless. Stories well-told make the real thing a continuous disappointment and saddle each of us with a secret feeling of inadequacy. Reality never coheres. Its narrative is either incoherent or it is a lie."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Amplified reality

"So much of the technology we take for granted serves to amplify. It broadcasts sound louder and wider; it internsifies and spreads illumination; it accelerates travel. Our senses adjust for this...so that we are not deafened or dazed, but experience this supercharged world as though it were normal. In doing so, we reduce out ability to experience sensation offered on a lesser scale. We are perhaps numbed to those little sounds and feelings that a quieter, darker, stiller world would offer."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

Mounting contrasts

"At an altitude where the air is thin, sunlight is hotter and shadow colder."
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola

The world's a small place (seven degrees of separation)

"It is as if at certain key points the faceless millions who make up the census figures, cause the traffic jams and constitute crowd scenes, stand momentarily aside so that just a few of us can bump into each other...Maybe they are holograms. Maybe there really are only a few of us, moving amid phantoms. Millions and millions of phantoms"
-Matthew Parris in Inca Cola