In postwar New York, a Cuban-born composer deadens his ambitions behind a desk job in advertising, his marriage to an actress feeling as hollow as his art. When a university offers him an expedition to the Orinoco's upper reaches to collect ancient musical instruments, he seizes the escape—traveling with his mistress into a wilderness that begins to unsettle everything he thought he wanted.
A labour-saving device can quietly destroy the culture bound up with the labour it replaces. A machine that does away with the washerwoman also does away with her song, wiping out ages of folklore at a stroke. On this view, a people that keeps its ancient epics and myths alive may hold something worth more than hot and cold running water.
When you first step beyond the familiar, you don't recognise the marvel while you are living it, and you vainly assume you can repeat the discovery whenever you like. But go back expecting the exceptional to happen again and the landscape has changed, the landmarks are gone and the guides' faces are new. A rare state reached by chance belongs only to the moment it was reached in.
An outsider may find a foreign people's reasons for dying incomprehensible. That does not make their deaths any less real or less final. Not understanding a culture's passions gives you no grounds for treating its losses as lesser.
Journeying away from the modern city into remote country can feel like moving backward through history, with the years falling away toward humanity's origins. Places that live by subsistence keep older ways of being that the traveller had believed long gone. Distance in space becomes a way of reaching back in time.
A life run by the metronome, ruled by measured time, haste and other people's demands, leaves a person feeling trapped and unable to change anything. Someone who acts only by routine has the outward form of a life without actually living it: 'essence without existence.' The anonymous, hurried city breeds despair that people numb with drink rather than cure.