The triple triumph:
Chilli & Coconut: Coconut milk enfolds Thai ingredients in a sweet forgiving embrace. It knocks the sharp edges off lime, shushes foul-mouthed fish sauce and soothes the heat of chilli, whose active component, capsaicin, is soluble in fat but not in water.Niki Segnit
I am a sucker for a tricolon and even more so for a tricolon describing food. The description of the offerings on a market day:
On good days—and most days are good—the Provençal sun transforms ripe peppers to fire, honey to melted gold, and olives into baroque jewels. Eggplants, tomatoes, and cherries glisten, melons send messages to your nose, and everything asks to be tasted.from "Introduction" by Dixon Long to Markets of Provence
Camella Grace
on Timothy Leary
Design for Dying
He was a man who touched the future, studied the past, and sculpted the present.Notice how fragile the construction is. It requires the casting of the future-past-present in order to solidify its rhetorical strength. Any other order smashes the implied narrative that peering into the future through an observation of the past yields to moulding the present. We are brought back to our implied point of departure. The present is the past of the future.
André Alexis in A (BookThug, 2013) offers up for the reader's delectation a tricolon in parallel. The weirdness (a hospital room with three mannequins that look like three versions of Anna Akhmatova) is alleviated by the classical poise of the prose concluding the paragraph.
They were all versions of Anna Akhmatova, young and beautiful, middle-aged and sensual, old and dignified.We have here in miniature the course of a life with the implication that it was a life well-lived. This in part is realized by avoiding a rising tricolon where the segments get progressively longer (aka tricolon crescens) and emphasizing the modulation evoked by equally balanced segments. Such a life like such an expression lingers with finesse, impresses with gentleness and speaks with smoothness.
