Dark Star Safari - Paul Theroux

Reread, repost:
Paul Theroux goes overland (mostly), by public transport (mostly), from Cairo to Cape Town  through eastern Africa. A sort-of homecoming, Theroux was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi (before he was banned from the country), who has returned to check in on the region's 'progress' and 'development.' A hard-eyed - some might say cynical - realist (at least of a fashion), Theroux finds little to recommend the current state of the region, particularly its cities. A continent seemingly on its way forward in the 1960s and 70s now* strikes Theroux has stagnant, robbed by cronyism and misguided First World aid. Theroux declares this will be his last trip back to his young adult roots.

Yet between his frustrations and dashed hopes Theroux still finds much to love. It is a traveler's love. When the mindset is right endless delays are simply a part of living. It is notable that Theroux does not perceive himself to have any itinerary - traveling is simply how he chooses to pass the time. The joys are a traveler's joys. Unexpected friendships revealed in power-outages. Frank discussions with prostitutes at a hotel restaurant. The continual puncturing of self-importance. Perhaps these could be found on the road anywhere - but here they take on a distinctly African flavor. For Theroux it is as though he has dropped onto a dark star: that unseen place of gravity that nevertheless pulls at each us. For Theroux, Africa will always be force and thus returning is always a type of home-coming.

*Published in 2002.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T. E. Lawrence

Reread, repost:
Lawrence's sense of the dramatic, and the tragic, in his own life and in the "revolt in the desert" must of course be difficult to either corroborate or discard. His work, and indeed his own myth, has become so intertwined with the conflict between the Arabs and the Turks that any dissenting view must address his weighty recounting. Yet perhaps the work's greatest strength is its thorough subjectivity. Lawrence makes no attempt to see the conflict and the issues which underpin it disinterestedly. It is because he cared so much for the Arab revolt, and similarly because he was so critical of both his own effectiveness and the appropriateness of his role, that this very personal recounting succeeds so admirably in conveying not only what the conflict was, but what it meant.

A sense of both the dramatic and the tragic in human affairs requires an accounting for the humane element. When a story - whether real, fictive, or somewhere in between - cannot arouse a reader's passions, then it can never transport a reader beyond his or her own confines. Yet when the personal element is felt, when the battle is joined not simply in some by-gone time, but in our own minds, then history steps out of the shadow of memory and is present in all its immediacy. Lawrence tells us that there is both right and wrong in the world, and that both the best and the worst of us transcend each and it is hardly certain which is which. The confusion of the modern predicament seems to be the awareness of that good, and yet the simultaneous awareness that, even on our best days, we fail to measure up to our own standards. Our common humanity with Lawrence's Arab compatriots, whom he alternately paints as wise and foolish, robust and fragile, faint-hearted and exceedingly bold, is in striving with and against the recognition that we are shadows on a vast landscape. But whereas the Howeitat and the Beni Salem may have been buttressed by faith and the certain absolutes of an unforgiving desert, Lawrence is thoroughly modern: riven and divided against himself.

Throughout, Lawrence is shadowed by himself and his own doubts, in the end we wonder if he was satisfied with his role in the Arab Revolt. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is sweeping, thorough, and at times seems as barren as the Nefud. Lawrence's gift to his time was bringing the Arab Revolt to the front of western consciousness. His continued gift is reminding us that beauty and tragedy are little more than shades of one another. We hold each of these in our hearts and attempt to make sense of them every day.