Nifty things I've been reminded of in writing these reflections:
-When writing the name of a book, it gets underlined.
-When typing the name of a book, it gets italics.
-End notes are for citing sources.
-Footnotes are for textual notes.
-Appendixes are for long textual notes providing background/context.
I think. Fun, no?
Also, Czech for 'hello' is 'ahoj' pronounced 'ahoy!'. This means I get to greet friends with 'ahoy' but must resist the temptation to pretend to be a pirate. Ahoj!
SUMMER BOOK THREE
Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between
Sometimes books, like people and ideas, follow and haunt me. They demand acknowledgment. A year ago, a friend of a friend recommended this book while we were together at the beach. I stumbled across it on Barnes and Noble’s website while trying to spend some gift cards, and finished it a week before running into her at the beach on this year’s trip.
Stewart is a gifted writer. I was worried about embarking on a novel-length trip with someone I mistakenly pegged as a journalist, but the reading was delightful. As narrator, protagonist, and author all at once, Stewart crafts with language as a smith crafts with metal. While the way he chose to end the book surprised me, it was very fitting. Now I’m itching to travel and wishing that I was a man so that hitch-hiking alone would be slightly safer.
“[Babur, the first Emperor of Mughal India] died the ruler of one of the largest and wealthiest empires in the world. He tells this adventure story with impressive modesty. What he did was very dangerous, but he never draws attention to this. Instead, he focuses on the people he meets and uses portraits of individuals to suggest a whole society. He pays more attention to his contemporary world than to legends or ancient history and he is a careful observer. He mentions hangovers and agricultural techniques, poetry and economics, pederasty and garden design with the sense of humor and experience of a man who has fought, traveled, and governed. He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal, or more symbolic. Unlike most travel writers, he is honest” (11).
From Babur’s description of Herat in 1504: “Hussein Mirza [the ruler]…created a court, which abounded with eminent men of unrivaled accomplishments, each of whom made it his aim and ambition to carry to the highest perfection the art to which he devoted himself” (13).
An official from the beginning of Stewart’s journey tells him: “Record me in your book. As the Persian poet says: ‘Man’s life is brief and transitory, Literature endures forever’” (22).
“I did not need him to complete the phrase because I had heard it word for word from men in Heart and Kabul. ‘There has been war for twenty-four years. There is no water. The villagers are poor, illiterate, mad, and dangerous. Afghanistan is destroyed.’ In this standard analysis, Islam and ethnicity did not feature and violence was the product of crazy rural illiterates. It suggested a little education, money, and counseling might restore a golden age that existed before Afghanistan was ‘destroyed.’ But I was not sure how the exact words of the slogan had become so fixed or what part the media had played in it all. It told me nothing about the community” (33).
“This was a ritual I had gone through almost every night as I walked across Iran. This village had been part of an empire centered in Persia for most of the previous two thousand years. In both Iran and Afghanistan, the order in which men enter, sit, greet, drink, wash, and eat defines their status, their manners, and their view of their companions. If a warlord had been with us, he would have been expected, as the most senior man, to enter first, sit in the place farthest from the door, have his hands washed by others, and be served, eat and drink first…Status depended not only on age, ancestry, wealth, and profession, but also on whether a man was a guest, whether a third person was present, and whether the guest knew the others well…When other senior men from the village entered, we all rose in their honor. But when the servants brought the food, I was the only one to look up. Servants, like women and children, were socially invisible” (38-39).
“My feet beat out a steady muffled rhythm. My thoughts participated in each step, never getting ahead of me…My sense that I was on an adventure seemed self-indulgent in the context of the war. I found it difficult to write about the risk of death. I wrote ‘one’ instead of ‘I,’ as though I were shying away from myself” (44-45).
“When he denied the building was a caravanserai, I do not think he was being ignorant. He was saying that whatever the building had once been, it was nothing anymore” (67).
“I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us on the long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on food. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus, and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes” (75).
“In the Indian Himalayas, villagers had described their landscape in terms of religious myth. ‘This hill is where Shiva danced,’ they said, or, ‘This lake was made my Arjuna’s arrow.’ But like Abdul Haq, the Aimaq villagers defined their landscape by acts of violence or death” (161).
“As we moved on the weather shifted, as did the sharp angles of the slopes, revealing new valleys on each side. My mind flitted from half-remembered poetry to things I had done of which I was ashamed” (179).
“In the early afternoon we entered a settlement where, for the first time, I saw women in the streets. They wore bright pillbox hats and clothes decked with silver. Rather than covering their faces, they stood still and watched me. I noticed how pale their skin was and their slender Mongolian eyes, unusual for Afghans. One of the girls smiled. In the central square were stocky men with broad ruddy faces and high cheekbones. They immediately invited me into the mosque. It was the first mosques I had been invited to in Afghanistan. These people were the Hazara” (185).
“I was not carrying a detailed map because I did not want to be thought a spy” (189).
“It is only safe for you because you are a stranger” (205).
“In all the countries through which I traveled, I was told with pride, ‘We [the Iranians, or the Pakistanis, or Indians or Nepalis or Afghans] are famous for being the most hospitable and generous people in the world. It is a religious duty for us. Everyone will welcome you immediately into their houses. You will be treated like a God.’
“But this was not my experience. Though most communities, whether Islamic or Hindu, and Muslims talked a great deal about their formal religious responsibilities to a mosafer (traveler), or meman (guest), in practice people often welcomed me reluctantly. This was understandable—they were often very poor, lived tough lives, and were suspicious of the few strangers they met. I was often disappointed by their hospitality. Only later did I begin to see how fortunate I was that they provided me almost every night with shelter and bread to eat” (209-210).
Another quote from Babur the Emperor: “The cave seemed to be small. I took a hoe and cleared for myself, at the mouth of the cave, a resting place about the size of a prayer carpet…some desired me to go into the cave but I would not go. I felt that for me to be in …comfort, while my men were in the midst of snow and drift…would be inconsistent with what I owed them…it was right that whatever their sufferings were…I should share them. There is a Persian proverb that Death in the company of friends is a feast” (214-215).
“For the first time, in the late afternoon sun, I could see the true color of the hills free of snow. There was a coal black peak with slopes of sulfurous yellow, an emerald green mountain, dark purple cliffs with a white crest, and in the foreground pale brown sandstone cliffs with dark eyelets of caves at the base, each stained with soot” (223).
“Blair’s handling and discussion of the Koran would have struck Ali as highly eccentric. In Ali’s view, Blair could not have read the Koran because Blair could not read Arabic. Since the Koran, unlike the Bible, is the verbatim word of God, spoken through Muhammad in Arabic, a translation is not considered to be the Koran. At times, it has been considered blasphemous to translate it at all” (236).
“Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights, and fiber-optic cable networks; to talk about transparent, clean, and accountable processes, tolerance, and civil society; and to speak of a people ‘who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralized multi-ethnic government” (246).
“Every three meters along the drystone wall facing us, a stone was painted bright red to indicate a mine on the path. They were antivehicle mines we were too light to trigger, so we walked over them. The antipersonnel mines seemed to be laid just off the road” (252).
“As Buddhism moved, it changed. In Tibet it incorporated the preceding Bon-Po religion and spawned new demonologies. In eighth-century northern India, it became scholastic; among the forest monks of Sri Lanka, pragmatic; in Newar, Nepal, married monks practiced inverted tantra; and in Japan, Zen devotees contemplated minimalist paradoxes. Afghanistan was where Buddhism met the art of Alexander’s Greece. There, in the Gandharan style, it developed its most distinctive artistic expression: the portrayal of the Buddha in human form. The colossal statues of Bamiyan were the legacy of this innovation…The dynamited niches now echoed the earliest pre-Gandharan depictions, in which the Buddha is represented by an empty seat, showing where he had once been” (257, 259).
From a village man: “‘We have not seen an American or a British. They would not dare to come to our village because they are afraid to die and we would kill them at once. They are afraid to die because they have no God. They are pathetic and decadent and corrupt. Why are they afraid of their deaths? They have nothing to live for. But I am ready to die now. We are all ready to die now because we know that we will go to God. That is why they can never defeat us’…I quickened my pace, aware of the tiredness and a slight tension in my muscles. My focus for the last hour had been immediate and practical. I had wanted to get to the next village. The men struck me as bullies with a strangled and dangerous view of God and a stupid obsession with death. I did not envy the government that had to deal with them” (283).
“After twenty months of walking, I flew out of Islamabad with a layover at Dubai International Airport, where I was served at McDonalds by a Filipino from Luzon. I landed in London and noticed its glass shop fronts and posters of half-naked women. Where I had been in Asia the tarmac roads petered out into bare patches of littered earth. Here the concrete ran clean from the roads over the curbs and up the walls of the houses, so that the whole city seemed rendered as a single room” (296).
Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence
This one, admittedly, took me a while to get through. It wasn't that I didn't like it. I just had a hard time focusing on it. The framing is brilliant and original. Kemal, the narrator, lives in a museum that he created of objects collected to document his relationship with Fusun. The objects hold memories of his love, humiliation, obsession, joy, and loneliness; he kept them as relics of his love, and he opens the museum as a testament to the years when their lives were entwined. Through Pamuk, who supposedly is transcribing Kemal's explanations, the reader is walked through the museum and through Kemal's memories.
I love that the book plays with memories, how memories can be attached to objects (my oral histories project?), how museums frequently have back-stories... As the book takes place in Turkey in the 1970s, and Kemal is from the upper class, the story also discusses cultural realities that were not directly forces in his life but that impacted his decisions as boulders impact the flow of water in a river. Women are admired for emulating the forwardness of western women, but their social worth is still based on their reputations and virginity. Kemal's high society friends don't frequent the lower class neighborhoods and public theater gardens that he attends while pursuing Fusun. Riots and curfews rearrange his schedule at times, and his willingness to disregard them reminds the reader that he has completely surrendered to his obsession.
Kemal is a desperate man for most of the book. His obsession with Fusun consumes his life, and reading 532 pages of his thoughts can get tiring, especially for someone like myself who doesn't enjoy romance novels. That said, I closed the book knowing that Pamuk had masterfully crafted this character. The idea is that Kemal has taken his past and tried to preserve it in an external form so that he can walk visitors through the internal dialogue that has haunted him for years. Yes, he is clingy and obsessive and irritating...but if he were any other way than he wouldn't be sincere and the reader wouldn't believe that the story is really in his voice. This is a flawlessly executed novel.
(Some curious quotes: )
"My father's expanding business, his factories, his growing fortune, and the attendant obligation to live the 'elegant European' life that befit this wealth--it all now seemed to have deprived me of simple essences. As I walked these streets, it was as if I was seeking out my own center" (212).
"In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty" (219).
"Like most Turkish men of my world who entered this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her" (253).
"During those eight years the dilemma preoccupied me, and damned me. The view you can see n the picture displayed here is one we beheld standing at the window for at most two or two and a half minutes. I would like the museum visitor in contemplating it to please reflect on my dilemma as he looks at this view, bearing in mind, too, how delicate and refined was Fusun's behavior at this moment" (300).
"'Cousin Kemal, how can you even say such a thing? Our lives are what they have become,' said Fusun" (303).
"I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent communists at that time" (309).
"Then he kissed Fusun in the half-heartfelt, half-routine way that husbands in American films kiss their wives when they get home from work" (314).
"The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory--of this there is no doubt" (324).
"Sometimes..." (398).
"Seeing she'd made no impression on my, my mother was incensed. 'In a country where men and women can't be together socially, where they can't see each other or even have a conversation, there's no such thing as love,' she vehemently declared. 'By any chance do you know why? I'll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don't even bother themselves with whether she's good or wicked, beautiful or ugly--they just pounce on her like starving animals. This is simply their conditioning. And then they think they're in love. Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this? Take care! Don't deceive yourself'"(450).
"...a feeling awoke in me that if I could tell my story I could ease my pain" (490).
"One could gather up anything and everything, with wit and acumen, out of a positive need to collect all objects connecting us to our most beloved, every aspect of their being, and even in the absence of a house, a proper museum, the poetry of our collection would be home enough for its objects" (501).
"There was another [collector] whose collection of doorknobs and keys I was delighted to exhibit after he explained that every resident (by which he meant every male) of Istanbul touched about twenty thousand door handles in his lifetime, and so it was virtually certain that 'the hand of the one I loved' had touched a great many of his specimens" (507).
"He was giving expression to the understanding that anyone obsessed with collecting objects and storing them away must be in the grip of heartbreak, deep distress, or some ineffable psychological wound. So what was my problem? Was I troubled at the loss of someone dear whose picture I had been unable to pin to my collar at the funeral? Or was I, like the man asking the question, suffering from something deep, unmentionable, and shameful?" (508).
"Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space" (510).
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