... Thus ends
, one of the three books I present today. The others are:
I
had made a promise to myself, and a bold statement to a fellow reader
in my book group, that I would find a common theme among these
seemingly disparate books, my having chosen them for different reasons.
I intrepidly assert the title of this blog provides the connection
among the books.
“The
rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite
particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In
all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close
to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect (→
Such a beginning certainly presages the coming apart of things, as this singular book does provide evidence for, at least in
The County of Suffolk, as located in the country of England
The author takes us on a journey through his county, starting in Norwich on a train to the coast bordering the
North Sea,
and thence generally along the coast on foot, sometimes dangerously.
Later, having walked inland, he visits a friend, a writer and teacher,
who lives in a house the author once lived in. He takes a taxi back to
a previously visited town to think and write, as he had been doing all
along this journey, then he traveled back home.
Places
in Sussex County mentioned in the book, along with the author's musings
on their historical and literary connections to many parts of the world
[Please click on the image]
What, you may be asking, assuming you have read this far, is so interesting about all this?
As
the caption of the image immediately above implies, the author uses his
travels to expose thoughts and memories stimulated by the places and
people he visits. This section of England, or Great Britain in the
larger picture, has had great forests, great industry (including the
manufacture of silk), great homes and hotels, great resorts and, last,
great airfields-staging areas for Great Britain's execution of its role
in the Second World War. All are gone.
A former silk mill, now a museum, in the City of Derby
Not
only are all these things and events gone, they have left a poisonous
residue, killing the vast herring industry once centered here, among
other insults. Nature has had a role in eating away at the vulnerable
coastline, toppling cliffs and their made-made objects.
As I
read through this compelling book, I was taken on imaginary trips,
accompanied by great detail, to: China (via an exposition on the origin
of silk and its resultant world trade); The Enlightenment and many of
its famous characters: the writers Gustav Flaubert, Algernon Swinburne,
Edward Fitzgerald (The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam), Joseph Conrad, Sir Thomas Browne, and Jorge Luis Borges, the latter's short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius being given much discussion.
In
the story, an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called
Uqbar is the first indication of Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of
intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world: Tlön. "According
to … a key tenet of the (several) philosophical schools of Tlön … the
future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes,
and the past merely as memory. In a different view, the world and
everything now living in it was created only moments ago, with its
complete but illusory pre-history. A third school of
thought...describes our earth as a cul-de-sac in the great city of God,
a dark cave crowded with incomprehensible images, or a hazy aura
surrounding a better sun. The advocates (in 'Tlön') of a fourth
philosophy maintain that time has run its course and that this life is
no more than a fading refection of an event beyond recall. We simply do
not know how many of its possible mutations the world may have already
gone through, or how much time, always assuming that it exists, remains." (Emphasis added).
What
has destroyed all that the author reminds us of, as the gravity of
Jupiter has destroyed its former satellites, is, I believe, the Second
World War. He was a German boy during the war, and later a life-long
resident of England.
And, the destroyer is also time, assuming it exists beyond the conceit of man.
Thesiger
Similarly, in Thesiger,
a biography of the renown mid-20th century explorer Wilfrid Thesiger,
the book ends with several quoted observations of the subject: "There is nothing to be cheerful about. Everything is wrong...There can
be no future. It's inconceivable that there could be any human beings
on the planet in a hundred years' time ... Not only transport but the
interference with nature, you've got pollution and the threat to the
ozone belt which means the heating up of the earth and the melting of
the poles and half the world going under water."
Wilfrid Thesiger,
whose father served in the British diplomatic corps, was born in
Ethiopia in 1910. He returned as a young man to explore and hunt, and
then traveled extensively in many parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and
also in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Please click on the image]
Thesiger
was given to hyperbole with native English speakers, spending most of
his life having lived among and traveling with, by foot and camel, the
native peoples of the mostly "untouched" lands he preferred to
"civilization".
Wilfrid Thesiger
Continuing the ending quotes:
"A
hundred years ago there were no cars...Well in a hundred years what are
we going to have? It won't be long before the Chinese will be demanding
cars-you can't put all that pollution into the air and get away with
it...I don't think development can be checked and that's why I think
we're heading for disaster-it's just a matter of guessing whether it's
fifty years or 100 years. I see absolutely no hope for the human
species.
"
As with his predecessor T.E. Lawrence, who
Thesiger admired, he eschewed the intimate company of women, and sex
altogether. He did like the company of young men who traveled with him
as a sort of tribe, as did Lawrence. Thesiger's biographer interviewed
him and followed in his footsteps to talk with many of the people
Thesiger had traveled with, lending great credibility to Asher's
portrait of the great explorer.
As can be seen from the quotes
at the beginning of this section, Thesiger saw civilization and, more
precisely, its mechanization and industries, as the ruin of natural
man, epitomized by the Bedu of the desert.
Thesiger
was the last person to travel to theretofore inaccessible places by
foot and animal transport. He mourned the advent of the automobile.
Wilfrid Thesiger
died in 2003 at age 93
in England, having been forced to live there the last few years of his
life because of ill health. He heart was, undoubtedly, in northern
Kenya where he had last lived for many years, quite simply, among the
native peoples there.
“I cannot stand the lush green of the
English countryside...Green should be a patch of cultivation, perhaps
just a fig-tree, in contrast to an expanse of desert; then it becomes
valuable.”
The Search for Sana
This is a
complicated onion of a book. Just as you think you see the story whole,
another layer peels off and you re-think what you may already have
concluded about its trajectory. There are passages where you are not
sure the characters are who they present themselves to be, and, in some
cases, they aren't. It would be a disservice to the author and to your
enjoyment of the book for me to reveal too much more, specifically,
about it.
How, then, to tie it in to the theme of this blog?
It
will not spoil your reading of the book for me to say the core of the
story resides in a town in what is now Israel, where both Arabs and
Jews live, although the action takes place in many places around the
world: first, Australia, then, not in order, Brazil, Italy, England,
New York and other places.
The main characters (other than the
narrator who appears to be the author himself) are two girls, one an
Arab and one a Jew, who are soul-sisters growing up in a small place in
Israel. The trajectory of their lives, together and apart, provide the
basis for the story.
Overlying the rest of the story is the
constant theme of conflict between Arab and Jew, between Palestinian
and Israeli, within and without the territory of Palestine/Israel.
This
conflict, without editorializing by the author/narrator except through
the different viewpoints of his characters, is destroying the land and
its peoples and generally poisoning the social and political atmosphere
of the earth. This may seem a commonplace and non-extraordinary thing
to say, but it is presented pungently by the author and, I feel, ties
in to the theme of this blog.
---
The Langoliers or Inevitable Entropy, by George Grie [Please click on the image]
These
three books are presenting the inevitability of decay, enhanced (I
paraphrase Thesiger) by too many humans occupying too little space.
Perhaps it is a simple matter of seeing
entropy
in action through what these books present. But this concept is
insufficient. What these books present, each in its own way, is man's
role in his and his world's undoing.