Back to crime — tomorrow, maybe

I was going to get back to crime fiction today, but I keep coming across wise and striking observations from The Way of the World. Here are two more.

The first is that nothing remains of true Islam "now that fanaticism has re-emerged." Predictable stuff today, or at least up until recently, but Bouvier wrote those words in 1953. And this:

"Alexander, a recent coloniser, brought Aristotle to the barbarians; thus the widespread mania for believing that the Graeco-Romans invented the world; and thus the contempt — in secondary education — for things Eastern (just a bit of Egypt, Luxor and the pyramids, so that children can learn to draw shadows). The Graeco-Romans themselves — see Herodotus, or the Cyropaedia — were not so chauvinistic. They greatly respected Iran, to which they owed much: astrology, the horse, the postal system, many gods, a few good manners, and no doubt also that carpe diem of which the Iranians are such past masters."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Life on the road

My current reading is not crime, but it shares a striking sentiment with one of the great espionage adventure novels.

The current book is Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World; the classic adventure tale is John Buchan's Greenmantle, about which I wrote here.

Buchan's Richard Hannay, exhausted when he reaches Constantinople, finds the city

"a mighty disappointment. ... I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere. It was a drizzling day, with a south-east wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs of mud. The first part I struck looked like a dingy colonial suburb — wooden houses and corrugated iron roofs, and endless dirty, sallow children."

Later, cleaned up and rescued, Hannay sees the city differently and draws a lesson from this:

"What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty ... A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery. I felt a free man once more, and could use my eyes."

Bouvier is brought to similar reflections by bouts of dysentery in Macedonia:

"With sweating foreheads, we'd rush to the Turkish-style toilets and resign ourselves to staying there, despite hammering on the door, because dysentery grants only brief respites.

"When I found myself in this low situation, the town would get me down. It was very sudden; it was enough to have a lowering sky and few drops of rain for the streets to be transformed into quagmires ... Everything in it that was misshapen, nauseating and deceptive would emerge with ightmarish clarity. ... In my mind I poured acid over the street, cauterizing it. ...

"When I got over that, I would see through the window, in the evening sunshine, the white houses still steaming from the downpour, the mountain chain spread out beneath a washed sky and the army of tobacco plants, which surrounded the town with their reassuring sturdy leaves. Once again I would find myself in a solid world, at the heart of a gilded lion. The town had revived. I could dream."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Way of the World

I take a brief break from crime with this post, with a tip of the hat to the crime writer who directed me toward its subject.

The subject is Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World, and I'm reading it slowly. That's just as well; though the book is a journal, a factual account of the author's trip from Switzerland to the Khyber Pass in 1953, it is full of images redolent of poetry and mystery — a song about a soldier "who, on returning from the war requested a pancake to be kneaded until it was `as white as this man's shirt.'"

or

"We set up the machine and looked up to meet a hundred pairs of magnificent eyes; the whole tribe was on tiptoes around us."

I can read those lines and feel I've read an entire story. What lines make you feel that way?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010