This is an excerpt from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.  One of the story lines in the novel is about explorers looking for a mythical desert oasis city.  Madox – the man who kills himself in the excerpt below – is a quiet explorer who has just returned to his wife back home, his work interrupted by the war’s incursion into the north African desert.

One of Ondaatje’s themes is nationalism.  When the Church becomes a propaganda arm of a warring state, civilized people kill themselves.  At least this civilized man does.  The uncivilized demur and look for profits.  And the flunkie priest in his robes blathers on.

It was July 1939.  They caught a bus from their village into Yeovil.  The bus had been slow and so they had been late for the service.  At the back of the crowded church, in order to find seats they decided to sit separately.  When the sermon began half an hour later, it was jingoistic and without any doubt in its support of the war.  The priest intoned blithely about battle, blessing the government and the men about to enter the war.  Madox listened as the sermon grew more impassioned.  He pulled out the desert pistol, bent over and shot himself in the heart.  He was dead immediately.  A great silence.  Desert silence.  Planeless silence.  They heard his body collapse against the pew.  Nothing else moved.  The priest frozen in a gesture.  It was like those silences when a glass funnel round a candle in church splits and all faces turn.  His wife walked down the centre aisle, stopped at his row, muttered something, and they let her in beside him.  She knelt down, her arms enclosing him.

/…/

It is important to die in holy places.  That was one of the secrets of the desert.  So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.

~Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Here is an excerpt from Alain de Botton’s book The Consolations of Philosophy in which he describes the French philosopher Montaigne’s trip to Rome.  Things haven’t changed much, we are as in love with ourselves and our cultures and our way of doing things as they were in 1580.  His larger point is that at a certain level our unwillingness to adjust to cultural differences of other people is foible; but that if we are not careful it can be much more and can even lead us to do terrible things against people that we haven’t taken the time to understand.

In the summer of 1580, Montaigne acted on the desire of a lifetime, and made his first journey outside France, setting off on horseback to Rome via Germany, |Austria and Switzerland.  He travelled in the company of four young noblemen, including his brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, and a dozen servants.  They were to be away from home for seventeen months, covering 3,000 miles.  Among other towns, the party rode through Basle, Baden, Schaffhausen, Augsburg, Innsbruck, Verona, Venice, Padua, Bologna, Florence and Siena – finally reaching Rome towards evening on the last day of November 1580.

As the party travelled, Montaigne observed how people’s ideas of what was normal altered sharply from provice to province.  In inns in the Swiss cantons, they thought it normal that beds should be raised high off the ground, so that one needed steps to climb into hem, that there should be pretty curtains around them and that travellers should have rooms to themselves.  A few miles away, in Germany, it was thought normal that beds should be low on the ground, have no curtains around them and that travellers should sleep four to a room.  Innkeepers there offered feather quilts rather than the sheets one found in French inns.  In Basle, people didn’t mix water with their wine and had six or seven courses for dinner, and in Baden they ate only fish on Wednesdays.  The smallest Swiss village was guarded by at least two policemen; the Germans rang their bells every quarter of an hour, in certain towns, every minute.  In Lindau, they served soup made of quinces, the meat dish came before the soup, and the bread was made with fennel.

French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences.  In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home.  They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread.  Montaigne watched them from his table:

“Once out of their villages, they feel like fish out of water.  Wherever they go they cling to their ways and curse foreign ones,  If they come across a fellow-countryman … they celebrate the event … With a morose and taciturn prudence they travel about wrapped up in their cloaks and protecting themselves from the contagion of an unknown clime.”

Here is a list of winds and sandstorms in the Middle East and North Africa described by Michael Ondaatje in his beautiful book The English Patient.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives.  There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome.  The alm, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia.  The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues.  These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise.  The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days — burying villages.  There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition.  Th haboob — a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousand metres high and is followed by rain.  The harmattan, which blows and eventually drowns itself into the Atlantic.  Imbat, a breeze in North Africa.  Some winds that just sigh towards the sky.  Night dust storms that come with the cold.  The khamsin, a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days — the ninth plague of Egypt.  The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.

There is also the ——, the secret wind of the desert whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.  And the nafhat — a blast out of Arabia.  The mezzar-ifoullousen — a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.”  The beshabar, a black and dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.”  The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle.  As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.

Other, private winds.

I have always found Pico Iyer to be dispassionate about his self described state of transience, moving about the world; my experience of growing up global is like an agony of yearning.  In the following excerpt from his essay Living in the Transit Lounge, there is the start of a nice ambivalence that begins to resonate a little more for me.  He describes how the refugee and exile have strong feelings for both the place they are leaving and the place they are going to, but the transit lounger, the global soul, is caught is a sort of limbo:  he has more questions than answers, nothing is definite, with indistinct emotions, and resolves to merely watch his own life and wait – like a samsonite on a carousel – to be claimed!

If I have any deeper home, it is, I suppose, in English.  My language is the house I carry round with me as a snail his shell; and in my lesser moments I try to forget that mine is not the language spoken in America, or even, really, by any member of my family.

Yet even here, I find, I cannot place my accent, or reproduce it as I can the tones of others.  And I am so used to modifying my English inflections according to whom I am talking to – an American, an Englishman, a villager in Nepal, a receptionist in Paris – that I scarcely know what kind of voice I have.

I wonder sometimes if this new kind of non-affiliation may not be alien to something fundamental in the human state.  The refugee at least harbors passionate feelings about the world he has left – and generally seeks to return there; the exile at least is propelled by some kind of strong emotion away from the old country and towards the new – indifference is not an exile emotion.  But what does the Transit Lounger feel?  What are the issues that we would die for?  What are the passions that we would live for?

Airports are among the only sites in public life where emotions are hugely sanctioned, in block capitals.  We see people weep, shout, kiss in airports; we see them at the furthest edges of excitement and exhaustion.  Airports are privileged spaces where we can see the primal states writ large – fear, recognition, hope.  But there are some of us, perhaps, sitting at the Departure Gate, boarding passes in hand, watching the destination ticking over, who feel neither the pain of separation nor the exultation of wonder; who alight with the same emotions with which we embarked; who go down to the baggage carousel and watch our lives circling, circling, circling, waiting to be claimed.

-Pico Iyer, Living in the Transit Lounge, Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global, Eidse and Sichel, editors.

This is an excerpt from David Byrne’s book Bicycle Diaries in which he discusses how the Chinese in Hong Kong tend to destroy anything that has been designed and built for the public realm.  I grew up in India and have occasionally thought about returning there to set up life, but hesitate when I remember that India, like China it seems, lacks a commitment to the pleasures of public life.  I think perhaps one of the best phrase I can think of for this commitment is ‘cafe culture.’  It barely exists in America – almost exclusively in New York – but thrives in Europe, the Mediterranean and large cities in Asia.  I was just in London and Paris – four days in each city -:  the street culture exists in Paris but London is in the dark ages.  Why?  I think Byrne is exactly right:  the prevailing philosophy of any culture is made manifest in the building of its cities:  if all that matters is the king and the family, then public life will wither and die – or more likely be willfully destroyed.

I am reading Continental Philosophy by Critchley who describes a sort of instrumentalist, get it done preponderance among 20th century English and American philosophers and contrasts this against the continental philosophers broader existential interest in what it means to live a fulfilled life.   If these are the – very different – preoccupations of the thinkers in the English and Continental traditions then I can see why their respective cities are so radically different.  And how the communist Chinese fall into step behind the instrumentalist Anglo world.

Here is David Byrne on Hong Kong:

I was recently in Hong Kong and a friend there commented that China doesn’t have a history of civic engagement.  Traditionally in China one had to accommodate two aspects of humanity — the emperor and his bureaucracy, and one’s own family.  And even though that family might be fairly extended it doesn’t include neighbors or coworkers, so a lot of the world is left out.  To hell with them.  As long as the emperor or his ministers aren’t after me and my family is okay then all’s right with the world.  I have been marveling at the rate of destruction of anything having to do with social pleasures and civic interaction in Hong Kong — funky markets, parks, waterfront promenades, bike lanes (of course) — I was amazed how anything designed for the common good is quickly bulldozed, privatized, or replaced by a condo or office tower.  According to my friend civic life is just not a part of the culture.  So in this case at least, the city is an accurate and physical reflection of how that culture views itself.  The city is a 3D manifestation of the social, and personal — and I’m suggesting that in turn, a city, its physical being, reinforces those ethics and recreates them in successive generations and in those who have immigrated to the city.  Cities self-perpetuate the mindset that made them.

-David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries, Viking 2009

Here is a quotation from Critchley’s Continental Philosophy in which he gives a kind of primer description of each of a half dozen or so significant 20th C European (non British) philosophers.

Critchley establishes a dialectic:  that an emphasis on knowledge leads to scientism and turns us into beasts and conversely an emphasis on wisdom rejects scientism, introduces obscurantism and turns us into lunatics.  But his broader point is that the Continental philosophers instruct us to return to searching for the meaning of life – by way of wisdom – and conversely to resist the reductive nature of mere knowledge.

My contention is that what philosophy should be thinking through at present is this dilemma which on the one side threatens to turn us into beasts, and on the other side into lunatics.  This means that the question of wisdom, and its related question of the meaning of life, should at the very least move closer to the centre of philosophical activity and not be treated with indifference, embarrassment, or even contempt.  The appeal of much that goes under the name of Continental philosophy, in my view, is that it attempts to unify or at least move closer together questions of knowledge and wisdom, of philosophical truth and existential meaning.  Examples are legion here, whether one thinks of Hegel on the life and death struggle for recognition as part and parcel of the ascent to absolute knowing; Nietzsche on the death of God and the need for a revaluation of values; Karl Marx on the alienation of human beings under conditions of capitalism and the requirement for an emancipatory and equitable social transformation; Freud on the unconscious repression at work in dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue and what that reveals about the irrationality at the heart of mental life; Heidegger on anxiety, the deadening indifference of inauthentic social life, and the need for an authentic existence; Sartre on bad faith, nausea, and the useless but necessary passion of human freedom; Albert Camus on the question of suicide in a universe rendered absurd by the death of God; Emmanuel Levinas on the trauma of our infinite responsibilities to others.  This list could be extended.

-Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford

This is excerpted from the article My Gypsy Childhood by Roxy Freeman in the Guardian.  She is a girl who never went to school, lived in a caravan, learned music and dance and how to cook and survive.  Eventually she decided she wanted an education and fought her way into a college.

These are the last three paragraphs of the article which describe her moving to a bricks and mortar place by the sea, and how removed she feels from nature and how constrained by her stable environment.

After completing my access course (thanks to a wonderful tutor, I got distinctions in all the units), I did a degree with the Open University, and that meant completely changing my way of life. Last November, at the age of 30, I moved to Brighton with my boyfriend and we live in a flat, which is bizarre and alien to me. My family are, admittedly, no longer truly nomadic, and my parents support my decision to transform my life, but I have never lived within bricks and mortar before, and I feel completely out of touch with nature now.

I can’t see or feel the change from one season to the next, I crave greenery, and I constantly wrestle with the emotion of feeling trapped. I spend half my life opening doors and windows, trying to get rid of the airless, claustrophobic feeling that comes with being inside. I get woken up by bin lorries, the rush-hour traffic and my neighbours shouting, instead of birdsong and the wind in the trees. I can’t sense when it’s going to rain because I can no longer smell it in the air, and when it does rain I can’t hear it landing on the roof.

I live near the sea because it gives me some sense of openness and freedom, but I don’t think I will ever feel truly settled here – or anywhere else. My instinct is to travel, and when you have grown up waking to different scenery every day, it’s easy to feel trapped. But to reach my dream, I have to put down roots.

Here is a bit of dialogue from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in which Jons, the Knight’s squire asks a fresco painter in a church about his painting of death and the plague.

The Seventh Seal is about a Knight who is returning to his castle after spending time fighting in the Crusades.  He is devout, preoccupied, a believer.  His squire Jons is a much better source if you like your information straight up, as we see in this scene.

The Painter knows who butters his bread and is the conduit for a culture of fear used by a priesthood to control their people.  Of course, he won’t admit it, but the insightful Squire has no problem labeling the art as propaganda.

JONS:  What is this supposed to represent?

PAINTER:  The Dance of Death.

JONS:  And that one is Death?

PAINTER:  Yes, he dances off with all of them.

JONS:  Why do you paint such nonsense?

PAINTER:  I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.

JONS:  Well, it’s not going to make them feel any happier.

PAINTER:  Why should one always make people happy?  It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in a while.

JONS:  Then they’ll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.

PAINTER:  Oh, they’ll look.  A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.

JONS:  If you do scare them …

PAINTER:  They’ll think.

JONS:  And if they think …

PAINTER:  They’ll become still more scared.

JONS:  And then they’ll run right into the arms of the priests.

PAINTER:  That’s not my business.

This is from an interview of Margaret Visser on her book The Rituals of Dinner.  In it, she makes the case for the eucharist being one of the most complex human constructs ever devised.  It is a meal full of content and ritual that upends everything we know, every order and truth and thing we hold sacred.

Her truly radical claim, that only two things really unite people:  joining together in killing one who has been isolated from the group, the scapegoat, and sharing a meal.  Her vision is isolating and bleak and more than a little true.

The Eucharist is blinding, it’s so incredible. It’s one of the richest, the most extraordinary rituals ever devised. I’m not talking about the belief in it. Just look at it analytically. It smashes all the categories of our culture: all of them. It smashes all the oppositions by which we categorize the world. It takes everything and makes it into one. The difference between here and everywhere is gone, the difference between one and many is gone, the difference between same and different is gone, the difference between meaning and fact is gone, the difference between host and guest is gone, the difference between God and man is gone–all the huge things which are absolutely divided in the experience of the world as we are brought up are smashed.

The mystic experience is one of perceiving a thing and its opposite at the same time, and realizing that black and white are the same. The Eucharist does this in an incredibly sophisticated way. And one of the many, many, many things it does is completely destroy the categorization of food, because it is a vegetarian meal which is also cannibal. And then you have all the poetry and all the ritual. This is mediated by ritual, it has to be–mediated by incredibly complex ritual although it’s extremely simple as well–and only eating can do this.

You see, there are two ways in which human beings are brought together most completely. One is by killing them, namely the scapegoat, and one is by eating together. And the Eucharist, of course, is about both. So it’s the ultimate uniting thing. But you see how food can say things like that. Only food could do the trick, because it’s an outside thing that comes inside. It’s one thing that we all share. We all eat it; we all become one. Human beings have been going on about food and its meaning since we were squatting around fires in caves. It’s the great metaphor. Much more important than sex. Sex is really a latecomer.

Here is Margaret Visser on table manners.  I like this topic because the dinner table, at different times in my life, has been fraught with a simmering underlying violence, or a place of real communion, or a time of loneliness.

We never never think that the family time around the dinner table could have this alternate meaning:  a summit of words designed in cooperation to kill one who has been singled out.  So, the least conforming in the circle must decide to suppress personal interest in order to not be eaten.

Table manners are social agreements; they are devised precisely because violence could so easily erupt at dinner.  Eating is aggressive by nature and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are,  most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.  But intimations of greed and rage keep breaking in: many mealtime superstitions, for example, point to the imminent death of one of the guests.  Eating is performed by the individual, in his or her most personal interest; eating in company, however, necessarily places the individual face to face with the group.  It is the group that insists on table manners; ‘they’ will not accept a refusal to conform.  The individual’s ‘personal interest’ lies therefore not only in ensuring his or her bodily survival, but also in pleasing, placating and not frightening or disgusting the other diners.

-Margaret Visser, Rituals of Dinner