Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

Paul Bowles: icon, historical figure, friend and destination for many around the world, died in November 1999, in Tangier, Morocco, at the age of 88. The expatriate writer, composer, and traveler, became part of Gertrude Stein’s artistic circle in 1931, and during that year, he made his first visit to Tangier with the great American composer, Aaron Copeland. In 1947, he moved to Tangier permanently, where he received such varied quests as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, and the Rolling Stones.

When Paul Bowles died, I had just finished reading “The Sheltering Sky”, and my paperback showed many turned-over corners that I used to mark interesting passages or prose. On everyone’s list of the 100 Greatest English Novels, it is an engaging and hypnotizing view of the edge of civilization in North Africa, set in the period just after World War II, as seen through the eyes of a world-weary and disenchanted American couple and their friend. That period in Europe and North Africa following World War II is such fertile ground for expression and is rich soil to plant a seed in; the post-war despair amid the growing tide of nihilism in regards to all things human. There is the life we know, and the life out there in the desert, just beyond our horizon and experience, the one in which all things are possible. As for the life out there, (in which we may find the meaning of ourselves, or in which we may lose everything), that life awaits us if we seek it. As for the life we know, that is moving inexorably to its end, along with us and our possibilities, as we head for our cosmic end and the ironies beyond.

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky”

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