'le bapteme de solitude'

 

 

 

 

 

 Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time,

 you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns;

 and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air,

 as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound,

 minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky,

 compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous,

 it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, 

curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, 

cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone,

 and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, 

darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, 

so that the night never really goes dark.

You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, 

go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. 

Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls,

 or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, 

something that everyone who lives there has undergone 

and which the French call 'le bapteme de solitude.' 

 

It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness,

 for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape

 lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears...

A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you,

 and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining 

the person you have always been, or letting it take its course.

 For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while

 is quite the same as when he came.

...Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? 

The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude 

he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, 

silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, 

no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation

 of existing in the midst of something that is absolute.

 He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money,

 for the absolute has no price.

 

 

 

 

 ~  Paul Bowles, 

from Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue: 

Scenes from the Non-Christian World

 

 

 

 

 

from 'Fez'

...

They love the sound of a fountain splashing in the courtyard; on the coals of their braziers they sprinkle sandalwood and benzoin; they have a passion for sitting on a high spot of ground at twilight and watching the slow change of light, color and form in the landscape. Outside the ramparts are innumerable orchards, delightful little wildernesses of canebrake, where olive and fig trees abound. It is the custom of families to go out there on a late afternoon with their rugs, braziers and tea equipment. One discovers groups of such picnickers in the most secluded corners of the countryside, particularly on the northern slopes above the valley. Not long ago on one of my walks I came across a family spread out in the long grass. They were sitting quietly on their reed mats, but something in their collective attitude made me stop and observe them more closely. Then I saw that surrounding them at a radius of perhaps a hundred feet was a circle of bird cages, each supported by a stake driven into the ground. There were birds in all the cages and they were singing. The entire family sat there happily, listening. As urbanites in other places carry along their radios, they had brought their birds with them from the town, purely for entertainment. 

...

~ Paul Bowles

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