“In Africa, for the first time, I got a glimpse of the sort of pattern my life would take...that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk...I learned what many others have discovered before me, that Africa for all its perils represented wilderness and possibility...School teaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. I never wanted to be a tourist. I wished to be far away, as remote as possible, among people I could talk to.”
-Paul Theroux
The patterns of life; even spontaneity can be habit forming; the thrill of stepping into the unfamiliar, of walking down a simple street never before seen, of turning a bend in a small alley and allowing the world to unfold before your eyes; to become a 'beginner' again, to see with this 'beginner's mind;' lifes many paths, many divergent trails, alleys leading into this great unknown...a great, mysterious dance we dance on these footpaths...to step back, to see things as they really are, experiences, memories, that vanish into light and shadow; experiences yet to happen, that will succumb to the same fate.
Understanding that aloneness is not aloofness; a sense of solitude is more than alright; it is to be embraced, celebrated, seized upon, utilized, honored; possibility can whither like a dying leaf in the small sense of mind, the small mind that has forgotten wonder, that refuses to see the mysterious dance, to sit back and smile at it all, to not take it too seriously.
The wish of remoteness; being away, truly away; observing, witnessing both the beautiful and the terrible, the lights and the shadows, for the first time; a silent witness to the world, watching the dance unfold.
2.1.11 Bombay to Benares, India Railways
Swaying rhythmically, the sound of the tracks groaning and a distant diesel locomotive, a beast of man, groaning like an overloaded ox cart, riding into the Indian night. The oranges flashed through the opaque window, my little porthole into a strange world, a new world, though I have seen it many times already. Riding into the night; on a train filled with colors;
the car is half empty, yet I know this is a mirage.
I know upon waking and drawing back the small maroon curtain, which provides me a small, fleeting sense of privacy, illusory perhaps, that there will be bodies to fill every space, for this is always the case, in a land so small, with so many souls.
The swaying pulls me to slumber, but the journey has just begun.
2.4.11 Benares, The Ancient City of Kali, India
“I had the Rimbaudesque thrill that noone on earth knew where I was.”
-Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
The thrill of solitude. The thrill of seeking, of journey, of pilgrimage, of wandering.
The big boat, crammed with pilgrims in this holy city, the holiest of Hinduism, the place of Moksha, of liberation from the cyclical wheel of birth and death true to this faith, and others, its engine like a distant jackhammer pounding its way through the morning mist, its pistons methodically misfiring, a split second of complete silence, then continuing, makes its way up the most sacred of rivers, the Ganga, Mother Ganges. Its long, dark, backlit shadow casts over the glasslike surface of the water. Where these pilgrims are coming from, where they are going, I could not guess...the loud sounds of chanting, of what sounds like drums, a cacophony of human emotion, comes into range as the boat turns towards the muddy shoreline, towards home, or away, I do not know.
