What Lawrence of Arabia had to say

Was glancing at Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence again and fear I may have been too dismissive in an earlier entry. He may not be up there with Joyce and Eliot, but he did have something. In between the endless treks across the desert and the many descriptions of sand in all its many varieties (oh yes…), there are some astute observations, although he was definitely a man of his time, with the biases and prejudices you would expect.

Here is a flavour, entirely without comment:

‘A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again.’

Describing the men he met; they had… ‘a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitations, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand out metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief…’

‘The first great rush around the Mediterranean had shown the world the power of an excited Arab for a short spell of intense physical activity; but when the effort burned out the lack of endurance and routine in the Semitic mind became as evident. The provinces they had overrun they neglected, out of sheer distaste of system, and had to seek out the help of their conquered subjects, or of more vigorous foreigners, to adminster their ill-knit and inchoate empires.’

‘It was midday; and the noon sun in the east, like moonlight, put to sleep the colours. There were only lights and shadows, the white houses and black gaps of streets.’

‘It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia.’

‘A weariness of the desert was the living always in company, each of the party hearing all that was said and seeing all that was done by the others day and night.’

‘The Arab leaders showed a completeness of instinct, a reliance upon intuition, the unperceived foreknown, which left out centrifugal minds gasping, Like women, they judged quickly, effortlessly, unreasonably. It almost seemed as though the Oriental exclusion of woman from politics had conferred her particular gifts upon the men.’

‘The Bedu were an odd people. For an Englishman, sojourning with them was unsatisfactory unless he had patience wide and deep as the sea. They were absolute slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water….They dreamed for weeks before and after their rare sexual exercises…Their strength was the strength of men geographically beyond temptation: the poverty of Arabia made them simple, continent, enduring.”

‘The Arabs, who usually lived in heaps, suspected some ulterior reason for any too careful privacy…it was a part of pride with Englishment to hug solitude; ourselves finding ourselves to be remarkable, when there was no competition present.’

‘Arabs being a race gifted with uncommon quickness of mind, and overvaluing it…..’

‘Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews, peoples who placed revelation before reason’

‘ I was dead tired of my life, longing as seldom before for the moody skies of England. This sunset was fierce, stimulant, barbaric; reviving the colours of the desert like a draught – as indeed it did each evening, in a new miracle of strength and heat – while my longings were for weakness, chills and grey mistiness, that the world might not be so crystalline clear, so definitely right and wrong.’

‘ …I found fear a mean, over-rated motive, no deterrant, and, though a stimulant, a poisonous stimulant, whose every injection served to consume more of the system to which it was applied.’

‘Our aim was a facade rather than a fitted building.’