Walk VIII
‘The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man’, said Bliss Carman. Posters with the quotation are all over London tube. The poet meant nature in general, but given he was Canadian probably a desert was not on his mind. Yet, why wouldn’t it. In the 1962 movie ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ the protagonist, who btw. lived not far from where I work (see picture), says he is drawn to the desert because ‘it’s clean’.
It’s not really clear what Lawrence means, possibly clean as in Carman’s ‘absence of man’, or as in empty, or understood as unsoiled by politics with which he is fed up. What is clear is that he is strangely drawn into the desert, impressed by its size and power. It seems that he falls in love with the desert’s isolation and welcomes the challenge of desert life. His companions, Arabs, cannot understand why anyone would voluntarily choose such an unwelcoming habitat.
I don’t know if it’s the proximity of Lawrence’s house, but I felt the same pull of endless sands. Before Lawrence leaves for the desert a politician named Dryden warns him that ‘only two kinds of creatures get fun in the desert: Bedouins and gods’, and that Lawrence is neither. I don’t claim to be the latter but thought that maybe my urban nomad’s nature was calling me to the origins of the nomadic spirit. So I went. And words cannot describe what I saw.
I was trying to figure out why was I drawn to the desert and what made me love it so much. In the movie Prince Feisal tells Lawrence that ‘No Arab loves the desert. They love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.’ What I came to understand is that the greatest joy in the desert is not the absence of man but the presence of nothing else. Feisal is right saying that no man needs nothing. At the desert you realise that the only thing you really need is another person to share it with.
