le desert

a penny for my thoughts. Anyway, did manage to listen to a lot of pink floyd today. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is really so good.
Some Chatwin that I've been meaning to put up for a while:
"'Alone and amid the nations', masters of the raid, avid for increase yet disgusted by possesions, driven by the fantasy of all travellers to pine for a stable home- no people but the Jews have felt more keenly the moral ambiguities of settlement. Their God is a projection of their perplexity. their Book- the Old Testament and the New- may be read, on one level atleast, as a monumental dialogue between Him and His People in the rights and wrongs of living in the Land."

" Jahweh, in origin, is a God of the Way. His sanctuary is the Mobile Ark, His House a Tent, His Altar a cairn of rough stones. And though he may promise His Children a well-watered land- as blue and green as are a bedouin's favourite colours- He secretly desires for them the Desert."
What is it about the desert that is so mesmerising, or is it the authors? There was Thesiger, who was happiest when he was crossing the Empty Quarter with bin Ghabaisha, and bin Kadina(?). And Ghabaisha was so beautiful. Thesiger must have loved him. Bruce too read Thesiger, not quite sure how he felt about him.
Then there's Ondaatje's English Patient, who personalised Herodotus' Histories(?), keeping the relevant pages and sticking in his own stuff in the others. Also that whole horde of European women, often cross-dressing as men (Vested Interests) who dissapeared into the desert. Many didn't survive. Bruce is a part of this lot. He calls himself 'the sterile wanderer', that post-war despair, looking for answers at cultures that had been subtexted by the West.
That's just by way of remembering facts. Yet I say it cuz I am wondering really at myself. What is it that one loves so much about all of this? can you at all want something that you do not have the potential to achieve? Dream dream dream dream dream- thare's a song that goes this way. and I am thinking all the time how life will shape up to me. When I get my two penny worth of the world's beauty, will I remember to appreciate for what it is worth?
'REGARD THE MOON,
LA LUNE NE GARDE AUCUNE RANCUNE...
THE MOON HAS LOST HER MEMORY.'

To Eliot.