Of Books and Bicycles

The Places in Between, part II

So I’ve been meaning to write about Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between. I thought this was a fantastic book for a lot of reasons — the writing is wonderful, the story of his walk is enthralling, and the information he gives about Afghanistan is of the type you won’t find in most other books about the country.

As I was reading I had a tendency to focus on the adventure parts of it, but I don’t want to neglect the political and historical aspects: I learned a lot about the history of Afghanistan, as Stewart gives descriptions of the towns and villages he passes through and tells a bit of their past. He talks a lot about the complex religious heritage of the place, including the Buddhism practiced in ancient times and the more contemporary Islamic history; he explores the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha sculptures destroyed by the Taliban only 9 months before he arrived there. He also criticizes westerners who lament the lost Buddhas but know very little of what’s happening to the people alive there today.

I was fascinated by the conversations with villagers Stewart recounts, and the very vague and hazy picture of the west many of the people have — not so different from the hazy picture of Afghanistan many westerners have, although it’s easy, particularly for Americans, to think that the whole world knows everything about us. Many of the people he talked to had never traveled farther than a few miles from their villages. There are very few women in the book, as for the most part they keep themselves separate from the groups of men Stewart moves among, although, interestingly, in the remote mountainous area the Hazara people inhabit, women are allowed a little more freedom. Stewart stays away from overt political statements, but he does criticize western politicians for saying ill-informed things about Islam and westerners in general for not understanding or caring much about the region.

And then there’s the adventure:

Daulatyar was only fifteen kilometers away and there were probably two hours of daylight left, but I had forgotten how much deep mud and wet snow slowed my pace. I felt muffled in the snow-fog and imprisoned by the rain hood I was wearing. I threw back the hood. I could hear and see again. The day was very silent and the plain seemed very large. The snow driving into my eyes at a forty-five-degree angle made me feel much freer, but my left foot seemed frozen to a cold iron plate.

Exhaustion and repetition created within the pain a space of exhilaration and control. And at this point, I saw two jeeps, their headlights on, weaving slowly toward us through the fog. They were the first vehicles I’d seen since Chaghcharan. When they reached me, an electric window went down. It was the Special Forces team from the airstrip.

“You,” said the driver, “are a fucking nutter.” Then he smiled and drove on, leaving me in the snow. I had seen these men at work when I was in the army and in the Foreign Office and I couldn’t imagine a better compliment. I walked on in a good mood.

Stewart insists on walking every inch of the way, even though he must walk in freezing temperatures over mountains, making his way through snow drifts, often in wet clothes. He’s sick much of the way, probably having caught a virus in the water and because he doesn’t eat very well. He depends on local hospitality traditions, often very reluctantly kept, for his food and shelter every night. At one point he lay down in the snow exhausted and in despair, and even though I knew he made it out of Afghanistan alive, I was afraid he wouldn’t get up again. His dog Babur rescues him, barking and whining until he gets up and starts walking again.

Babur turns out to be an important part of the story; Stewart picks him up in an Afghan village when a family, who had been mistreating the dog, offers to give him away. He is a huge mastiff of one type or another, and Stewart spends much of the book dragging him reluctantly along. Poor Babur causes a lot of trouble; at every village they pass, a pack of dogs comes chasing after him looking for a fight. Stewart is constantly beating back these wild dogs with his walking stick. But Babur is an excellent companion and his life with Stewart is much better although more physically demanding than his previous one.

And, finally, here is an example of the kind of writing you’ll find in this book:
Almost every morning, regrets and anxieties had run through my mind like a cheap tune — often repeated, revealing nothing. But as I kept moving, no thoughts came. Instead I became aware of the landscape as I once had in the Indian Himalayas. Every element around me seemed sharper, the colors more intense. I stared, expecting the effect to fade, but the objects only continued to develop in reality and presence. I was suddenly afraid, uncertain I could sustain this vision.

This moment was new to me. I had not dreamed or imagined it before. Yet I recognized it. I felt that I was as I was in the place, and that I had known it before. This was the last day of my walk. To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion seemed too neat. But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible. I had no words for it. Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.

I finished Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between and loved it, and I’ll write about it soon, but I’m too tired right now. The book does remind me of how fond I am of walking and particularly of going on epic walks (Rory Stewart walks across Afghanistan in the winter through the mountains).

I just came across this article from the New York Times about how the novelist Will Self walked from Kennedy airport to Manhattan — about 20 miles — rather than taking a cab. He flew to New York from Heathrow and he didn’t take a cab to Heathrow either; he walked there from his home, about 26 miles. He wanted to do the New York walk because:

It would take him through parts of the city that most people never notice while driving in a car: an experience that Mr. Self, a student of psycho-geography, believes has imposed a “windscreen-based virtuality” on travel, cutting us off from experiencing our own topography.

“People don’t know where they are anymore, “he said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I’m not quite sure what “psycho-geography” is, although it sounds interesting. I like his idea a lot — that the best adventures available today are those we can experience in near-by places, if we just get outside and actually experience them.

I’ve written before about how much I liked Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust, a history of walking. Does anybody know of other good books about walking — either theoretical/historical ones, or stories of long walks? I know of Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods, and Dark Orpheus mentioned Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines as one that would interest me. Others? I haven’t read enough contemporary travel writing, and this is one form of it that particularly interests me.

More on Rory Stewart tomorrow …

I’ve begun Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, a book about his walk across Afghanistan starting in January, 2002. It’s quite absorbing, and it makes me want to go on adventures. Before this trip, he’d spent 16 months walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, but he’d had to skip Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to let him into the country. After the fall of the Taliban, he decided to give it another try. This is how he begins his Preface:

I’m not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure. But it was the most interesting part of my journey across Asia.

I love that attitude, the “I’m not sure why I did it, I just wanted to” attitude. Because why do anything at all, really? In a lot of ways walking across Asia makes as much sense as anything else anybody might choose to do. So he walked across Asia because it was there and he could.

Can I tell you how much this makes me want to go off on some crazy, senseless adventure?

So far the book is very well written, very absorbing, and full of sentences like these:

It was possible that they had simply told Qasim and Abdul Haq to take me outside the city and kill me. No one would notice in the middle of a war. I felt it would be ludicrous to be killed only eight kilometers into my journey and not for the first time worried that when I was killed people would think me foolhardy.

I’ve read story after story of Stewart walking into strange villages with no idea whether he’ll be welcomed or attacked. In his previous walks, people had always taken him in, following customs of hospitality, but in Afghanistan things are not so simple — while the hospitality custom is still strong, so is fear of strangers in a country so unsettled.

Stewart briefly describes what fills his mind while he’s walking day after day. This is the only passage I’ve come across so far that talks about walking in a more theoretical way; I kind of wish he’d do it more often, but that’s not what the book is about (and if you’re interested in that subject, I highly recommend Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust):

Before I started, I imagined I could fill my days by composing an epic poem in my head or writing a novel about a Scottish village that would become more rooted in a single place as I kept moving. In Iran I tried earnestly to think through philosophical arguments, learn Persian vocabulary, and memorize poetry. Perhaps this is why I never felt quite at ease walking in Iran.

In Pakistan, having left the desert and entered the lush Doab of the Punjab, I stopped trying to think and instead looked at peacocks in trees and the movement of the canal water. In India, when I was walking from one pilgrimage site to another across the Himalayas, I carried the Bhagavad Gita open in my left hand and read one line at a time. In the center of Nepal, I began to count my breaths and my steps, and to recite phrases to myself, pushing thoughts away. This is the way some people meditate. I could only feel that calm for at most an hour a day. It was, however, a serenity I had not felt before. It was what I valued most about walking.

As an occasional backpacker, I’m interested in what people think about when they spend hours walking (or something similar like running or riding) — for me, sometimes get in the meditative mood Stewart describes and I agree with him that it’s one of the best things about walking.

More on this book later …

So I finished Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree yesterday, just as I thought I might. The weather never did get nice enough to go on a bike ride, although The Hobgoblin, Muttboy, and I did go on a hour-long walk in the rain at our local woodsy park. After that, it was nice to come home and take a warm shower and stay indoors for most of the rest of the day.

I thought the book was a lot of fun. It’s rather addictive; I’d finish a chapter and consider moving on to something else or drifting off to sleep, but then I’d look at the list of books read and books bought that begins the next chapter, and I’d think, oh, just one more. Next thing I knew, the book was finished. Hornby’s attitude toward books is infectious. I like how he reads all kinds of different stuff; he writes just as well and just as enthusiastically about a collection of Chekhov’s letters as he does about, say, Mystic River.

There were a couple things that bugged me. He has a bit of an attitude about the “literary novel”; he reads them and reads them happily, but he picks on them an awful lot, to the extent that I began to wonder why, and I also began to wonder if it’s really so clear just what the “literary novel” is. Is it really a clearly-defined category? When talking about Chris Coake’s book of short stories We’re in Trouble he says this:

Sometimes, when you’re reading the stories, you forget to breathe, which probably means that you read them with more speed than the writer intended. Are they literary? They’re beautifully written, and they have bottom, but they’re never dull, and they all contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas. And Coake never draws attention to his own art and language; he wants you to look at his people, not listen to his voice. So they’re literary in the sense that they’re serious, and will probably be nominated for prizes, but they’re unliterary in the sense that they could end up mattering to people.

Now this strikes me as unfair. Why should the “literary” be that which doesn’t matter to people? I think he’s got too much invested in this idea of the literary and that he too easily categorizes and dismisses books based on their supposedly “literary” qualities and readers based on their devotion to those qualities, whatever they are. I’m not sure most readers actually read with this category in mind.

Hornby plays around with Hemingwayesque, hyper-masculine posturing about books and writing a little too much for my taste. Books are always in a battle with other books or with other forms of art. This is what’s on the book jacket; it’s quite funny — but also … eh, not my thing:

Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute vs. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper vs. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception — Blonde on Blonde might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chances against Citizen Kane. And every now and then you’d get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I’m still backing literature twenty-nine times out of thirty.

This is clever, but after a couple of passages about fights among books and the degree of strength or wussiness it requires to write, I start to feel a little alienated. What saves it for me is that Hornby is not actually taking any of it seriously; he’s mocking himself a bit, pretty much admitting he’s not very good at the Hemingwayesque, hyper-masculine stuff.

I didn’t come away with a lot of new books I want to read, although I did pick up a couple of recommendations. One is Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books; I remember Jenny D. has an intriguing post on it. The other is Janet Malcolm’s book on Chekhov, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. This seems like a very interesting mix of literary criticism and personal narrative, a combination I like very much.