Pursue It So Ardently

I spent the morning in the Sudan of Tayeb Salih (1929-2009).  As in years passed I am in New York after having traveled and finished a long journey across the world.  And though I am still and will always have more to read, certainly, about Russia, I am beginning to reorient my thinking to something new.   The next journey may never happen.  The next journey is predicated on a constellation of assumptions and contingencies.  But its best to plan for the next journey, regardless.

I think I am craving something that I want to sate.  That is, the moment, perhaps lost forever, not much longer mine to bestow, of introducing my daughters to places that make them gasp with wonder.  I think the last time a building did that was the Pantheon in Rome or Il Domo in Florence.  The buildings physically arrested my daughters and drew oxygen unwittingly from their lungs like a vacuum.  Perhaps we had some of that seeing wildlife in East Africa, though that is obviously different. 

Russia, at least as we confronted it, is a continental experience.  We went from one end to the other, mostly by land and its enormity kneaded itself into all of our minds.  I was enthralled by Moscow.  I walked around Saint Petersburg as though it were haunted and animate. But I don’t know that my children emitted any gasps of wonder. Perhaps it’s a thing of the past.  A thing that younger people do.

And so, I will try next year, I think.  I will try one last time before my older one goes off to college to orchestrate some awe.  Egypt, I suspect, may do.  The pyramids are older constructions than anything else of man’s and it is where the thread all Western and Near Eastern civilizations begin.  I have now begun to organize my reading around this general theme.

The Salih book is set on the outskirts of the Egyptian world, further up the Nile, towards Khartoum.  I looked.  It does not appear to be advisable to travel to Khartoum or much of anywhere else in the Northern Sudan these days, though we did have a friend who was teaching there up until last year.  Salih has a book that speaks to the intellectual prison of colonialism.  For the hundred and fifty years that Britain ran the place, and the ruling civilization was far away to the north.  Two of the characters in the story make this migration north to England and reject it, returning south, tainted.

I thought of China, and what it must be like in the Sudan, for example, among the grandsons of Salih.  This book was published in the year of my birth, 1966.  There were only the civilizational bookends of his homeland and the U.K. to consider.  OK.  There was also the pole of the Marxist world and as I now look,  years after this book was published there was indeed a briefly successful Marxist coup.  There was, after Japan defeats Russia in 1905 or the October Revolution in 1917, always some alternative to western colonialism perhaps.  But you wouldn’t know it reading Salih in this book.  His protagonists perfect and then reject Anglicanization.  It’s sad that they pursue it so ardently in the first place, and sad that they then rejected and it was all numbing to consider that these choices, were all there was.  I kept wondering about the kids of today’s Sudan, few of whom are particularly interested in Anglicanization. What do they think of China and its efforts to support their country, regardless of what it’s government does?

I don’t think we’ll have time or clear passage to visit Salih’s land next summer.  But whether its ancient or contemporary Egypt this Nubian component seems pivotal to understanding the Nile.

Wednesday 7/18/18