Daoine · Sidh(e)

You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plan and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptême de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.

Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast , luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute.

He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price.



Desert scene, photograph taken sometime in the first decade or two of the twentieth century - digital image courtesy of guard_devotees


Paul Bowles immigrated to Morocco in 1947, and lived in Tangiers until his death in 1999. As a young man he befriended Gertrude Stein, studied music with Aaron Copeland and tried his hand at writing. It was Stein who first encouraged him to go to Morocco (in 1931), and when he finally moved there permanently in 1947, he went about creating a novel, which he 'wrote in bed in hotels in the desert' and titled A Sheltering Sky. For the remainder of his life, Bowles wrote a number of other novels, and produced short story and essay collections, some of which he collaborated on with Moroccan authors. His work is brilliantly descriptive - intensely journalistic in many instances, and all capturing the beauty and harshness of the north African cultural and physical landscape into which he immersed himself. He was a true convert of the desert, experiencing that baptism of solitude quite early in his life there, and he never turned his back on its allure.

Here is a clip from the closing scene of Bernardo Bertolucci's film adaptation of A Sheltering Sky (starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich) ... in it Bowles recites from a piece called 'Limitless' ...