T.E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom

In the very outset, at the first meeting with them [Arabs], was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades (p. 39).

Three hours later we were on the move again, helped now by the last shining of the moon. We marched down Wadi Mared, the night of it dead, hot, silent, and on each side sharp-pointed hills standing up black and white in the exhausted air. There were many trees. Dawn finally came to us as we passed out of the narrows into a broad place, over whose flat floor an uneasy wind span circles, capriciously in the dust. The day strengthened always, and now showed Bir ibn Hassani just to our right. The trim settlement of absurd little houses, brown and white, holding together for security's sake, looked doll-like and more lonely than the desert, in the immense shadow of the dark precipice of Subh, behind. While we watched it, hoping to see life at its doors, the sun was rushing up, and the fretted cliffs, those thousands of feet above our heads, became outlined in hard refracted shafts of white light against a sky still sallow with the transient dawn (p. 85).

The Turks were stupid; the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife (p. 193).

Nasir rolled over on his back, with my glasses, and began to study the stars, counting aloud first one group and then another; crying out with surprise at discovering little lights not noticed by his unaided eye. Auda set us on to talk of telescopes -- of the great ones -- and of how man in three hundred years had so far advanced from his first essay that now he built glasses as long as a tent, through which he counted thousands of unknown stars. 'And the stars -- what are they?' We slipped into talk of suns beyond suns, sizes and distance beyond wit. 'What will now happen with this knowledge?' asked Mohammed. 'We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo's; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.'

'Why are the Westerners always wanting all?' provokingly said Auda. 'Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions.' 'We want the world's end, Auda.' 'But that is God's,' complained Zaal, half angry. (pp. 281-82).

Fellows were very proud of being in my bodyguard, which developed a professionalism almost flamboyant. They dressed like a bed of tulips, in every colour but white; for that was my constant wear, and they did not wish to seem to presume. In half an hour they would make ready for a ride of six weeks, that being the limit for which food could be carried at the saddle-bow. Baggage camels they shrank from as a disgrace. They would travel day and night at my whim, and made it a point of honour never to mention fatigue. If a new man grumbled, the others would silence him, or change the current of his complaint, brutally (pp. 465-66).

In my saddle-bags was a Morte d'Arthur. It relieved my disgust (T.E. Lawrence. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. Garden City Publishing, 1938, p. 485).

Lawrence "of Arabia's" autobiographical account of his role in the Arabs' guerilla warfare against the Turks during WWI, culminating in the seizure of Damascus, is remarkable and moving on a number of counts: in part, for his extraordinary love of the Arabs and their way of life; in part, for the vivid, detailed, and eloquent depiction of the desert landscape; and, in part too, for the anguish with which it is written, torn as the author was between the interests of British imperialism and his hopes for Arab self-rule, largely dashed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Then, too, the account is streaked with cheeky, even subversive impudence, a boyish idealism nurtured on medieval romance (he wrote his senior thesis at Oxford on castles constructed during the Crusades), and a complex mixture of self-love and self-loathing, providing us, perhaps, with one of the first, complicated 20th-century heroes. Revolt in the Desert, without all the accounts of gravel along the way, is his abridgement of Seven Pillars. For other good books on Arabian territories, see especially Thesinger's Arabian Sands. Charles Doughty's Arabia Deserta is the grand-daddy of them all (Lawrence wrote the introduction to its reprinted edition in the 20's), and Jonathan Raban's Arabia is a briefer and more accessible overview. (Others say that Betram Thomas's Arabia Felix is also good, but I've not read it.) As for T.E. Lawrence himself -- it turns out there's an entire industry devoted to the man, a half-dozen biographies, collections of letters, accusations (he sold out the Arabs, he was an egotist, a liar) and defenses, psychoanalyses of an extremely complicated life, and more. In the meanwhile, I thought Seven Pillars was really quite magnificent!