Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Jim used to say that the only thing keeping people from really living is a preoccupation with personal comfort. Here’s some lines from the “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” that are the best…

“...and there [we] drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. The slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby speech. “This,” they told me, “is the best: it has no taste.”…

The Bedouin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free. He lost material ties, comforts, all superfluities and other complications to achieve a personal liberty which haunted starvation and death…In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God. God was to him not anthropomorphic, not tangible, not moral or ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not natural: but the being, thus qualified not by divestiture but by investiture, a comprehending Being, the egg of all activity, with nature and matter just a glass reflecting him. The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive of anything which was or was not God; Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an every-day-ness of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by their decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least credible causes. He was the most familiar of all their words, and indeed we [the English] lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables…”

“…This faith of the desert was impossible in the towns.”