"Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."
--Gustave Flaubert
Long before he became the fabled Lawrence of Arabia, he was just another young Englishman, like so many of his Oxford classmates, entranced by the Middle East--so he set out for it in December of 1910, always open to new vistas and experiences. His attitude was quite different from the two middle-aged ladies I heard discussing their trips abroad over lunch. Their complaints were numerous: too many foreigners everywhere, you couldn't get a simple American meal of Coke and fries, no one spoke English or all too many spoke their own highly accented version of it . . . . It was all such a bother.
Young Lawrence, on the other hand, looked on every inconvenience as an opportunity, every delay an invitation to tarry and take in the sights and sounds of a new city. The traveler, it turns out, is what makes the trip.
Lawrence crossed over the Mediterranean en route east, his journey made all the more enjoyable and memorable--to him, anyway--by the persistent engine problems of his ship, the S.S. Saghalien, a name now mercifully lost to imperfect memory. Its problems made it necessary for its passengers to interrupt their voyage at Naples, Athens and then Constantinople en route to their destinations.
Naturally enough for someone of Lawrence's temperament, he found the interruptions unexpected pleasures, and delighted in each of them. He would stay on in the Middle East for the next four years, returning to England only for intermittent visits.
To quote one of the letters chosen for a fine selection titled T.E. Lawrence: the Selected Letters, edited by Malcolm Brown and published in 1989:
"Just as we entered the Piraeus the sun rose, & like magic turned the black bars to golds of pillar and architrave and pediment, against the shadowed slopes of Hymetreus. That was the Acropolis from a distance--a mixture of all the reds and yellows you can think of with white for the high-lights and brown-gold in the shadows."
Young Lawrence was delighted by the sight because he had been prepared for delight by a classical liberal education with its emphasis on the ancient Greeks. He was, in short, already an educated man, one definition of which is someone who is never bored.
"For the present," he wrote home from Athens, "I am only confused with it: I do not know how much was Athens, and how much the coloring of my imagination upon it." He hoped to return and sort it all out. But then it was time to board the creaky old vessel and go on.
"Constantinople is as much life as Athens stood for sleep," he wrote. "It is a huge town crammed with people, who all live and eat, and sleep in the streets apparently . . . . The colour and movement in the streets are unsurpassable--Damascus is not within call of it--and besides there are glorious-colored mosques, in blue and gold and cream and green tiles, and yellow glazed pottery . . . . I don't know Turkish, but have bought a grammar, and started it . . . ."
That's another secret of the successful traveler. He is always learning, observing, reporting, if only to himself.
And then Lawrence was off to begin the business of his trip: his archaeological dig at Carchemish--but not unaccompanied. He had his books with him. To quote a letter of his to his mother back home:
"Father won't know this--but if you can get the right book at the right time you taste joys--not only bodily, physical but spiritual also, which can pass one above and beyond one's miserable physical self, as it were, through a huge air, following the light of another man's thought. And can never be quite the old self again. You have forgotten a little bit: or rather pushed it out with a little of the imagination of what is immortal in someone who came before you."
Reading, fully entered into, is not unlike travel itself when fully experienced, savored, and remembered. It is the world's great antidote to the empty passage of time.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 11/18/2015