It is through
adversity that we come to know our strengths, and he who is never
tested can only know the shallowness of his private striving. To
say that we live in trying times is obvious, for we have always lived
in trying times, my study of history reveals the truth that the world
is always ending in some way, and always being reborn. My current
era is no different from your own Mr Lawrence, and your years of
struggle in the Arab desert give me continual comfort to know that a
man (or woman), may face such suffering, and through those
experiences, come to know their own strengths.
The sign on the door
to my heart says:
Business As Usual
-only now,
I may prove my heart worthy
not only of my own ideals and goals
but now,
also,
I may prove myself worthy
of being called a man
of virtue
in a time of
calamity.
- Me
I am a poet, not a
warrior with a rifle. My struggle is against apathy. My goal is the
liberation of my own mind and heart, and through the beauty of my
language, I may share this liberation with others, and offer an open
door through which they may pass into their own freedom. To describe
the struggles of my simple civilised life, through peace and
calamity, and to make beautiful music from whatever events may
transpire, seems a worthy use of my talents.
But what exactly is
this 'liberty' of which I speak? What is this freedom that I strive
towards? There are many kinds of freedom, and not all of them are
good, but you, Mr Lawrence, I think perhaps that you found something
very important early in your long adventure, in the ruins of a Roman
settlement.
From Chapter III
The common base of all the Semitic
creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of
world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to
preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this
invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first
knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in
early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of
North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed
was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen.
The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater
richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of
flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling
room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'.
But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come
and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main
lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there
drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the
desert, throbbing past. That 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.' My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries
to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
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. He saw no virtue
in poverty herself: he enjoyed the little vices and luxuries—coffee,
fresh water, women—which he could still preserve. 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
nor 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.
I could go on and
on, quoting passages from your book, and perhaps I will write another
letter, you certainly deserve more than one conversation. I have
carried your book with me for months, sharing passages with anyone
who will listen to me read. I have breathed life into the dry pages
and found in your story a vigour and stimulation that has encouraged
me to face my own life with greater courage.
I cannot thank you
enough.
With gratitude and
respect
Morgan.
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