The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux

When I used to live in Singapore years ago, I read a lot of travel writing. And so when I went there in ‘24 to take care of my dad, I read more travel writing. Paul Theroux is probably one of my favorites of this genre.

This is a travel book by Paul Theroux. I’ve read only his travel writing. In any case, this is about his trip around the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Morocco. And along the way he meets people.

It is told in his typical style. A bit pissed off. With humor. I did find him very considerate towards the people he meets.

In reading this book, I realized I don’t read chapter titles.

Elias Canetti has an epigram about wishing to see a mouse eat a cat alive, but to toy with it first. Thinking about bullfighting I wanted to see a bull torment a matador to death, not trample him but gore him repeatedly and make him dance and bleed to death. This vindictive thought might have been shared by some people who went to bullfights; to see the matador trample
Quoting from Dalí’s autobiography talking about Lorca [Lorca] was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice … I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole. Amazing vanity.
When the English painter Francis Bacon was seventeen he saw dogshit on a sidewalk and had an epiphany: “There it is - this is what life is like”. Not entirely sure what he meant.
This was Sapjane, the frontier of the Republika Hrvatska (Croatia). It was a place much like Pivka or Bistrica. When a country was very small even these tiny, almost uninhabited places were inflated with a meaningless importance. He talks about how in Croatia everyone talks about how everything will be different in 10 years. I spent better part of a year there 9 years after his trip. And yes it was different from what he talked about. Though, some of the things were the same: the bullet pockmarks on walls, taxi drivers pointing to me which house had/has Croat/Serb/Bosnia families, talk of Ustashe, Chetniks. After Game of Thrones, of course, it has changed even more, I am sure. Though I’ve not been there since 2004.
.. in Saki, that “The art of public life lies in knowing when to stop, and then going a bit further.
Here is Waugh on the French: “As a race, it is true, the French tend to have strong heads, weak stomachs, and a rooted abhorrence of hospitality.” Germans are “ugly”. Paris is “bogus”. Monte Carlo is “supremely artificial”. Waugh even manages to be rude about the pyramids (“less impressive when seen close”) and the Sphinx is “an ill proportioned composition of inconsiderable esthetic appeal”. All this is from Evelyn Waugh’s book Labels: A Mediterranean Journal. Was one of the most celebrated travel books of the thirties. While Theroux is kinder than Waugh, one feels if he feels a bit of envy towards Waugh.
James Joyce believed that Italians were obsessed with that private parts. Space “when I walk into the bank in the morning”, he wrote, “I wait for someone to announce something about cazzo, culo or coglioni. This usually happens before quarter to nine”
When meeting Naguib Mahfouz some of this was in English some in Arabic. His accent could have been the accident of one of his characters that he described: “like the smell of cooking that lingers in a badly washed pan.”
More with Mahfouz he was old and physically shrunken, like the character of whom he wrote “there is nothing left for death to devour - a wrinkled face, sunken eyes and sharp bones”
*“A great blue mass, heaving, locked in as far as the Sultan Quaitbay by the Corniche wall and the giant stone jetty arm thrusting into the sea.” This is Mahfouz in his novel Miramar. “Frustrated. Caged. These waves slopping dully landwards have a sullen blue black look that continuously promises fury. The sea. It’s guts churn with flotsam and secret death.”
That night, lying in my cabin, I thought of poor diminished Alexandria, and it seemed logical that it should look that way, after so much of it - streets and buildings and monuments - have been ransacked by writers
I was still reading the Trollope novel, Dr. Wortle’s School, about the fuss in an English village over an apparent impropriety. Tonight the battle doctor was reflecting, “It’s often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion."
"There is an old Arabsaying,” Habibi said, “that the Jews celebrate the feast around gardens, the Christians around kitchens ,and the Muslims around graveyards”
Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque.
Jonathan indicated a passage in The Enchafed Flood Auden warmed this theme of the disorderly sea: “The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out which civilization emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the book of revelations notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the time of end of time is that ‘there was no more sea.‘”
In the small cluttered apartment I experienced a distinct epiphany feeling -with Nietzsche - that “without music life would be an error.”
This severely orthodox reaction had something to do with the waywardness of governments and the crookedness of politicians. Instead of working within the system, people were adopting a religious scourge which was a simpler remedy involving denunciation and murder. It was perhaps understandable, but I found it depressing.
Talking about how the people that he met and their stories was more the point of his travel though the setting was important too. I guess that is what all travel writing is about. I could not deny that the setting mattered the Rock of Gibraltar to me was the French tourist on a ledge at the top pinching an ape. I remembered van Gogh’s Arles because I was almost rundown by high-speed train at Arles station, while entrance by almond blossoms. In Olbia, Sardinia, a Senegalese scrounger told me in Italian how in Africa (which he visited regularly), he had two wives and six children: “Not many.” In Durrell’s Kyrenia, Fikret the Turk suffered over his bean soup and said, “I’ve been thinking about marriage. Please tell me what to do.” I could not think of Jerusalem without seeing a Lubavitcher Jew in a black hat and coat hoisting his orange mountain bike into an angry Arab’s cabbages. My lasting impression of Dubrovnik was not its glorious city, but rather its bomb craters and broken rules and the Croat Ivo saying, “I came home because home is home.”
The Greek genius for tacky construction surpassed anything I had seen - surprising in people who claim the Parthenon as part of their heritage
The problem with the liar is not his frank admission of lying, but rather when he robustly asserts that he’s telling the truth.
”I work all the time,” Bowles said. “Malraux said to me, ‘Never let yourself become a public monument. If you do, people will piss on you.‘”