A Walk Around the Block

"Someday we'll go places

New lands and new faces

The day we quit punching the clock.

The future looks pleasant,

But at present

Let's take a walk around the block."

- Song by Harold Arlen, Lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg

We all know, or ought to know by now, the difference between a tourist and a traveler. As defined by Paul Bowles in his novel A Sheltering Sky: the traveler doesn't know where he's going and the tourist doesn't know where he's been. And Bowles's story of a young American married couples' disastrous journey off the beaten track should be seen as an emphatic warning against such excursions. But most of its readers are drawn, nonetheless, to the idea of getting lost. Just as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which was a powerful allegory of the fate of civilized men when they voyage too far from civilization, has been giving readers ever since the vicarious thrill of immersing themselves in exoticism, Bowles's writings actually nourished the neurosis that they were attempting to diagnose. By elaborately destroying the young American couple he turns loose on Morrocco, was Bowles tacitly trying to tell us that neither the tourist nor the traveler belong in such places? Maybe he was attempting to head off the inevitable wave of tourism that his novel might incite? If so, he failed miserably.

Tourists have been reviled by writers at least since the creation of "package tourism" - the "14 Days, 10 Cities" tours that were devised to optimize the short vacations that Americans have typically taken to Europe. As early as 1908, E.M. Forster's 1908 novel, A Room with a View, touches on a phenomenon that was already somewhat passé - looking down on the tourist. When asked by Mr. Eager if she is traveling, "as a student of art," Lucy Honeychurch replies, "Oh, no. I am here as a tourist."

"'Oh, indeed,' said Mr. Eager. 'Are you indeed? If you will not think me rude, we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little - handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get "done" or "through" and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: "Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?" And the father replies: "Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog." There's travel for you. Ha! ha! ha!'"

Six years ago, when I ceased being a tourist and became a resident of the Philippines, I wrote on this blog:

"Somewhat miraculously still in the Philippines, I have had a tough time adjusting to being a resident rather than a tourist. It's easy being a tourist. You're here for a fixed number of days and you have a certain amount of money to spend. So you know exactly how much you can get away with spending every day. And even if you screw up, there's always the return ticket.

It's completely different when you come here to live. Since your stay is "indefinite," whatever amount of money you bring can never be properly budgeted. You know when it will run out, of course, and you know when and how much will be coming in next month. But you'll never know how much it will take to get you to the other side of that great divide called "indefinite." There is, in fact, no other side out there to be reached. You're already there - it's right under your feet."

Little did I know, but John Cheever wrote virtually the same thing, though far more beautifully, in his story, "The Bella Lingua":

"For the tourist, the whole experience of traveling through a strange country is on the verge of the past tense. Even as the days are spent, these were the days of Rome, and everything - the sightseeing, souvenirs, photographs, and presents - is commemorative. Even as the traveler lies in bed waiting for sleep, these were the nights in Rome. But for the expatriate there is no past tense. It would defeat his purpose to think of this time in another country in relation to some town or countryside that was and might again be his permanent home, and he lives in a continuous and unrelenting present."

Of course, what I've learned (the hard way - which always seems the best way) after six years living poor in an all-too-quiet backwater of a poor country, is how much better it is to experience such places as a tourist. Living in a resort hotel, even a resort as unassuming as the ones here on my island, is a luxury that I, quite frankly, miss terribly. How I long to take risks, to live always on the cusp of my budget, knowing full well that my return ticket will save me if I should happen to go too far off the beaten track. I have learned that I am not, as some of my friends would suppose, an actual expatriate. I am an exile, pure and simple. I banished myself to this place in 2008, just as surely as Ovid was exiled by Emperor Augustus to the edge of the civilized world, to what is now Romania (which, after twenty-one hundred years, remains a bit on the edge). The reason for his banishment is obscure, although Ovid himself attributed it to carmen et error - a poem (Ars Amatoria) and a mistake. I suppose I should attribute my own exile is the result of karma and error. (Coincidentally, Ovid turned 50 in the year of his exile [8 C.E.]. I turned 50 in 2008. But there, alas, the resemblance between us stops.)

Letter from Home

Despite my living Beyond the Pale (the entirety of Ireland outside Dublin that Queen Elizabeth I designated as beyond her control) - blown beyond the rainbow by a super-typhoon, I have always prided myself with staying up to date, keeping abreast of the news of my homeland and the wider world. I have mentioned that loss has become like a litany here, and Haiyan took away with her (assuming it's a girl's name) countless things, and every day since then has been a painful step in the progress of a recovering patient. 

Electrical power was restored to my island province after nearly six weeks of living in more than just figurative darkness. Other deprivations continue. Almost every day, the grocery stores in the capital city look like Vikings got there moments ahead of me - shelves are empty, prices are jacked up. The local company that has provided me with cable TV since 2009 has been making repairs at a snail's pace, so slowly that in my outlying barangay there is still nothing to watch on television except dvds. The only alternatives are satellite TV at an unreachable price or a primitive TV antenna to hoist above my roof just so I can receive the only two Pinoy stations available over the air (they are, frankly, unwatchable). This doesn't just mean that I have no television entertainment among the screaming coconut palms. Most importantly, it means that I have no access to news of the world whatsoever. Yes, I can now (since January 15) go online to find news, but limitations of both time and money (not to mention a ridiculously tiny bandwidth) make it impossible to find out what I need to know on the few occasions in which I can go online any given week.

Imagine what I felt when, just a few minutes ago, I went online to find out that Philip Seymour Hoffmann was dead at the age of 46. Or when I was informed on Facebook that the Super Bowl, which I believed was being played tomorrow, was nearly over and that my home team was being crushed. It was like being kicked in the stomach. That was the news for today. But what was the news for the two months I lived here without any source of information whatsoever. The people here live in a darkness that is both imposed from without and self-perpetuated. They have lived in this darkness for so long that their minds have adjusted perfectly to it. I have been forced to live in that same darkness against my will.

The comparison may seem odious, but I don't feel much different from a Russian caught in Leningrad during the German siege who longs for news of the world outside that isn't tainted by propaganda; or a Berliner living under the Soviet blockade; or a North Korean today who looks out every day at his occluded horizon and wonders what's going on in a world he isn't permitted to see.

Or, more likely, I'm like a soldier on a far frontier, standing his post, who waits every day for mail call in vain for nearly three months, with no news of his family in so long that he feels almost like he's been forgotten. Letters, dozens of them, have been written and mailed. He may get them all at once or not at all.

On the 50th commemoration of a World War Two battle (Anzio, perhaps, or Salerno - I don't remember which), I heard a beautiful story about a woman in the States who got a letter from her newlywed husband, written on the eve of that battle. Except that he had been killed in the battle fifty years before. The letter, along with many others, had lain forgotten in a mail sack that a mailman had simply neglected to deliver. The mailman had died, and his son, not knowing what to do with the sack of forgotten mail, handed it over to the post office. Working diligently to locate as may of the letters' recipients as possible, the post office discovered that most of them had died or couldn't be located. 

The woman who got her lost sweetheart's letter had neither moved nor remarried, so the latter was delivered along with a letter of explanation and an apology. Upon reading the letter, she confessed that what upset her the most about the mix-up was that it made her aware, for the first time, of how her husband hadn't altered in fifty years, but that she was now an old woman.

I want to know about everything I've missed - and continue to miss - since a natural disaster (and human incompetence) took the world away from me. What famous people whom I've followed and loved over the years have died? There must have been a few - unless Death took a holiday along with this country's disgraceful government. Have there been any more mass shootings in the States? What have people been saying about them? Is there another Fiscal Cliff Looming?

I had my finger on the pulse of the world - whose vital signs are vital to me - when the lights went out, and now I can't find it. I know that its heart cannot have stopped.

Blown Away

On November 7, the day before Typhoon Haiyan (known as Yolanda in the Philippines) hit the coast of the Visayas Region, I had watched the opening, black-and-white scenes from The Wizard of Oz, and watched, with special fascination, the approach of the tornado that snatched up Dorothy's house (with her inside it) and transported it to the Land of Oz. 

I had also told my girlfriend's eleven-year-old daughter the bedtime story of the "Three Little Pigs," who lived in houses made of straw (nipa), sticks (plywood), and of brick. She was delighted when I did the voice of the Big Bad Wolf and the little pigs. 

"Open the door and let me in!"
"Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!"
"Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll BLOW YOUR HOUSE IN!"

It was certainly an edifying fairy tale for a Probinsyano - a Filipino from the provinces - who builds his house out of brick (cinder-block), rather than straw or sticks (there are no building codes whatsoever in the country). All of Haiyan's fearsome huffing and puffing failed to blow down my house.

I was inside my sturdy cinder-block house, situated about a hundred kilometers northwest of  Tacloban, the city that bore the full savagery of the storm, when the 250-300 kph winds crashed into my province. When the first telltale sound of an oncoming express train signaled the arrival of the winds (I could even hear the uncanny sound of their acceleration) I was sitting down, and I had the rather alarming sensation of my house moving ever so slightly from its foundations. 

I stood up. I was on my feet for the next three hours as the world outside was torn to shreds - stout mango and jackfruit trees were stripped of their limbs, the houses adjacent to mine, constructed of either nipa (grass) or plywood disintegrated piecemeal as, one after another, the express trains came and went. The people who lived in these houses were safely sheltered in the precincts of their church in the nearby port city. Unbeknownst to me, however, one of my neighbors who drove a taxi for a precarious living, had come to the incredible decision of riding out the storm with his family inside the taxi. It was from there that they watched the roof of their flimsy house blow off and land within a few meters of the taxi. When I saw there were people inside the vehicle, I opened one of my windows and bellowed at them to get out of the taxi and come into my house.

The power supply to the entire region had been shut off hours before the storm's arrival, as a precaution to avoid accidental electrocutions from live wires hanging from downed utility poles. The power wasn't restored to my area until thirty-nine days later. I remember the days of my childhood in the American South when an ice storm knocked down all the power lines. Sitting at home with my family, since schools were all closed, and gathering around a candle and a battery-operated radio were precious times for me. The thirty-nine day blackout (known erroneously by the locals as a "brownout") that ended on December 17 was nothing like that.

(To be continued.)  

Gone With the Wind

Dear Readers,

I was prevented from making further posts in 2013 by Super Typhoon Haiyan (known here in the Philippines as "Yolanda"), which had the uncanny effect of knocking my entire province back in time a few decades. Not only was I without a cellphone connection for 24 days, and electricity for 39 days, but I was without anything like a reliable internet connection until about an hour ago, when I discovered a hole-in-the-wall internet cafe here in the provincial capital city whose owner had come up with the brilliant idea of using a plug-in wi-fi modem. The bandwidth remains weak, but it's all I needed to go on Facebook (for the first time since November 21) and notify my friends of my reappearance online. Now let's see if I can get my cable TV back so I can rely on something other than rumor (known contemptuously to us foreigners as the "bamboo telegraph") for my news of the world.

A Christmas Ghost-Story

Here is a poem, written by Thomas Hardy 114 years ago, which asks a perennial but hopelessly rhetorical question. (It was the Boer War in which the English soldier died.)

A Christmas Ghost Story

South of the Line, inland from Durban,

A mouldering soldier lies - your countryman.

Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,

And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans

Nightly to clear Canopus: "I would know

By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

Was ruled to be right, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears

In tacking 'Anno Domino' to the years?

Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,

But tarries yet the Cause fpr which He died."

Christmas Eve, 1899

Just to avoid confusion, I suppose, the term "A.D." ("Anno Domino," or"Year of Our Lord") and B.C. ("Before Christ") were dropped by many historians and archaeologists in favor of the inoffensive (to non-Christians) terms C.E. ("Christian Era") and B.C.E.

Anatomy of a Christmas Carol

Christmas Carols, songs or hymns sung during the Christmas season, have a history going back to 4th century Rome. The Protestant Reformation actually accelerated the popularity of carols, since Martin Luther encouraged music in churches and composed carols himself. The tradition in England can be traced back as far as the 17th century. One of the finest and most beautiful Christmas carol sequences was composed by Benjamin Britten in 1942. 


John Rutter (b. 1945), who has become a favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (he composed some of their wedding music) has specialized in choral music and has assembled the choral group The Cambridge Singers to perform his own as well as other favorite choral pieces in the English canon. As arranger and editor, he compiled the four volume Carols for Choirs with David Willcocks. Among them are the exquisite carols, "Candlelight Carol," "Christmas Lullaby," and "Christmas Night." 

"Candlelight Carol" became especially wondrous for me when I became trapped in a Philippine province without power after Super Typhoon Haiyan last November. I tried to make the approach of Christmas as cheery as possible by listening, throughout the sometimes unnerving silence at night, to my MP3 recordings of Rutter's carols (after charging my batteries every day using a neighbor's generator) long into the starry nights. My companion and I had candles that illumined our sala (living room), and Rutter's carol was beautifully coincidental.

But even more exquisite is what is probably Rutter's finest carol, "What Sweeter Music." (You can listen to it on YouTube here.) The original carol was composed by M. Henry Lawes (who also set Milton's Comus to music) to words written by the extraordinary poet Robert Herrick. At the start Herrick asks, 

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly king?

Herrick seems to remind us that "sweet" was one of Shakespeare's favorite words, and he uses the occasion of the birth of Jesus, a humble event in a Bethlehem barn, to present to us startlingly fresh imagery and a vision of a baby as a bringer of joy and of love to a winterbound world.

Dark and dull night, fly hence away
And give the honour to this day
That sees December turn's to May.

Why does this chilly winter's morn
Smile like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly shorn,
Thus, on a sudden?

Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
'Tis He is born, whose quick'ning birth
Gives life and lustre, public mirth,
To heaven and under-earth.

We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who, with His sunshine and His showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.


How could the announcement of Jesu's birth be more simply and lovingly put than Herrick's line "The darling of the world is come"? No one, to my knowledge, ever called the Son of God "darling." 

Herrick reminds us of the origin of the Christmas festival, borrowed from the pagan Roman Saturnalia - a mid-winter period of feasting, a sudden and, sadly, a brief reappearance of spring in the midst of darkness and cold. It's no accident, then, that Christmas became especially precious to Northern Europeans, for whom winters are longer and bleaker.

Of Herrick, George Saintsbury wrote: 

"The last - the absolutely last if we take his death-date - of those poets who have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing in another, was Robert Herrick."

The View from the Hill

My two favorite writers are George Orwell and Albert Camus. Orwell was born in 1903 and Camus a decade later, in fact a hundred tears ago today.(1) There are a few interesting similarities between them. Both were born in colonies, outposts of empire: Orwell in British India and Camus in French Algeria. Both were teachers for s short time, long enough to learn that they hated the job. Both were Leftists who tried to avoid its orthodoxies. Both contracted tuberculosis - Camus was cured, but the disease killed Orwell. Both created striking parables on totalitarianism, The Plague in 1947 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. And both of them died at the age of 46.

Because I encountered him when I was a very young man, Camus has been with me the longest time, and I think I cherish him more because of this. Through the years, the truth in his writings has been continually confimed: "Le monde est beau, et hors de lui, point de salut." (The world is beautiful, and there is no salvation beyond it.) Despite having lived - so far - nine years longer than he, these words seem to me more true than ever.

His seminal, and central essay was The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942 concurrent with his first brilliantly serious and sensuous novel, The Stranger (2). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a mentor for Camus, was critical of the essay because of its lack of philosophical rigor. Sartre may have been a better philosopher, but Camus was by far the better artist. Sisyphus is a fascinating treatise because of its highly imaginative, personal and emotional content.

It was this work, with its metaphor of a contented - even a happy - Sisyphus fulfilling his Sisyphean task of pushing a giant rock to the top of a hill, only to watch as it rolls all the way back down to the bottom, that introduced to literature Camus's concept of the Absurd, insisting that all human endeavors are ultimately as fruitless and profitless. "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."

Faced with knowledge of the futility of his life, Man must inevitably contemplate suicide. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." Camus himself had attempted suicide. "At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face." How can he possibly be happy, knowing what he knows of the futility and hopelessness of his life? What would stop someone from suicide if he possessed such knowledge? Even thus punished for eternity by the Gods, Sisyphus's triumph lies in his rebellion - his refusal to be damned by his labors. "But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill oneself." Camus concludes in his essay that, even if this tedious effort is his only reality, the condition of being a man, he must accept it, embrace it, ceaselessly throw himself into the effort. "What is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

The image that Camus leaves us with is indelible: Sisyphus on the hilltop, turning to descend down the hill to where the rock - his rock - has rolled once again. Is it a faint smile I see on his shadowy face? "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."

For me, this is Camus's greatest achievement - making words and abstract concepts into flesh. "In the beginning was the Word," the gospel of John begins. "And the word was made flesh." And it's what distinguishes Camus the artist from Camus the philosopher. It is only because they convince one as works of art that his most philosophical essays live on.


(1) My father was born the same year, on March 13. 3-13-13. Needlessly to say, my father was a gambler all his life.
(2) The word "stranger" is a better equivalent to the French l'Étranger than "outsider," which is also gauche.