![]() ![]() So he would not look at them.įrom Paul, Bowles’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky. I like the passage Bowles shows here that to be human is to invest an aesthetic (and simultaneously anesthetic) viewpoint into one’s daily life-and that to invest in this viewpoint is to calculate psychic and emotional costs and payoffs. ![]() They were there, and they should have pleased his eye, but he did not have the strength to relate them, either to each other or to himself, he could not bring them into any focus beyond the visual. He did not want to face the intense sky, too blue to be real, above his head, the ribbed pink canyon walls that lay on all sides in the distance, the pyramidal town itself on its rocks, or the dark spots of oasis below. In its interior aspect, 'The Sheltering Sky' is an allegory of the spiritual adventure of the fully conscious person into modern experience. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force. In this external aspect the novel is, therefore, an account of startling adventure. Reduced to its plot essentials, 'The Sheltering Sky' is a sort of existential update on Rudolph Valentineos old chestnut, 'The Sheik. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. ![]() The author sets the mood for the book through the character of Port, who broods upon. He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. He was somewhere, he had come back through the vast regions from nowhere there was certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar. As he walked along the hot road toward the walls of Bou Noura he kept his head down, seeing nothing but the dust and the thousands of small sharp stones. ![]()
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