November, 2000

Contemplations on Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky

Remembering

Because we do not know when we will die
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well
and yet everything happens only a certain number
of times and a very small number really.
How many times will you remember a certain
afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that
is so deeply a part of your life that you can't
even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps
four or five times more? Perhaps not even that.
How many times will you watch the full moon rise,
perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems so limitless.

~ From The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

When I heard Paul Bowles utter these words, I was thunderstruck. I was channel surfing at the time and landed on the last scene of the movie directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. I was so taken, I had to see the movie from the beginning. The Sheltering Sky is so beautiful, so harrowing, so nonsensical and so maddening, I had to read the novel, which was even more powerful emotionally, than watching the movie.

The Sheltering Sky is the story of a naive American couple who travel into the Sahara, lose themselves in another culture and are destroyed. "They didn't know what they were doing or where they were going, of course," says Bowles. Their characters are not strong enough to stop the menace of the landscape and its people, from overpowering them.

Paul Bowles described The Sheltering Sky as "an adventure story in which the actual adventures take place on two planes simultaneously: in the actual desert and in the inner desert of the spirit." The adventure has an aura of both fascination and dread.

Some say the story is an allegory for life in the 20th century, and I think it still applies. The Sheltering Sky is considered one of the seminal novels of mid-20th century American fiction.

A catalyst for contemplation.
I invite you to re-read the passage at the top of the page and use it as a catalyst for contemplation.What have been the defining moments that have shaped your life? Are you taking the time to savour your experiences or are you lost in the desert of the soul? Write down your stories and you will find that as the years pass, you will have a collection of oases upon which to take refuge in times of turbulence.

About Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles, a successful composer before he became a writer, was part of an illustrious peer group including Gertrude Stein, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams and William S. Burroughs (who in The Naked Lunch made Bowles a central character). He has been described as America's only existentialist and "the link between the 'Lost Generation' of Gertrude Stein and the 'Beat Generation' of Jack Kerouac."

You ask what decadence is. I should think in art and literature nothing is decadent but incompetence and commercialism. If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully; this is certainly no time for anyone to pretend to be happy, or to put his unhappiness away in the dark. (And anyone who is not unhappy now must be a monster, a saint or an idiot.) You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head.

~Paul Bowles. (New York Times, 1952)

It was Gertrude Stein who directed him to go to North Africa. She found his surrealist poetry and nihilistic outlook irritating and advised him and friend Aaron Copland to travel to Tangiers. "As a result of this arbitrary action," he wrote later, "my life was permanently altered. "If Morocco had been then as it is now, I should have spent the summer and gone away, probably not to return. But Morocco in 1931 provided an inexhaustible succession of fantastic spectacles."

Paul Bowles died at 88 in a Tangier hospital on November 18, 1999.

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