Paul Bowles and the silence of the Sahara
Read time 9 mins
I am standing on a dune in the Algerian Sahara, surrounded by a silence so dense that all I can hear is the noise in my head.
I’m here because I once read 'The Baptism of Solitude', an essay by Paul Bowles, which describes the unique sensation of encountering the Sahara Desert for the first time.
“Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back… or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen… you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course”
'Baptism of Solitude' could be seen as an introduction to what desert solitude might suggest to a modern-minded person – a psychological brush with what the early Christian desert hermits might have encountered on their retreats.
I found the essay in a book called ‘Their Heads are Green, Their Hands are Blue’ which I borrowed from a library van (remember those?) in rural Shropshire. I’m not sure why this book appealed to the 14-year-old me – perhaps it was slim pickings in the library van that day – but it made such an impression that 30 years later, I went to Algeria to experience my own ‘baptism of solitude'.
Paul Bowles was an American existentialist writer who lived in Morocco in the 1950s and wrote cruel, lean prose about tourists coming to sticky ends in the Sahara Desert. He is best known for his novel ‘The Sheltering Sky’, which was made into a film by the same name. What Bowles prized above all else was the absolute solitude of the desert. “Why go?” he asked.
“The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort or money, for the absolute has no price”.
While I didn’t stay out shivering in the Sahara all night, I did get a taste of the primordial Saharan silence that Bowles wrote about. We often think of silence as awkward, or something we should avoid, but in the Sahara it is a presence more than an absence – a space not bound by language, which allows our human constructs to fall away, allowing access to something more absolute.
After it's over, I walk to the warmth of the campfire. Tahir, a Tuareg musician, asks me "Did you feel the silence?".
While I doubt that Tahir would care for the ideas of an American writer from the 1950s – all three of us might agree that there is something simultaneously frightening, calming, and profound in the Sahara Desert. Which, if you give yourself over to it, can be transformational.
As Bowles says “For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came”.
THE BAPTISM OF SOLITUDE
Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting it into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really grows dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le baptisme de la solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
-- Paul Bowles
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