“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Friday
There is nothing like the day of departure.
Gym and then drop Shell off for one more day of leadership business.
I have all day to get ready.
We travel light, one carry on bag, so I usually throw some clothes in a bag ten minutes before we catch a cab to the airport.
“…her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
Simone de Beauvoir
Without the detail, as it is not my story to share, Shell was gifted an entirely dysfunctional team this year and has somehow managed to fly, without the wings.
I am immensely proud of her, and while she might not get the platitudes she deserves from those beneath her, she has earned the respect of her peers and those she reports to.
“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
Susan Sontag
I have finished Against Interpretation. An extraordinary collection of essays from a gifted mind. Sontag captures the 1950s and 1960s with purity that makes you wish you were there.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Simone Weil… the list goes on forever of the writers and artists of this era. I doubt there has been a more influential period in the last 200 years.
“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’ It is to turn the world into this world. (‘This world’! As if there were any other.)
The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ”
Susan Sontag
I have jumped straight into Illness as a Metaphor. Two essays where Sontag explores the metaphor of cancer, and a decade later, the same paradigm with AIDS.
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
Susan Sontag
I get a haircut.
Al Jawereh for some lunch before I head into the desert to collect Shell.
Shell sends me back to the barber to have my nose taken care of.
“Many big hairs”
Maneet the barber
I spend the afternoon watching the Pies play inconsistently and reading.
I pack ten minutes before we leave.
We are flying out of Dubai Terminal 2. Much smaller than Terminal 3, but no less busy.
I am not a fan of airport crowds.
“As a recluse I couldn’t bear traffic. It had nothing to do with jealousy, I simply disliked people, crowds, anywhere, except at my readings. People diminished me, they sucked me dry.”
Charles Bukowski