I am back after almost two weeks away from the written word. I did occasionally glance at emails - but made a point of answering virtually none of them (my children being the exception to this rule) and doing no writing whatsoever. The fact that I was in a sublime city (Rome) followed by eight nights in one of the most astonishing corners of the planet (the Amalfi coast) certainly made turning off somewhat easy. But here’s an interesting question with which to mark my return to these daily postings and the next draft of my new novel: can we ever truly detach from the world beyond? More tellingly, can we ever sidestep all that we haul along with us? When I was researching the new novel I spent some time in the Moroccan Sahara - and traveled off-piste with a driver (a local Berber gentleman, skilled at negotiating the sand in a 4x4 jeep) who brought me deep into a region of high dunes. There I bore witness to the most pellucid and electric sky night imaginable. The clarity of the desert air, the lack of any ambient light (bar the gas lights that illuminated our camp), turned the celestial floor show above into one of limitless incandescence. But what so struck me about the experience was the fact that, though I was in a thoroughly silent realm, a hum still remained within my ears ; the hum of the world beyond. At first I thought it was just my own heavily urbanized ears registering this ongoing buzz. But when I mentioned to my driver, Mohammed, about this constant noise, he laughed and said: “It’s always in my ears as well”. This, in turn, made me wonder: can we ever truly turn off the humming within our heads? Or is a cornerstone of the human condition bound up in the realization: we are the sum total of all that we carry between out proverbial ears?
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 05:29:02 +0000
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