Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Winston Churchill said this was a classic book and indeed it is. I, of course, cherish the film Lawrence of Arabia but Lawrence's prose and his story is a revelation. It is beautiful, beautiful in its awesome sense, and poetic in its verbiage. The story too is nothing short of engaging and interesting. His descriptive powers are amazing and his narrative is gripping, especially in battle scenes and scenes of intense effort or concentration. It is beautiful in an artistic sense. It borders on poetry. And it is worth the long slog for that. The maps are good, but could be better. The images are a mix of beautiful and silly 1920s-style frippery, but, they are a product of the times and of the man. Lawrence was a strange bird.

The only show more oddness, though knowing Lawrence's biography it is not surprising, are the long passages of homoerotic feeling and justification. No wonder this book did not circulate before his death. And it's not just the scene at Deraa.

All said, a classic, no doubt.

This is a review of a 1988 reissue of the 1935 version, a beautiful hardcover. show less

Tonight I finished [Seven Pillars of Wisdom], a book I've started reading half a dozen times before without making it to the end. It's very long, and can be tedious at times, but then there will be a thrilling scene of setting explosives while the enemy is near or a painfully beautiful description of the desert.

Lawrence's account of the revolt in the desert should not be taken as the definitive--or even reliable--history of the conflict, but he never intended it to be. As he writes in the introductory chapter: "In these pages the history is not of the Arab movement, but of me in it. It is a narrative of daily life, mean happenings, little people. Here are no lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock peoples. It is filled with show more trivial things, partly that no one mistake for history the bones from which some day a man may make history, and partly for the pleasure it gave me to recall the fellowship of the revolt." It is the romanticized, deeply personal truth of one man.

Throughout the book, Lawrence comes off as a very complicated person: self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating; highly intelligent, but inexperienced; romantic, but often clear-sighted and cynical. By the end, I found myself even more fascinated by this quixotic figure who found himself torn between conflicting loyalties.

I shall leave off with one of my favorite passages:

Later I was sitting alone in my room, working and thinking out as firm
a way as the turbulent memories of the day allowed, when the Muedhdhins
began to send their call of last prayer through the moist night over
the illuminations of the feasting city. One, with a ringing voice of
special sweetness, cried into my window from a near mosque. I found
myself involuntarily distinguishing his words: "God alone is great: I
testify there are no gods, but God: and Mohammed his Prophet. Come to
prayer: come to security. God alone is great: there is no god--but God.'

At the close he dropped his voice two tones, almost to speaking level,
and softly added: 'And He is very good to us this day, O people of
Damascus.' The clamour hushed, as everyone seemed to obey the call to
prayer on this their first night of perfect freedom. While my fancy, in
the overwhelming pause, showed me my loneliness and lack of reason in
their movement: since only for me, of all the hearers, was the event
sorrowful and the phrase meaningless. (Chapter CXX) show less

Prima lettura ottobre 2008:
Geologia, antropologia, etnografia, sociologia, politica, arte della guerra, e molto, molto altro ancora sono gli ingredienti di questo magnifico libro, massimo esempio di epica moderna, che racconta la storia con l'afflato del miglior romanzo.
Lawrence, scrittore inestimabile, tiene incollati alla pagina sia che racconti le lunghe notti nel deserto, sia che descriva i protagonisti sia che espliciti i propri pensieri, dolori dubbi.
Libro altamente raccomandabile per chiunque voglia entrare nel guazzabuglio della moderna storia del popolo arabo.
La nuova traduzione è molto ben fatta, peccato che per la correzione ci si sia un po' troppo affidati al correttore di word.
Seconda lettura:
Ci è voluto più tempo. La show more prima lettura è corsa sul ritmo epico della narrazione, dell'incredibile guerra che ha generato un personaggio romantico. La seconda invece mi ha fatto apprezzare l'abnegazione di un uomo fisicamente piccolissimo (45 kg) che, nutrito solo dalle sue idee romantiche, portò alla rivolta e alla liberazione un popolo che non era il suo e in cui si era completamente calato.
Alcuni passi sono assolutamente umoristici, e lasciano brillare in pieno l'intelligenza e la cultura di Lawrence, sempre conscio della sua piccolezza e della sua posizione assurda. show less

Reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a pilgrimage through the vast deserts of Arabia, through the last remnants of Rome (if you squint, the Arab Revolt was like the blowing out of the final ember of the two-thousand-year-old fire of the Roman Empire), and into the conflicted mind of a mythical figure of WWI. In a book of enormous moments (which will forever inform my understanding of the region, still very relevant today), it was the small, lonely, reflective episodes that will stay with me, like when he falls one night in a snow bank alone and has to dig out his trusty old female camel, or when when he reflects during a night on the desert with his comrades: ‘And the stars – what are they?’ We slipped into talk of suns beyond suns, show more sizes and distance beyond wit. ‘What will now happen with this knowledge?’ asked Mohammed. ‘We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo’s; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven…’ show less

Not an easy book to sum up in a paragraph or two: in many ways it's a big, shaggy mess, at times tediously self-centred and self-important, at times captivating and beautiful. You can put up with his endless agonising about his role in history and his "betrayal" of the Arabs, his sweeping generalisations about other people, his half-baked theories of this and that, his detached and callous descriptions of death and destruction; because there is nothing like the experience of riding across the desert with Lawrence. When he is talking about landscape, camels, tracks and wells, all the bloat and solipsism drops away, and his prose is perfectly fitted to what he is describing. Reading his descriptions of his journeys perversely gives a more show more intense visual experience than even the most technicoloured cinemascope version could hope to. show less

I was aware before starting that this was a somewhat unreliable account of the exploits of Lawrence on the Eastern Front during WWI but the Introduction introduced such a level of scepticism that it tainted my reading; I was forever wondering what was true, what was exaggerated, what entirely fabricated. The veracity of the account was challenged in a publication of 1955 that I don't have. I'd have much prefered to read a critical edition that put the book in the context of the known history so that truth and fiction could be easily separated - I don't know if such a thing exists, though.

Lawrence is at his best when describing landscape and action, at his worst when being judgemental, whether it be about history, peoples or individuals. show more The first half fled fairly fast but the second was a struggle for most of its length. It turns out that camel rides and raids on railways and bridges can become repetative and dull. Interest was re-ignited when the Allies turn up in force and events become novel again.

I know very little about WWI; my main impressions of it come from two books; All Quiet on the Western Front and this. The contrast between the Western and Eastern conflicts could hardly be greater, on this basis. The mud, trenches, gas attacks, whole-sale slaughter and stalemate of France and Belgium feel like a different world from the rock, sand, guerilla warfare and endless gadding about by horse, camel, plane and (Rolls Royce) car that Lawrence describes in the Middle East. Lawrence's account is rarely in the slightest bit romanticised, though, and hunger, thirst, battle and death are treated in a most matter-of-fact manner that contrasts both with the myth of Lawrence of Arabia on the one hand and the deliberately political and horrifying verse of Sassoon and his fellow War Poets. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/990884.html

This is the story of how Lawrence helped the Arabs revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-1918. Its greatest strength is its vivid description of the landscapes of Arabia, Syria and Palestine; I've never been to the desert, and don't know that part of the world at all, so I found this tremendously compelling. I was left a bit more ambivalent about the human side of the story: on the one hand, Lawrence is aiding a subject nation to throw off their oppressor; on the other, his heroism is undermined - according to his own account, it should be said - by the brutality of the campaign, by his awareness that his British masters will certainly break their word to their Arab allies, and by the casual show more racism he himself displays toward them.

It's a very manly book, for values of "manly" that overlap with "gay". In the very first chapter, we have Arab lads "quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace". It is a constant theme, and manly love merges intriguingly with Lawrence's affection for the landscape. There is I think precisely one woman character of note, an old lady who Lawrence rescues from a train wreck (he blew up the train). Apart from her, there are several other memorable female personalities, but they are all camels.

The book falls rather neatly into two parts, the first half being the desert campaign starting from Mecca going up the coast to eventually capture Akaba (= Aqaba), the second half covering operations more closely linked to Allenby and culminating in the taking of Damascus and consolidation of a new Arab regime. I found it very odd that although Lawrence says he was present at the capture of Jerusalem, he reports almost nothing about this key event apart from an argument between the French diplomat Picot (of Sykes-Picot fame - Sykes too makes an appearance) and the British. Of course, he was not impressed by Jerusalem:

...a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohammedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present.

For all its faults (some mentioned above, but I'll add another: it is too long) I found the book also tremendously enlightening in understanding the roots of today's politics in the region. Lawrence himself is very aware of the contradiction between his responsibility to his country and his moral obligation to his Arab friends and allies, and his personal dilemma can be read also as a comment on the wider international situation. The ruling family of Mecca, who Lawrence helps put in charge of Syria, now rule Jordan (having also had a go at Iraq in the interim). The boundaries of states were mostly drawn at the convenience of the Great Powers, possibly even more arbitrarily than in Africa; it's not surprising that they are perceived as having shallow roots.

Anyway, a bit of a slog in places (rather like the campaign it describes), but I'm glad I read it in the end. show less