Solo la penumbra me acompaña hoy

Solo travel is lonely for most parts. I am confined to single-serve dishes because I can only eat so much and I have no one to drink the cheap beer with in the evenings. There are no idle or meaningful conversations to while away the time, no one to make a better decision for me and no one to have a moment with. Travel is not solely about experiencing new environments and cultures but it is also about that shared experience, which adds much meaning to the travel itself. This was absent for me in Cambodia aside from the conversation I had on the roof of the boat from Battambang to Siem Reap. Perhaps Joseph Conrad put the whole mood most aptly in the account of his experience in the Congo in 1890:

"A great melancholy descended on me. Yes, this was the very spot. But there was no shadowy friend to stand by my side in the night of the enormous wilderness, no great haunting memory...I wondered what I was doing there, for indeed it was only an unforeseen episode...Still the fact remains that I have smoked a pipe of peace at midnight in the very heart of the African continent, and felt very lonely there."

I did ask myself that all important question, "what the hell am I doing here?", a couple of times when I was lying in bed unable to sleep in the windowless guesthouse room where the fan only blew stale hot air that smelled of cigarette smoke and when I was showering in a cramped toilet whilst trying not to get my clothes wet. And then I chanted to myself that old mantra: it builds character, it builds character, it builds character, it builds...

The language barrier also often isolates and paralyzes one in an alien culture, there was just me, in my head, talking to myself. I actually felt more comfortable roaming about in Ecuador, where I could read the signs and talk to the locals, than in Cambodia, where it was pretty much looking for English menus and for locals who could speak English or Chinese. And then there was the thinking. Too much idle thinking. Thinking over a beer, thinking as I sat on the top of an ancient temple trying to kill time, thinking on the bus and thinking as I lay in bed too early to sleep. You know what they say about an idle mind.

"We live, as we dream, alone," writes Conrad in Heart of Darkness. I once subscribed to this whole notion, now I'd like to think otherwise.

And yes, photos with nobody in them.

famous last glimpses

fusion confusion

generous summerfields donations

everything I've forgotten
can't remember much of this day either

cruel to be kind

"I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets that Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness: that even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, 'a lord of terrible aspect'. There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness is separated from the other elements of Loves, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it....Kindness merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided that it escapes suffering...It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness."

"Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care?...Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and loves still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive to hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved...Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p33; 38

I still haven't got my head around this one yet.