http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/08/27/do2701.xml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/chinese/news/newsid_3200000/32005511.stm
BBC前中东事务记者 加德纳
被誉为二十世纪最伟大的探险家之一的威尔弗莱德·塞希格于8月24日在英国去世,享年93岁。二十世纪四十年代,塞希格探险游历了大片阿拉伯地区,并写下了不朽的游记作品《阿拉伯的沙》。在沙漠中艰苦而简单的游牧生活中,塞希格发现了西方世界所缺乏的很多东西。他的作品对很多人产生了深远的影响,其中就包括BBC前中东事务记者加德纳。
传奇人物
把腿圈在身下,蹲在一张毛织的垫子上,塞希格爵士看上去很不自在。"这讨厌的空调,"他抱怨道,"为什么他们不能把它给关了。"我们坐在阿布扎比一家五星级酒店里,等待被招进总统府,晋见酋长。这还是四年前的事情了,酒店外热浪滚滚,窗户上已经凝结了水汽。塞希格这次重返阿布扎比,一是要参加一本书的发行仪式,二是要和一些阿拉伯的老朋友做最后的道别。这时,他已经有些不耐烦了。这位曾经穿越过阿拉伯不毛之地的老人,太不适应现代化的酒店。
当一辆加长轿车来接我们的时候,塞希格就盘腿坐在后座,看着从车窗闪过的沙漠陷入沉思。接着,我们来到总统府;路障抬了起来,两边的人向我们敬礼;身穿白色大袍、腰间佩着弯刀的仆人把我们引进宫里。世界上在世时间最长的统治者问候了世界上最伟大的探险家。四十年代,塞希格就曾经追踪过扎耶德·阿勒纳哈杨酋长。眼下,他们一起回忆起了过去的很多笑话。酋长是如何打中一只野兔,把它抛给自己的狗,而塞希格却捡起那只兔子,烤熟后填了肚子。那是在石油财富被发现前的艰苦和饥饿岁月。与塞希格一同穿越沙漠的贝都因部落,他们的财产除了猎枪就是骆驼。那时,生命就是靠找到水源之间的路程来衡量的。
对塞希格爵士来说,石油财富让阿拉伯世界失去了一切意义
沙漠生活
半个世纪前,塞希格进行了两次艰险的旅程,他迂回穿越了一些至今很少有人敢于冒险的阿拉伯地区。在一些忠实向导的陪伴下,他征服了一座座最高可达两百米的沙丘,横穿了险象丛生的流沙地带。塞希格操一口流利的阿拉伯语,他的装束就像是贝都因人,腰里佩着匕首、盘着子弹带。当穿行在一些充满敌意的部落之间时,塞希格的同伴都以旅行商人的身份做掩护。塞希格的身高近两米,所以总有露馅的时候,他曾被沙特的统治者伊本·萨乌德短暂地囚禁过一段时间。
我第一次见到塞希格是在二十世纪七十年代,当时沙漠里那种简单的游牧生活正在慢慢地消亡,塞希格对此感到伤心和失望。“阿拉伯人被石油给毁了,”他在伦敦的住宅里告诉我。
他抱怨说,过去他在贝都因人身上找到的那些品格勇敢、忍耐还有豪爽,都被海湾地区建立在石油财富基础上的城市生活给侵蚀了。
我对这个说法不能苟同,但是我又知道些什么呢?那时,我只是个十几岁的孩子,从来没有接触过中东。但是塞希格的旅程当中总有些东西吸引着我。于是,我决心学习阿拉伯语,并在大学学习伊斯兰文化。这是我一生中所做出的最好的决定。随后的几年里,我在不少阿拉伯国家生活和工作过。的确,石油改变了中东的很多东西。但是阿拉伯人的一些悠久传统,无限的好客、尊敬老人、乐善好施都在现代化的风潮中得以保留。
回到伦敦后,我会经常拜访塞希格,倾听他那些石油时代前的故事。他会告诉我,有时在一天的旅行后,他和贝都因向导坐下来,靠猎取的一只瞪羚作晚餐。突然,地平线上出现了陌生人的身影。贝都因人的传统要求他们把食物献给哪怕是没有受到邀请的陌生客人。
塞希格承认,那时他气得脑袋直冒烟,而他的贝都因向导则一个劲地哀求客人们吃完最后一点东西。我从来没有经历过这些,不过作为记者,我知道阿拉伯人是会为我冒多么大的风险。我还记得,两位也门人在和我认识不到一个小时后,就决定陪我到一个混乱的国家里作有关绑架的报道。
让人好奇的是,尽管我很崇拜塞希格的探险旅程,他那些文学巨著以及永不磨灭的黑白照片,我们都尊重彼此对中东的不同看法,对他来说,石油财富让那里失去了一切意义;而对我来说,那里过去、现在、将来都是一片充满无尽魅力的地方:一个如果不是在多年前一次与塞希格喝午茶的机会,我是永远不会了解的地方。
- posted on 09/02/2003
A maverick species has died out with Wilfred Thesiger
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
(Filed: 27/08/2003)
The death of Sir Wilfred Thesiger is like that famous first scene in Lawrence of Arabia - but in reverse: the titanic, heroic and almost mythical figure of the lean, mysterious adventurer, shimmering beautifully in his native robes, mastering his racing camel, is galloping away into the distance across those pure golden sands until he is just a speck. And then he is gone altogether.
So it is with the great traveller-adventurer-writers: this maverick species is dying out. Not all the greats possessed Thesiger's flamboyance; Norman Lewis, who completely lacked theatricality, has also just ridden into the distance. But more than just an era of exploration has ended.
These adventurers, who travelled and wrote from Victorian times to the mid-20th century, among them Richard Burton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and Thesiger himself, created a powerful body of work, rendering strange, rare, lost worlds on the edge of being destroyed by Western civilisation.
Whether in Iraq, Arabia or Kenya, Thesiger searched for his ideal of "a freedom unattainable in civilisation" and preached his questionable credo that "the harder the life, the finer the person".
A literary genre is dying with those titans - and perhaps that is something of a relief, because the fresh gleaming gold that they spun from their extraordinary lives has long since been transformed, through imitation, into the base metal of most modern travel writing.
Some of their heirs writing today are their equals. Colin Thubron for example, or Ryszard Kapuscinski; who are both, I think, almost geniuses. But as a genre, by the 1990s, travel-writing had become the hackneyed road to media greatness for any Ivy Leaguer or public schoolboy.
The real problem is that travel writing became a profession. Few of the great travel writers were professionals. Thesiger and his peers were brilliant amateurs, and their example endures. The best travel-writing nowadays is usually by an aid-worker or a priest or a travelling doctor.
They were eccentrics in every sense and usually poseurs in the best way possible. There is nothing wrong with posing. A certain high camp can enliven travel-writers. Thesiger relished dressing up in Arabian robes, bandoliers and daggers, and it certainly added to the fun.
The great travellers often had special reasons to wish to live abroad - whether they were gay, enjoyed the experience of zipless sexual encounters in faraway places or just loved the spartan austerity of tribal life. This was all part of "going native". But they did not live their adventurous lives just for the sake of dressing-up: the most important quality was that these men became genuine experts on these peoples and places.
Yet these great mavericks were also great insiders, too, hailing from the mannered but peculiarly rootless elite of imperial service. Thesiger was superbly well-connected - the nephew of the Viceroy of India - but he was shaped by his upbringing at the court of the Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia.
Though he was educated at Eton, his tendencies were always to be the maverick. In the Second World War, he fought bravely in Abyssinia under Wingate, another inveterate outsider, performing acts of splendid derring-do, capturing 2,000 Italians among other exploits, before joining David Stirling's SAS.
Who could beat his exotic role as political adviser to the Abyssinian Crown Prince or the absurdity of his next job as an investigator of the Middle-East Anti-Locust Unit in Arabia? Of course his generation had two great advantages as travel-writers over the one born after the war: they experienced the Empire and the Second World War.
The diplomat-commando-MP Sir Fitzroy Maclean became a "travel-writer" when he described his adventures in Stalinist Russia and Tito's wartime Yugoslavia in Eastern Approaches. Thesiger, an explorer and anthropologist, wrote his first travel book, Arabian Sands, in 1959 when he was almost 50.
Once travel-writing was embraced by the media-savvy modern generation, it became a sort of hybrid, neither history nor journalism. The genre followed a simple formula: the travel - almost always in Central Asia or the Middle East, often supposedly following in the footsteps of a hero such as Saladin or Alexander the Great - would be told portentously, and laced with shallow second-hand history and funny encounters with locals, who would all behave with picturesque nostalgia for pre-modern society and for totems of British civilisation such as Lipton's Tea.
Usually, the travel-writers had to be 1) posh, 2) young, 3) photographed in native garb at all times, and behaving like a self-conscious imperialistic adventurer (such as Thesiger); then they had 1) to denounce wicked modern culture that had destroyed everything good and pure, while acclaiming the charms of any relic of the Empire; 2) to pretend that they were constantly in personal danger; 3) imply that no Westerner had ever been there before (even when these places crawled with tourists and backpackers).
This became worse and worse as more and more journalists published their travel-memoirs of places that were usually visitable by 1990 on package tours. If any one writer symbolises the obsolescence of the imperial-adventure travel-writing of Thesiger's generation, it is Bill Bryson, the most successful travel author in Britain today, who has made a career as a sort of anti-Thesiger: travelling in very safe and boring places and writing with dry wryness about them.
So, the genre of post-Imperial travel-writing is extinct - or it should be. A new travel-writing style, best shown in Wendell Stevenson's book on modern Georgia - Stories I Stole - is already developing; one free of the confusion about modernity and Empire that characterised the British elite of Thesiger's generation.
Human cultures have always been hybrids: civilisations are certainly changed by the arrival of CNN or Britney Spears T-shirts, but they remain distinctive - and often in the most terrible ways. Chechens still behead their enemies even though they listen to Eminem. The boy soldiers of Congo have mobiles and watch Friends on cable. But they still eat the livers and brains of their prisoners.
Thesiger's second radiant classic was The Marsh Arabs, which records a noble Arab civilisation. It is surely ironic that it was to be destroyed not by modern culture, but by Saddam Hussein. - 令胡兄,英国有很多好东西啊,望多贴贴!posted on 09/02/2003
只可惜在美国看不到BBC电视,但是好录像我是从来不误的... - posted on 09/02/2003
感谢令胡推荐的好文章。 英国海外殖民的正面历史意义之一就是产生出一批博学而优秀的人文学者和作家。因此英国学者在全球事务中,比美国同行清醒。
至于物质是不是腐蚀剂,是也不是。对追求精神超越的人来说, 过度的奢华没有任何好处。
我的小外甥的生活就是太好了,所以他不想读书。我现在非常清楚离开纽约的那个环境是天意,我现在比那时快乐许多,心性专一,没有诱惑。 我是会在物质之前投降的人。
远离物质世界一段时间再回来,眼睛就觉得比以前亮了,人也突然更有精神了,各位不妨试一下。我还想着到一个更偏僻的地方去住,不过那是我70岁以后的事情了。 - posted on 09/04/2003
BBC由公众电视税支付,有电视的家庭每年付110镑左右,养着它。举世也算少见。所以它并非商业电台,本质上也不是政府电台,直接对议会负责,尽管它大多时候对政府前呼后拍的。最近BBC由于对伊战争和kelly博士自杀跟工党政府打起来了,才算比较热闹有趣。
BBC节目确实题材广泛,有些documentary制作的出类拔萃。前几年我还曾看过一个关于1993年费马(Fermat)最后定理被解出过程的记录片,内容也很优秀。这些天想了起来,还看看有关的书。有的书,从古希腊number研究而产生的数学抽象逻辑方式,写的也异常出色。
不知道人类从什么时候起,就有了大致科学。但基本上可以说,从Pythagoras(毕达哥拉斯)起,人类似乎才有了完整明确的数学。这里的数学跟科学概念不一样。数学定理是严格、抽象和完美无缺的事实陈述。其结论完全不基于科学实验。自身一旦论证,则能永恒,不再发展变化。我有几个专业搞数学的网友,也没问过,他们是不是都学数学史。费马最后的定理,源于pythagoras论证的勾股定理,这个过程本身也有意思。
古希腊文明的兴起,除哲学、政体意识等等的一切之外,竟然也还能完全建立抽象逻辑推理的符号表达,奠定数学的基础,真是人类思维的一个了不起飞跃。现在再看,真是奇迹。在他之前,古巴比伦、古埃及等的艺术和建筑,都早已实际上掌握和运用了很多数字和几何规律,可并没有形成抽象的逻辑推理表达。Pythagoras游历各地回到希腊城帮后,却能仅出于自己(基本上一个人)的经历和兴趣,广招当地最优秀的minds,组织一个类似当今大学似的brotherhood,进行群体研究。这样卓越的组织能力,开创性的思维方式,似乎是有些不可思议。如果静态考虑当时期人类思维成果的丰富和鼎盛,真让人怀疑是基因的突变或外星文明的帮助。:)
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