ROSIE DIED IN THE FULLNESS OF HER YEARS, and so eventually did I. Mumma was right about one thing: I did regret smoking. That’s what killed me in the end. And Karl was right about that legend. Remember? He told me that to drink from the Nile was to ensure a return to Egypt.
Of course, you’ve had some time to get used to the idea that I’ve been speaking to you from beyond the grave, but it took me completely by surprise when Rosie and I were reunited in a place of water and lotuses and palms. This is certainly not the afterlife I anticipated. I thought there’d be…well, nothing. Even now I don’t know if I am closer to heaven or to hell, but Rosie likes it here. There are beautiful ghostly salukis for her to romp with and an extraordinary number of lovely phantom cats to chase, so she is quite content.
I wandered quite a bit at first, probably because I wasn’t buried with the Book of the Dead, which would have guided me away from the world of men. Then I began to encounter others like me—people who found themselves in this place without the vaguest idea how or why. Drinking from the Nile seems to be the only thing we have in common, so Karl’s explanation is as good as any.
Most souls are here for a short time and gradually disappear, which is often a pity. Once, a gentleman wearing hardly anything in the way of clothing made friends with me. We didn’t talk much but enjoyed our quiet companionship. Then he stood, knit his brows, and looked out into the fog that surrounds us. “When Pagans strive to rule the world, Yahweh defeats them,” he declared in a firm voice. “When Jews strive to repair the world, Jesus breaks them. When Christians strive to save the world, Allah humiliates them. When Muslims strive to purify the world, Mammon corrupts them. Therefore, the Buddha advises, Cease to strive. Endure the world.”
I thought about that and said, “I’m not sure I agree with your analysis—” but before I could continue, the gentleman faded away just like the Cheshire Cat.
There are lots of Egyptians here, but the Nile divides the frangi from the beledi even in the afterlife, and we foreigners still tend to congregate on the west bank. In life, we usually paid attention only to people who could speak our own languages when we visited Egypt. You might say it was as though we were starring in our own private movies. Egyptians became “extras.” They served coffee at the edge of the frame or filled the screen with untranslated rage, while we imagined ourselves the “main characters.” We didn’t even notice we were thinking that way, and now I guess we’re stuck with it, though we don’t seem to have a language problem anymore.
Some of us here are famous. Did you know Saint Francis visited the Holy Land? I’d never heard that, but it seems he traveled from Assisi to Jerusalem, hoping to make peace with the Muslims of his day. On his way back to catch a boat from Alexandria to Italy, he waded through the Nile and fell in.
I was less surprised to meet Napoleon Bonaparte because I knew he’d been to Egypt. He introduced me to Ptolemy XIII, who drowned in the Nile during a naval battle with his sister Cleopatra. “We were Greeks, you know,” Ptolemy told me. “I never believed in the Egyptian gods until I arrived here. My body was never found, so I was not properly prepared for the afterworld.”
General Bonaparte was convinced that the Sphinx held him responsible for letting French artillerymen fire on its nose. Francis refuses to believe in the power of a false god like the Sphinx, but despite his own unwavering faith in Jesus, here he is.
It is a matter of some debate why some of us fade away so quickly while others linger for centuries. There may be validity to General Bonaparte’s theory. “As long as your name is remembered, you are not truly dead” is what he thinks. Francis and Ptolemy certainly fit that notion, but who’d remember Agnes Shanklin all these years? It’s possible that one of my fifth graders still thinks of me, I suppose, or that someone recalls the Library Lady who used to read to children on Saturday mornings, but maybe it’s Karl Weilbacher’s daughter who remembers me.
I had a letter from her in 1938. When I first saw her name on the envelope, my stomach lurched at the thought that my sins had been discovered and I was at last to be held to account. Such little fears in such a dangerous time…
Instead, Fräulein Weilbacher reported that her father had recently been arrested in the middle of the night—roused from bed in his pajamas, dragged into the street, hurled into a car. Despite the open and increasingly shrill denunciations of Jewish influence in Germany, the Weilbachers hadn’t seen this catastrophe coming. Karl had retired from his government position in 1931, his daughter told me, but he had many contacts inside the new regime, old friends who helped him and his family during the Depression. Life was hard, but it was hard for everyone.
“Papa couldn’t believe that the Germany he had loved so well would fail to value his long service, but you must know how bad things are for people like us these days,” Fräulein Weilbacher wrote. “He sent word to my mother and me that he was lost, but that we must look for help. I am writing to you because your name and address were in his papers. Please, for the love of God and in my father’s memory, is there anything you can do to make it possible for us to emigrate to America? I would not trouble you if there were anyone else to whom we could appeal.”
That was the moment when I truly regretted the loss of my wealth. If only I had the cash I’d spent on hairdressers during the twenties, or on fashionable shoes, or theater tickets! I might have been able to buy passage out of Germany for Karl’s small family.
As it was, I could only contact ladies from my stock market days, hoping one of them had made it through the Crash in better shape than I. Could they lend me money for a good cause, one that might actually save lives? Failing that, did they know someone who might have influence at the State Department, or in the visa offices? No, and no, and no…
So I wrote to our representative in Congress and to Ohio’s senators. I even wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, who seemed much more alive to the plight of people overseas than her husband was. Nothing came of my pleas. Eventually, one evening, I set myself the awful task. In the morning, I would write to Fräulein Weilbacher to tell her that all my efforts on her behalf had failed.
I went to bed that night and almost wept to think of how Karl’s nation had repaid him. Then it came to me, and I sat bolt upright in bed. Rosie awoke, annoyed by the disturbance. “Palestine!” I told her. “Maybe they could get to Palestine!”
Of course, by then the British had closed the protectorate’s borders to the desperate German Jewish refugees whose influx had triggered the sort of riots I’d seen in Cairo and Gaza. At the same time, I remembered the hospitality I’d experienced in Jebail. Surely, I thought, such generous people would not turn away a poor widow and her daughter.
I rose from my bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and picked up my pen to write. The question was, Whom did I know? Who was still in a position to help?
Gertrude Bell was long gone. She had indeed become a valued adviser to Lawrence’s friend Feisal, who was acclaimed king of Iraq shortly after the British saw to it that there were no other pretenders to the new Iraqi throne. If Feisal was grateful to the British, he was subtle in showing it, and not the puppet they expected him to be. He reigned with some success until his death in 1933, which I suppose was a sort of vindication of the Cairo machinations; on the other hand, he was the only ruler of Iraq to die of natural causes for generations, so there you are.
Miss Bell herself died in 1926, so she didn’t live to see what happened to the nation enclosed by the boundaries she drew, but she had her triumphs in her last few years. Terms were concluded for a treaty with post-Ottoman Turkey, granting Mosul to Iraq. This denied the Kurds a nation of their own, as Karl had feared, but established Iraq as a reliable source of oil for the British Empire, for a few decades at least.
The last official function Gertrude Bell attended in Baghdad was the opening of a new archaeological museum—the very one that was looted in your time. When her passing was reported, the newspaper included a photo of her on that gala evening. Her slimness had become fragility and her dress remained resolutely old-fashioned, but it was bedecked with ribbons of honor from two nations. She was found dead a few weeks later—a suicide by sleeping pills, it was rumored, but I don’t believe that. Like so many Britons of her generation, Gertrude Bell was a great letter writer. There are thick volumes of her collected correspondence, still studied in your day, but she left no farewell note. It seems unlikely that she’d have allowed anyone else to write her obituary if she’d known she was going to die that night.
Given his hopes for Jewish settlement in Palestine and his connection to Karl—whatever it may have been—I think Colonel Lawrence might well have helped the Weilbachers, but he, too, was gone by 1938.
When I met him in ’21, Lawrence was still running on nerves, but the strain of the war was catching up with him. He worked himself like a sharecropper’s mule, writing that war book of his. Then the original manuscript was lost—lost! just imagine!—but he bore down and wrote it all again. When Seven Pillars of Wisdom was finished, he was out of money and desperately tired—physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Many were puzzled by his decision in 1924 to leave both academe and diplomacy behind and to live instead as an enlisted man in the ranks of the Royal Air Force, but I was not very much surprised. Like Miss Bell, he was a great letter writer, you see, and to my delight he had found it worth his while to correspond with me. There were hints of his plans in his letters.
To his misfortune, the predatory paparazzi of your time are really nothing new. The press discovered Lawrence in the R.A.F. and hounded him relentlessly, shouting questions, photographing every move. The situation became impossible, and the R.A.F. asked him to leave. Close to despair, he changed his name and prepared to go more deeply underground in the Royal Tank Corps. Fearing rediscovery, he sent printed postcards to warn his correspondents that he would no longer be writing many letters.
On the back of mine, I found a handwritten note: “My past is like a tin can tied to my tail.” My reply was itself a few words on a postcard, honoring his own brevity. I quoted Ovid: “Facta fugis; facienda petis. Achievement you flee, pursuing new accomplishment.” I don’t know if he received it, but I like to think he did and that he smiled.
There were those who insisted that Lawrence must have been working as a secret agent in his later years, fomenting trouble in India or the Middle East, or even spying in Germany. They couldn’t accept at face value his decision to walk away from public life, couldn’t understand that when he finished with something, he simply never looked back.
He was freakishly competent, you see, a sort of serial genius who thrived on change and challenge. Study crusader castles; run an archaeological dig; make maps. Establish liaisons with Arab tribal leaders; develop tactics for asymmetrical warfare. Represent Sherifian interests with the Big Four at Versailles; find a compromise that would allow for Arab aspirations while serving his empire’s strategic needs. Write a war book; translate The Odyssey from the Greek with a literate warrior’s insight. Master airplane mechanics; test and modify power-boat engines…No matter what he took up, he worked until he achieved a result that he himself could respect. Then he went on to something else.
Anyway, the publicity eventually died down, and Lawrence was able to transfer back to the R.A.F., an organization he truly loved. He resumed some of his correspondence when it seemed safe to do so, and I was delighted to hear from him again. We rarely wrote of anything historic or political. For the most part, we discussed writers and books, or music and record players. Lawrence had an impressive collection of modern music and firm opinions about the best machinery for playing it. He particularly loved Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which, he wrote, “holds me in thrall. Its spell does not break until the recording has ended, and I hear the rhythm of the needle.” On his recommendation, I bought a recording he admired and learned to love it as well.
Apart from the letters, he did me the extraordinary honor of sending a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom from the initial hand-printed edition. He inscribed it, “In memory of our camel ride—this is the book I told you about.” Of its contents, he said nothing, noting only that he wished me to see the craftsmanship he’d marshaled in its production. The book was beautifully bound, with a wealth of illustrations, just as he’d envisioned. There were pastel portraits and amusing cartoons by Eric Kennington; oils by Augustus John; Rothenstein’s chalks; a photograph of Meštrovic’s bronze of the beautiful, sad-eyed Feisal; pencil and pen-and-wash portraits by Douglass, and Dobson, and Spencer.
Later Lawrence sent me a proof of his popular abridgment Revolt in the Desert, asking my opinion. Reflexively, I sent a schoolteacher’s quibbling list of typos and misspellings, alerting him to occasions when the ship of metaphor had run aground. I also suggested that he reconsider his enthusiasm for commas, colons, and ellipses, a weakness I admittedly shared. I regretted mailing it the moment the envelope left my hand, but he seemed pleased to receive my advice and thanked me for saving him from public embarrassment.
That reply was an opening for me to express the one real reservation I had about the shortened story. He’d left out the emotional climax of Seven Pillars: the incident in Deraa. Some people say it never happened as he described it, but something awful did; whatever it was, it scarred him deeply. “I can understand why you would prefer to leave ‘the difficult section’ out of the abridgment,” I wrote, “but that seems to me like skipping the third movement of Mahler’s Ninth. Until you’ve struggled to understand the third movement—with its pileup of polyphony, the crazy complexity that nearly tips into madness—well, I don’t think you can truly appreciate the beauty and consolation of the fourth movement.” I believe he took my point, though nothing came of my suggestion. The abridgment was published with improved punctuation but without reference to Deraa.
And then one morning in 1935, I read the headline: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DEAD AT 46. He had been out on his motorcycle, speeding along a country lane, when he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. It was reported that Colonel Lawrence had suffered a compound fracture of the skull, a hemorrhage of the brain, a broken leg, and many internal injuries.
From the first, his doctors were pessimistic, but even in middle age Lawrence was a man of great physical stamina—like a bull, as Karl once described him. He survived the crash for nearly a week, raising hopes for his recovery, but it was not to be.
You can imagine the shock. You, too, have experienced the sudden and unexpected passing of someone vital and attractive and world famous. Whatever distress their private lives hold, the public lives of such charismatic figures seem charmed, almost magical. Their deaths are all but impossible to comprehend. Many people refuse to believe that something as ordinary as a motoring accident could claim such a luminary.
For years afterward, sightings of Lawrence were reported and conspiracies were rumored. His death was a hoax, some said, providing cover so that he could sneak into northern India and foment rebellion among the Muslims there. I permitted myself to believe these notions for a while, but they were all nonsense.
After his death, his brother Arnold published a book of remembrances by those who’d known Lawrence best. I think I told you that earlier, didn’t I? Anyway, Mr. David Garnett was not alone among Lawrence’s friends in finding “something clerical and celibate” about him. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fervent evangelism of his mother, Lawrence was not religious, but the monastic life in the Royal Air Force had suited him, and he was genuinely happy there. As an elderly Miss el-Akle recalled years later, Lawrence “used all his gifts, great or small, in service to others.” Her observation might seem at odds with what some took to be a shameless seeking after fame, but Winston Churchill agreed with her assessment. “Home, money, comfort, fame, and power meant little or nothing to Lawrence,” he wrote.
In my opinion, Lawrence’s celebrity was as much a tool as his clothing. He used whatever he had to advance causes he believed in, and made himself insignificant otherwise. He was actually quite consistent about that. To work among comrades, doing something useful with his mind and his hands—that was God’s work to him.
When I read about the accident that killed him, I thought, It was a good life, well lived. I wept, on and off, for days.
You might be surprised that Winston Churchill was the last person who came to mind as I cast about for someone who could assist Karl’s family. When you know that Churchill led Britain through the dark days of the Second World War, it’s hard to keep in mind that he spent the years between the two global conflicts without much influence. His party was out of power, and he was relatively unimportant within it. Even among Tories, it must be said, Winston was widely disliked.
In France and Britain and America, we were simply sick of war. Our dead soldiers needed no freshly slaughtered company. Governments around the world were strapped for cash and beset by troubles, left and right. The Depression had impoverished so many; most people were struggling day by day to keep body and soul together. As odious as Herr Hitler was, the very thought of another war with Germany was unbearable. And frankly, so was Winston’s tedious insistence that such a war was inevitable and that it would be better undertaken sooner than later.
Unlike some war lovers I could name, Winston had actually served under fire; unlike most combat veterans, he had relished the experience and never washed his war paint off. You will say that he was right about Hitler, that appeasement was wrong; in the end, the Second World War was a necessary struggle. Too true, but you should also know that going to war was always Winston Churchill’s first resort. Even a stopped clock gives the time correctly twice a day, as the saying goes. You’re still better off with a clock that actually works, in my opinion.
Anyway, I did write to him about helping “my friend Miss Sarah Weilbacher and her mother.” Several weeks later, he replied with a promise that he would see what he could do. “Clemmie sends her regards,” he wrote in closing, “and Thompson says it’s been too long between riots. Do visit, if you can.”
I never heard from him again—not surprising, considering what he had on his plate as war came closer. Nor did I hear from Fräulein Weilbacher after the spring of 1940. I continued to write to her, apprising her of my continuing efforts on her behalf, trying to keep her spirits up. When I wrote in April, the letter was returned marked with the German equivalent of “Addressee unknown.”
Perhaps Karl’s widow and daughter did make their way to safety in Palestine. Perhaps Sarah married and had children. Maybe now, when she tells her sabra grandchildren stories about her escape from Nazi Germany, she mentions the American lady who convinced Winston Churchill to help her get to Israel, and that’s why my name is remembered. I know the odds are horrifyingly against it, but I would like to think that’s how things turned out.
If she survived, Sarah must be quite elderly now. Even the youngest of my little library friends are getting on in years. I don’t have much time left, I expect, and to tell the truth? That’s fine with me. Even General Bonaparte has stopped being smug about the longevity of his fame.
You see, we seem to have a sort of aerial view of the world from here. There’s nothing much to do, so we spend a great deal of time watching human history as though it were a sort of film projected on the shifting misty air around us. It was fascinating—at first.
I was sadly amused, for example, to observe how things turned out for the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. Relentlessly unlucky with the history they were born into, they fought two world wars and bore the brunt of the Depression. With their savings wiped out, many were forced in old age to move in with their grown children. Ancient flappers and decaying swells would shake their heads as their serious sons and respectable daughters raged at teenagers for dabbling in illicit drugs, thoughtless sex, “jungle” music, and lewd dancing.
“Why, we used to drink until everyone was falling down, peeing-on-the-carpet, puking-in-the-streets drunk!” the Lost would mutter, recalling the bootlegging, the jazz, and the parties that went on all night. “How could we have raised such stiffs?”
I myself lived long enough to see the defeat of the tyrants of World War II. Before I died, I thought that people had learned some enduring lessons from the stupendous carnage of that war. The United Nations was formed, and it appeared that the world’s wisest men and women would gather together and find ways to bring reason to bear on their differences. After all that suffering and destruction, I honestly believed people had finally learned to value peace and progress and prosperity.
When I expressed such sentiments in the afterlife, General McClellan laughed at me. (Oh! I forgot to mention it, but he’s here, too. Did you know George McClellan had a great interest in the Middle East? He visited the region shortly after the American Civil War and drank from the Nile during a barge excursion to Luxor.) “You just watch,” he said cynically. “It’ll turn out to be a swindle.”
Francis agreed, with a weary sigh. “Usually the next war is being planned before the ink on the treaty is dry.”
“Peace is the womanish pursuit of cowards,” Ptolemy declared. “My sister put an asp to her breast and died for love. She should have murdered Marc Antony and fought to reclaim Egypt’s glory.”
“At least you died fighting,” General Bonaparte said. “Real men,” he informed me, “will always choose peril and power.”
Not always, but consistently enough. Observing human history has turned out to be a terrible exercise in monotony.
As Mr. Mark Twain observed long ago, there’s hardly a square yard of land anywhere on earth that’s in the possession of its original owners, and I suppose that’s true. The dead don’t blush, but I would if I could when I think how I lectured Winston about colonialism, for my own country rests on the whitening bones of countless Indians. Nobody’s hands are clean. We might not rape and kill and pillage personally, but an awful lot of us were happy to inherit the stolen goods.
Poor Francis has witnessed the cycle for centuries. Armies arrive and lay claim to somebody else’s land. Generations suffer humiliation, theft, and murder. The dispossessed call upon their gods to witness this injustice; theirs is a righteous anger and so retaliation is sacred, for it is meant to redress an affront to all that’s holy. “Savages!” the conquerors cry then. “These rebels are devoid of human morality. We have no choice but to hunt them down and kill them like the wild beasts they are.” They always claim that they have no choice, but what are they doing there in the first place?
“You can see why God weeps,” Francis often says. “How sad, to grant free will and see it used so poorly.”
I haven’t told Francis, because he might be upset by the idea, but I’ve come to pity God, who has observed our kind for millennia, not merely decades, as I have, or centuries, like Francis. The good Lord must find our world a brutally disappointing place.
If He exists at all…
I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but apart from the steadfast faith I see in Francis, there is no sign here of the deity my sister, Lillian, worshipped. Far more in evidence are the gods of war, whom I once assumed were merely mythical: Mars, Ares, Thor. Indra, Guan Yu, Wotan. Ogun. Ashur, the Morrigan. Huitzilopochtli, Bishamon, Sekhmut…All of them are real, and in their numberless hordes, they watch human history with gleeful satisfaction.
Here, along the Nile, Mentu the Falcon-Headed seems to be in charge. “The children of men may prate of peace and mewl of love, but anyone can see the truth,” he roars, lifting his great feathered arm toward his legions. “They worship us!”
I wish I could argue, but the twentieth century certainly didn’t provide much evidence to deploy. I’ve come to believe that Mr. William James was right. (He’s not here, by the way. I just remember what he wrote.) Most people welcome war. Rare and precious as it is, peace seems boring and banal by comparison. People believe easily that battle is a sacrament with young men the necessary sacrifice. They believe darkly that without war’s mystical blood payment, society goes soft and rots from within. And most of them can be swayed by lofty rhetoric and crafty slogans. As war approaches, Mr. James wrote, nations experience a vague, religious exultation. That’s when the blood-red gods begin to dance. “I am Empire,” Mentu howls as the others whirl in ecstasy. “I am the King of Thieves!”
The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken than before. Always, someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest those black seeds, dreaming of the day when they will bring forth their bounty of vindictive vindication. Into that dreamer’s ear, a blood-red god whispers, “Offer flattery in one hand, fear in the other. Rule or be ruled! Dominate or disappear!”
The rationales warp and twist and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us?
“All men dream,” Colonel Lawrence wrote, “but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
“It’s the dreamers who do all the damage,” I decided as we watched yet another reckless rush toward calamity. “I swear, the world would be better off without them! You know what I’m starting to think? If you meet a dreamer of the day, you should wait until he sleeps again, and then just—just shoot him in the head!”
Francis stared, not so much aghast as disappointed.
“Well, that’s what the Bible tells us,” I said, defending myself. “It’s in Deuteronomy. ‘If there arise among you a dreamer of dreams, a false prophet who arises among you, thou shalt not harken unto him and neither shall thine eye pity him, but thou shalt kill him!’”
With half-closed eyes, Francis began to recite, “I have a dream…I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—”
“—will join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” General McClellan finished with him.
“Oh, my,” I said.
“There were those who believed the Reverend King was a dangerous man,” Francis reminded me, “and someone killed him for his dream.”
“All right then, what about Hitler?” I said.
“Gandhi,” Francis countered.
“Pol Pot!”
“Mandela.”
“So how can we tell the false prophets from the true?” I asked.
“By their deeds shall you know them,” George McClellan said. “Wait and see.”
“Wait and see,” Napoleon mimicked in a prissy voice. “That’s why Lincoln fired you.”
“And in the meantime, the damage is done!” I cried.
No one answered.
There was some excitement a little while ago. The ghost Nile has currents and eddies, just as the real river does. Every now and then someone new washes up. George spotted a man wearing antique armor climb onto the foggy bank, across the water. Ptolemy says the armor is Greek. He thinks the man might be Alexander the Great, so he and George have been trying to attract the newcomer’s attention. General Bonaparte is sulking. Just between you and me? I don’t think he wants the competition.
The idea of another soldier among us is making Francis restless, but I’ve begun to hope we can lure someone new to our group, if for no other reason than to distract our two generals from what’s happening among the living.
General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. “Non, non, non!” he’ll cry. “Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way! Mon Dieu! Doesn’t anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?”
“This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia,” George predicted.
You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.
I’m sure you’ve realized that Karl Weilbacher was tragically wrong about his own nation but largely right about the Cairo Conference. Black seeds were sown, and I’m afraid you’re still bringing in the harvest. Rarely has so much been decided by so few to the detriment of so many as in that fancy hotel back in 1921. I thought at the time that Winston and his Forty Thieves were a high-handed, arrogant bunch, and I knew the Cairo Conference was significant when I stood on its edges. I never imagined that decisions made then would dictate history for a hundred years or more, or that America would get tangled up in it all.
I guess it’s easy for some people to convince themselves, as Mumma always did, that they’re doing something nice for others, something they suppose others must truly yearn for, something anyone ought to be thrilled and grateful to receive. And perhaps others do want it, or maybe they don’t, but people on the receiving end can’t help feeling that they should have been asked before somebody charged in and bestowed it. Naturally, people are resentful of ham-handed efforts to run their affairs for them, especially when they can plainly see a benefactor’s ulterior motives. And even when you mean well? Sometimes things are just none of your business.
“Americans have always looked at the Middle East and seen themselves in a mirror,” George McClellan told me recently. In his opinion, “Anyone could have predicted how all this would turn out.”
Well, I didn’t, but I certainly know something about gazing into the mirror of infatuation. Eventually it shatters, and you’re left with nothing but broken glass.
Francis says he’s fed up with the generals and wants to know if Rosie and I would like to try moving upstream. I’m thinking about it, but I may wait a while longer. This bend of the river seems to collect military people, and I am still hoping to run into Colonel Lawrence. Surely his name is remembered, and I can’t imagine that he never drank from the Nile.
Which sort of dreamer was he? I wonder. He seems to have concluded that he was a dreamer of the day, and hated himself for it, but I don’t think it was Lawrence’s fault that things are such a mess in the Middle East. There were many forces at work. He did his best, not that good intentions count for much.
The Arabs he lived among had every opportunity to shoot him while he slept and bring his head to the Turks for that enormous reward. They understood that Lawrence was for them, not merely using them for his own purposes. His dream was that they could be more fully and truly themselves, not just darker reflections of himself in the mirror of infatuation.
Maybe that’s the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.
A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.
Well! I was hoping I could end my little story by saying something wise and uplifting, and I’m afraid that might be about the best I can do. Perhaps if I’d read more philosophy when I had the chance, I’d have something more impressive to leave you with but, you see, I just taught fifth grade and lived my own little life. When it comes down to it, I don’t have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is:
Read to children.
Vote.
And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.
Oh, dear. It might be too late now, but one last thing? Try not to remember my name.