Does treating a deep funk with wallowing in a deep funk work?
A few years ago a cousin in his 80s pressed me to read this book, for non-funk reasons of his, just for the travelogue of it. I resisted because I expected it to be a bloodless description of places. He insisted for whatever his reasons were, and when I gave in, I became amused, not by the ostensible subject, but by the author's grouchy personality. The enticement of his itinerary was to find out what gripe he would come up with next.
But the paragraph with the highlighting struck me like a 2x4. After I returned the book, I kept remembering the passage every few months until I finally went to the library to copy it down. Just finding it was not easy, paging through and skimming, and the memory had made it larger than I found it to be.
It has a strange comfort to me I can't explain. Is it that wallowing in funk is a cure for funk? Or just that being grouchy is not-just-me is quite a relief?!1
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[font size=5]The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean[/font]
By Paul THEROUX
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Copyright 1995 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company
“The 7:20 Express to Latakia” pp 430-431
Cold and [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]unsettled[/FONT] at the edge of this desert, feeling [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]thwarted[/FONT], this enforced [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]isolation[/FONT] filled my mind with [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]memories of injustice[/FONT]-- [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]put-downs, misunderstandings, unresolved disputes, abusive remarks, rudeness, arguments I had lost, humiliations[/FONT]. Some of these instances went back many years. For a reason I could not explain, I thought of everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. I kept telling myself, “So what?” and “Never mind,” but it was no good. [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]I could not stop the flow of unpleasant instances, and I was tormented[/FONT].
From time to time, I laughed to think I was so removed mentally from Syria, but then I concluded that being in the middle of this desert had something to do with it. It was pitch dark and silent except for when the occasional trucks thundered by. I supposed that I was [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]fearful and disgusted[/FONT]; I disliked the desert, I had been [FONT style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: yellow"]abandoned[/FONT] by Abdallah in this howling wilderness, where there was darkness and no water.
A pair of oncoming headlights wobbled off the road. Abdallah got out and approached the car laughing, carrying a gas can. Saying it was an electrical fault had been a face-saver.
It was late. Returning the gas can to the town of Deir Atiyeh, he stopped the car and I told him I was bailing out. There ensued a great whining argument, as he pleaded, berated, complained and demanded more money than what we had agreed on. I bought you oranges! he howled. I thought: I hate this nagging man. Then I said: Do I care? I gave him what he wanted and swore at him, and afterwards realized that the whole incident irritated me because I had been planning to tip him the very amount he had demanded.
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