I finally started reading Dervla Murphy's 1965 or so classic *Full Tilt:
Ireland to India With A Bicycle* about her 1963 trip across Europe and Asia
on a single speed*.* I have to say that this is truly the best bike
travelogue I've read, and -- to place the book in a far more demanding
category -- I have to say that it ranks among the best travel writing *tout
court.* I've read much of Waugh, Theroux, Iyer, as well as Tim Moore etc
etc, as well Toqueville etc, but Murphy is a real writer. I must buy more
of her travelogues; they're $10 on Kindle.
Why is she so good? First, she's mostly interested in the travel and not on
the bike. Now, there are some very good bike travelogues -- Tim Moore; and
I do enjoy the technical bits in such works. But Murphy's Rosinante ("Roz")
is almost an afterthought; look at the bike kit in her packing list! 1
spare tube and 4 links of chain! Murphy is interested in the movement, the
scenery, and above all, the people and their cultures, and it is here she
is so good: she is as observant and eloquent in her descriptions as Theroux
but from the standpoint of an intelligent woman with a curious and -- the
main point -- frank and open and sympathetic character; Theroux, for all
his intelligence and eloquence has a nasty misanthropic quality that nags
at one while reading -- and enjoying -- his writings.
I suppose Murphy's background accounts for some of her openness to very
foreign traditional cultures; perhaps paradoxically, the very traditional,
and hugely alien to Western eyes, culture of rural, traditional Muslim
Afghans in the early 1960s is less far from the near-peasant (outside of
Dublin), old-fashioned Roman Catholic culture that dominated 1963 Ireland
than to the much more secular and jaded globalist Westernism (for though it
is global, it is entirely of the modern West) of 2022.
And one is also struck very, very hard by the openness and friendliness of
such hard-line Islamic traditionalists (and it is largely the men, too, in
a grossly "patriarchal" society -- I dismiss that ideological term, but
Pushtun -- as Wahabi-ist S Arabian -- society *is* grossly patriarchal in
the negative sense; but anyway) the friendliness, acceptance, helpfulness,
and dignity of these patriarchal me toward a stray, solitary, White
European female. I daresay that it was in part because Murphy carried in
her own character the marks of a medieval religious peasant society that
she was so well received; the other part doubtless is that open, engaging,
respectful and friendly character that marks her.
O poor Afghanistan, what have they done to thee! Google photos of
Afghanistan in the 1960s; there's a portfolio going around taken by a
visiting American teacher who spent time with his family in Kabul
("KAH-buhl) in the mid 1960s. I lived in India at the time and remember the
general situation well: even then Afghanistan an ideological battlefield,
large American presence, AID and so forth, to ideologically counteract the
diabolical Soviets; even then the beginnings of the conflicts that would
destroy the country and its society -- but the rural peasant Muslim
tradition lives on; even amongst the debased and really modernist Taliban
perversion of the religion, for fanatical narrowmindedness, proselytizing
fury,*, and vicious cruelty is part of that pseudo-Islam that has generated
the terrorism that really has its root in Western ideologies: Al Fatah and
such Leninist-inspired radicals from the 1960s and '70s that morphed from
Marxism into ideological fundamentalist (which means "superficial")
faux-religious political activism.
* AK Coomaraswamy applied this wonderful epithet to the imperialist and
racist Christian ideologue missionaries ravaging Asia and Africa in the
19th and first half of the 20th century; and I say this as a believing
practicing Christian. Now, Coomaraswamy often wrote hyperbolically to make
points for his antagonistic audence, the learned "elite" and
"great-and-ideologically-good" opinion makers of his time in defense of
religious tradition, but he was far, far too intelligent and culturally
aware to deny that even fundamentalist Victorian Christian missionaries
were often people of charity and selflessness who did at times some good
for their charges, even if they did a lot of bad.
But back to Murphy: she is good because she is a. intelligent, b. open
minded, c. very observant, d. eloquent; I mean that she has outstanding
literary talent; e. intrepid and f. outgoing. Oh, so many bike travelogues
are vitiated by the narrow minds and cultural narrowness of the authors!
(Tim Moore is readable because besides being a very good writer, he is very
funny; if he tried to be serious I daresay he'd be like the rest.)
https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan for example. These photos
were taken by the American Podlich family, I think.
https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-as-it-once-was-the-photographs-of-william-podlich/29222700.html
The Podlich girls were just a few years older than I.
On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 9:07 AM Doug H. <dhansford1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I recently read a fun book by Tom Eastham called Back on My Bike. It is
> the story of a 60 year old recent retiree who rediscovers cycling. It does
> touch on some ideas that will be familiar to Rivendell riders although i
> don't recall Rivendell being mentioned specifically as it is set in Great
> Britain. Check it out.
> Doug
> Athens, GA
>
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Patrick Moore
Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum
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