“It is sheer magic,” I recall him saying: “read it and tell me what you think about it.” This was Freya Stark’s account of her third visit to Turkey in which she took the same route which the great Macedonian had taken 22 centuries earlier: ‘through lonely mountains passes, past remote ruins and along the pirate shore where country people respond gladly to informed curiosity’. Alexander’s Path was the exact title, the sub-title reading: From Caria to Cilicia. I do not read travel books much but my ears picked up as I heard that wonderful scholar-entrepreneur friend in Zurich, Uli Albers, talk to my wife, commending Freya’s book on Alexander to her favour. It might have been the year 1994 - or was it 1993 - when I heard of Freya Stark for the first time. It is hard to think of a writer in the travel game who most closely demonstrates the merits of Flaubert’s three rules for good writing: clarity, clarity, and finally clarity. Her life was something of a work of art … The books in which she recorded her journeys are seductively original …Nomad and social lioness, ublic servant and private essayist, emotional victim and myth-maker. It was rare to leave her company without feeling that the world was somehow larger and more promising. This surely is the meaning of home-a place where every day is multiplied by all the days before it.” - Freya Stark In smaller, more familiar things, memory weaves her strongest enchantments, holding us at her mercy with some trifle, some echo, a tone of voice, a scent of tar and seaweed on the quay.
In these accounts of her own transformation she brought a growing body of readers not only into exotic locales but also to the brink of metaphysical questions about the meaning of life.Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest. The writings that resulted from her constant travels began as wonder-filled accounts of ancient storybook kingdoms of the Middle East and moved impressively toward a reflective consideration of the differences between a nomadic way of life and the stable urbanity that might have been her lot if she had decided to fit the mold of those around her. "Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself," she wrote in Baghdad Sketches ( enlarged edition, 193 7) "I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates." Such a motto defines not only her approach to the world but also the character of the woman herself. Freya Madeline Stark lived for a century, and into that one hundred years she packed a life of extraordinary daring and ingenuity.
0 kommentar(er)
