Seven Pillars of Wisdom (a book review post)

 

This book is not what I would call an easy read. It's full of unfamiliar people, difficult to pronounce names, and events that are not really remembered by anyone other than historians. I would say, on the other hand, that those things don't matter to any great extent. You don't actually need to have a greater understanding of whom most of the people are other than how they relate to Lawrence, especially since most of them only make very brief appearances in the narrative. The ones who hang around, you will come to know. There's no need to speak any of the difficult pronunciations, so they can just be glossed over. And the individual battles and meetings and whatnot can be experienced through Lawrence, so there's really no need to know the history of the Arab Revolt in any great detail, rather like knowing about each and every battle of the American Civil War is mostly superfluous information. Not to mention the fact that the continuity may not be actual. Lawrence admitted that when he had a conflict between his notes and his memory that he always sided with his memory. No, that doesn't make sense to me, but, then, I didn't write the book.

I do think most people will not be able to or want to try to dive into this book. I chose to because of... well, reasons which are unimportant to the book itself.

Let's talk about the title. I like the title. Or I did. Before I started reading the book, I liked the title, and I fully expected it to have some meaning within the context of the book, and I kept waiting for the meaning to be revealed. I'm going to throw in here that I took a long time to read this book. It's something that I read bits of between other books. Not because it wasn't good, just because it's dense and does go on in places, and I would need a break. So, as I neared the end of the book, I began to worry that there had been some explanation about the title somewhere in the beginning and that I had just forgotten what it was. When I say it took me a long time, I mean that I spent more than two years with this book in the background of other things I was reading.

When I did get all the way to the end, no meaning to the title, at least as far as I could remember, had been forthcoming. I was slightly annoyed by that and decided I needed to do some research into the matter. As it turns out, there is no explanation for the title at all other than that Lawrence liked it. It's from a verse in Proverbs and was meant as the title for a different book that Lawrence was writing, one where it would have made sense, since it was going to be about seven great cities in the Middle East. But World War I started and Lawrence wrote this book instead and just kept the same title. In that sense it's a bit like if Richard Adams had never written The Plague Dogs but had decided to use that as the title to Watership Down just because he liked it.

All of which is to say that I'm not in favor of the title. My personal philosophy is that the title should be related to the book or reveal something about the book, but this title does neither, which I find... well, for me, it's a ding against the book, even though it has nothing to do with the text of the book. I love Watership Down (you can find it listed on my Of Significance... page) but if it had been named Plague Dogs, I would have issues with it.

So that's a lot just about the title. heh

If the book has a flaw, it's the title.

Which is not say that it's a perfect book, but it's the title that's a real thorn for me.

Lawrence has some beautiful passages describing the desert. More than a few. He's actually quite eloquent. He also occasionally spends chapters philosophizing about war (and maybe various other things? I don't quite remember), and those are interesting. For a bit. He always goes on too long about any given point and repeats himself several times before finishing whatever it is he's talking about. Not enough so as to make it not worth reading, though. And the book is full of amusing stories of things that happened during the various campaigns.

Like the time, during a cavalry charge against the enemy, he shot his own camel in the back of the head and was catapulted over the camel into the midst of the oncoming enemy. He didn't realize until later what had happened, but it actually saved his life. Amusing after the fact, you know.

There are also some horrific events recounted.

For me, though, the thing that really makes the book worth the read is the turning point for Lawrence when he goes from being a naïve, young soldier who believed the British, his people, were going to do right by the Arabs and his realization that they were... not. His exploration of his existential crisis and subsequent depression is... well, I don't know how to describe it. His determination after that that the Arabs should end the war in a state of independence and self-governance was admirable, even if he was not able to help them achieve it. Colonialism had not, yet, run its course, not that it has, now, either, but at least it's not the operating paradigm anymore.

In the end, this is a book that I'm very glad I read; however, it's not the kind of book I would suggest to anyone. It's the kind of thing a person really needs to take an interest in before they can get through it.

Abandoned Places: Qasr el Baron

Modeled after the Angkor Wat, the Qasr el Baron, or Baron Empain Palace, took four years to build. It was finished in 1911 in the Heliopolis district of Cairo and has a troubled, if not sinister, history. In fact, the palace was built by the guy who founded Heliopolis, Belgian millionaire Edouard Louis Joseph, Baron Empain. The house was surrounded by gardens and terraces within which hid erotic statues. The main tower is said to have been built on a revolving base to provide a 360 degree view and constant sunlight into the Baron's room. There's also a rumored secret tunnel to the nearby basilica, somewhat at odds with the whispers of Satan worship and orgies that went on during the years Baron Empain  was in residence.

The Baron's wife, scorned by the Baron's affairs, is said to have thrown herself down the stairwell of the revolving tower.

His daughter, Miriam, suffered from psychological issues and would sequester herself in the basement rooms when she was in a bad mood. It was there she was found dead. Murder or suicide? No one knows.

The Baron returned to Belgium at the beginning of World War I and never returned to the house. It's said that there was a mirrored chamber in the basement rooms, possibly the same room Miriam was found in, and, upon the Baron's death in 1929, the mirrors ran with blood and were permanently stained red.

The Baron's son moved in for a while after the Baron's death, but it was a fairly short tenure. It had been abandoned, looted (including any mirrors), and vandalized by the 50s. In 2005, the Egyptian government bought the property and began plans to restore it. It was briefly opened to the public but, after only two months, was closed again and never re-opened. No explanation has ever been given.

All but the first and last pictures are by Hossam el-Hamalawy and used under the linked license.

As an added bonus, here are some pictures of some abandoned quarries:

Abandoned Places: Kalavantin Durg

Photo credit to Rohit Gowaikar and used under the linked agreement.

Rising up to 2300 feet, Kalavantin Durg is older than it is tall. The fort is not much more than a cave built on the pinnacle of the jutting stone that gives a spectacular view of the surrounding lands, which is probably what it was built for. It's said, though, that it was built for a princess or, possibly, a queen: Kalavantin, but there are no historical records to back that up. The only up to the fort is the "Climb to Heaven," narrow, hand-carved stairs that take hours to climb.

Photo credit to [selvin] and used under the linked license agreement.

As an added bonus, the ghost town Kolmanskop:

Kolmanskop is located in the Namib desert much in the same way as the diamond that caused it to spring into existence: it was just lying there. A railway worker found it in 1908 and turned it over to his German supervisor, leading to a flood of German diamond miners and a quickly flourishing town. But the field was mostly depleted by the end of World War I and completely abandoned by the 1950s. Since then, it has been featured in a number of films and TV shows.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Ultraphone Ear-Disc

Here is something I didn't know: Buck Rogers first appeared as the character Anthony Rogers in the 1928 novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan. Anthony Rogers is a veteran soldier of The Great War (World War I) who ends up in a state of suspended animation for nearly 500 years. And suspended animation is probably a topic I could have covered; it has been around in fiction for a while (there's Rip Van Winkle, and I mentioned HG Wells Sleeper, and, oh, well, so many more), but we don't really have that worked out in a way where we can do it on purpose, yet, so I left it out. I say on purpose, because there have been a few times where people have ended up in accidental cases of suspended animation (like falling into a freezing lake) where we've been able to bring them back, but it's not something anyone can depend on.

Anyway...

The topic for the day is the ultraphone ear-disc. You may know it better as

or

Yeah, your bluetooth started out as military technology so that soldiers could have their hands free for weapons instead of needing to use a handheld radio. And that started out in Nowlan's story about a war 500 years in the future. So we have a guy writing just after World War I who already was seeing the need for soldiers to have "hands free" phones. heh Just to make this clear, wireless devices, specifically, the radio, had only just been invented. And radios were HUGE (I mean physically huge. There was an old radio down at the farm when I was a kid, and it was bigger than me). When Nowlan was writing his story, there was no idea, yet, of using radio for personal communication.

Some of the other things that Armageddon 2419 introduced (there are more):
1. remotely piloted drones (more radio)
2. telecommuting
3. e-purchasing
4. paratroopers

Armageddon was adapted into the Buck Rogers comic strip just a year later, and it mostly delves into space exploration after that, but that initial novella was quite visionary.

Bonus U (breaking news)

Ultrasound:

One of the shows I loved growing up, and, when I say loved, I mean loved, as in it was not negotiable as to whether or not I was going to get to watch it or not, and my family knew it, was Doctor Who. Other than the TARDIS, the Doctor had two things that were really cool: K-9 and his sonic screwdriver. The sonic screwdriver is kind of what it sounds like. Okay, well, it's not a screwdriver at all, at least, not in appearance, but it does use sound as a sort of a screwdriver, and, other than a lightsaber, it's one of the things I grew up wanting to have.

the latest Doctor with his screwdriver

There has been ongoing research into sound over the years, specifically ultrasound. That is, after all, how we got the ultrasound machine. There are even ultrasound techniques for non-invasive surgery. Yes, they don't have to cut you open, just use a beam of sound to take care of what ails you. The new development, though, is that some physicists at the University of Dundee got together and developed a way to lift and manipulate objects with sound alone. It's a pretty amazing achievement that could lead all sorts of places. One problem: I don't think it's something anyone's going to be carrying around in their pocket anytime soon.