Post by Ten on Aug 13, 2010 11:39:27 GMT -5
While the internet connection is still working at this place, I want to tell y'all a little about this book I'm reading: The Places In Between by Rory Stewart -- his first-person account of walking across Afghanistan. It seems like something Cloud might like, but anyone who has no interest whatsoever in anthropology, history, or foreign cultures would get bored with it. As for me, I don't pay as much attention to the parts where he describes the history of some extinct snake-worshiping cult and such, but I love reading about all the things that happen to him and all the different people he encounters. Plus he's not a bad writer.
What I value most about this book are the things it demonstrates about humankind, which now that I think about it sounds cheesy and pretentious. That's not how I mean it. It's just one of those things that's hard to say without sounding fake.
The people he meets and talks to... they really show how people who do terrible things aren't always nasty in 100% of everything. For example, there's one man he meets early on who is funny and dorky and light-hearted and yells things like "I AM A MULE!" as he carries another guy across the river and later he walks up to a little boy with his gun and threatens to kill him and he laughs when the poor boy bursts out crying.
It frustrates me that so much of fiction has villains who have only two default expressions: evil scowl and evil laugh. Sometimes, smiling, fun, likable people commit evil acts, but that's too unsettling to write about isn't it? /bookstore rant,
So as I read about all these folks, some nice and some not, some violent and some not, it helped illustrate to me something I've believed for a while now: folks are too much of a muddled mix of good and bad traits for any of us to be able to judge them as "good" or "bad" with any reliable accuracy.
Which just half of why the whole idea of "good" people getting into heaven (or "good" cats getting into StarClan) does not compute. But this is another digression. Back to what I was saying about life lessons in the book.
Another thing it teaches is how important it is to understand the folks you're working to help or change or appeal to, and I don't know how to stress that enough. When you don't get someone's religion or culture or way of life, don't hold out any hope of being able to parade in and tell them how to conduct themselves. That goes for knowing how to lead them or solve their problems, too. Folks in Afghanistan have numerous differences from each other, let alone foreign aid workers and UN officials, and the other day I saw one of those awful Coexist stickers that make me so mad and I want to know if it's legal to rip one off someone's car. I found my essay on that, by the way. It's back at home. I'll share it with y'all once I get back so that I won't sound like such an ignorant bastard.
Also, Rory is Scottish.
