"And we have adorned the lower heaven with lamps and set them to pelt the devils with ... we touched the heavens, and found them filled with a mighty guard and shooting stars, and we did sit in certain seats thereof to listen; but whoso of us listens now finds a shooting star for him on guard."
Emblems of all the great abiding truths have been set up on high, where, one would have thought, every poor, striving mortal could not fail to see them; vastness and distance is displayed as a rest to those wearied with the smallness and nearness of things; solidity and eternity are there to comfort the grievers over passing men and disappointed hopes; the kindly darkness which hides us intermittently from our fellows is pierced with points of guiding light. And yet we do not habitually, and as a matter of course, accept these gifts for which no price is asked; we go blundering on, intensifying the grim blackness of night by shutting ourselves up with it, surrounded with all the small things of earth, and this when we might forget them by reason of their very smallness in the vast distances of the vaulted heavens. It almost seems as though we would deliberately wish to hide from ourselves and each other the few simple sufficient laws of existence, for in this as in other things we not only avoid the truth but appear ashamed of it, and dress it up in every possible accessory of human invention.
We dress everything up—our bodies, our minds, our food. I look down this long table d'hôte, and what do I see? I see a crowd of people dressed up, exchanging dressed-up commonplaces, eating dressed-up food.
I feel that nothing is real.
But this unreality is so real that I ask:
"Have, then, the unrealities, the non-essentials of existence become the realities, and have we, emerging from a world where only the essentials of existence concerned us, given them an undue importance? Coming out of a state of primitive civilisation, are we unable to appreciate the true meaning of our surroundings? These people wear the burdens of fashion so lightly, they talk these complicated nothings so simply, they toil so contentedly discontented through these endless disguised dishes: what is it behind it all that our minds cannot grasp?" I look again: I talk to them and they answer me; I eat another dressed-up dish. Here I feel a weary heart, there I touch a bored mind; now one gets a flash of intellect, now a gleam of soul, all alike so carefully wrapped up, and yet with a longing to be out. Why this unnatural dread of truth and simplicity? I am getting positively affected by it. I sit here amongst these smart people in my travelling clothes, and I confess to a new strange sense of discomfort in consequence. I feel ashamed of my old clothes. Opposite to me is a lady with a kindly face and a comfortable look about her; her mauve dress gives a pleasing sense of colour, but as she moves two beaded flaps keep jumping about, which detracts from the sense of repose suggested by her comfortable look; when she leans back an array of stitched beads catches on the carved projection of the chair, and she has to be disengaged by the waiter. Her sleeves drooping gracefully from the elbow require elaborate gymnastics to prevent them dipping into her plate as she eats, and twice they caught in the pepper-pot and overturned its contents on the floor. But she bore it all with a pleasant apologetic smile which called out my admiration for such a display of schooled temper under these trying circumstances. Then, with an unconscious transition of thought, I found myself comparing her to the Arab woman who brought the bowl of youart off which we supped last night. I recalled how I envied her the dignified carriage of her free unfettered form, the natural grace of her untrammelled manners. I recalled the simple graceful folds of her clinging single garment, so much a part of herself that she was quite unconscious of it, and I compare this lady trying to adapt herself to the elaborate creation in which she is enthralled. Long custom prevents her from realising how her form and movements are rendered artificial and ungraceful. As the Chinese lady, unconscious of her deformity in feet, would resent or wonder at our pity for her enslaved by the idea of a barbarous custom, so would my neighbour resent or wonder should I feel pity for her at this moment, equally a slave to a Western idea.
I glanced at my battered old coat and was pervaded with a sense of remorse at having been ashamed of it.
Here, in the middle of this bewildering appearance of unreality, it was telling me of so many solid facts. How often had it not covered the aching pangs of hunger, and the satisfied sense of that hunger appeased; it had felt the thumping of my heart stirred by danger, or hastened by exhilarating motion; it had known the long-drawn breaths of quiet enjoyment at a peaceful scene. That tear was made on the rocks the day we climbed to the "written stone" at the top of the Boulghar Mountains, and I mended it one long quiet evening by the Euphrates. I lost this button the night we scrambled up to the castle at Palmyra, my little friend Maydi pulled me up a rock by it and it broke. That burnt mark was made by Mahmet, who dropped the live charcoal with which I was lighting my cigarette in the shaykh's hut at Harran. All this and more is what my coat says to me.... I am no longer ashamed of it. I feel sure if the kind lady opposite realised all this she would not regard me as an outcast, for there is something very honest about the coat.
But I had got no further away from the feeling of unreality. I tried to recall what it had felt like to live in civilisation, but all I could remember was how difficult it had been to disentangle ourselves from it. While we were still in it, we had not known what we should want outside it. But, once outside, all these difficulties had disappeared: everything at once seemed to happen naturally; we missed nothing of the things we had left behind. And as it had been difficult while we were still in it to get disentangled from it, so now we experienced a difficulty in entering it again—a difficulty in once more taking up and using the things we had discarded for a time. It was as if we had never used them, so strange did they seem, and so little did we understand their meaning. Entering it differed, moreover, in this way from our entrance into the new life outside it; once in it nothing seemed to happen naturally. This was the more disconcerting since civilisation was not altogether a new world to us, in the sense that the other had been. We had spent many long years in it, and yet on returning we found it all strange and incomprehensible.