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“The harder the life the finer the type and there’s no doubt about that; the easier you make life the lower goes your standards.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swjcpS6EpV4&feature=youtu.be&t=17m43s. 2001. <br class="br">Variante: I think the harder the life, the finer the type

“Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 68.
Kontext: Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs. Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good. While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming. Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.

“No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)
Kontext: A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease….. No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.

“But we seldom spoke of sex, for starving men dream of food, not women, and our bodies were generally too tired to lust.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 110.

“The Empty Quarter offered me the chance to win distinction as a traveller; but I believed that it could give me more than this, that in those empty wastes I could find the peace that comes with solitude, and, among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world. Many who venture into dangerous places have found this comradeship among members of their own race; a few find it more easily among people from other lands, the very differences which separate them binding them ever more closely. I found it among the Bedu. Without it these journeys would have been a meaningless penance.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 4.

“[re Danakil country] I was among a savage, good-looking people with a dangerous reputation. I was travelling with camels in hot, arid country under testing conditions where, if things went wrong, I could get no help and where men's lives depended on my judgement.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 94.

“I had yet to learn that no Bedu thinks it shameful to beg, and that often he will look at the gift which he has received and say, ‘Is this all that you are going to give me?’ I was seeing the worst side of their character, and was disillusioned and resentful, and irritated by their assumption of superiority. In consequence I was assertive and unreasonable.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 49.

“This incident impressed upon me the Bedu’s indifference to human life. The man was sick and if God ordered it he would die. He was a stranger who came from a tribe unrelated to theirs. None of them felt an interest because he was a human being like themselves. His death would in no way affect them. Yet their code demanded that, however unwanted he might be, they should fight in his defence if he were attacked whilst with them.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 177.

“Personally, I would forgo any other comfort to drink clean water.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 153.

“More important, something decisive in my life, he [Guy Moore] taught me to feel affection for tribesmen. Ever since then it has been people that have mattered to me, rather than places. I have never craved magnificent scenery or opportunities for sport in the way that I have longed to be with certain tribes and, above all, certain individuals among them.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 210.

“Now I had crossed it [the Empty Quarter]. To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was ever likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 138.

“I might have been homosexual if I was born in a different age but as it was I remained asexual.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Stewart, Rory (2007). Arabian Sands (Introduction). London: Penguin Classics. p. xii. ISBN 9780141442075

“I know that today it sounds unforgivable to have shot seventy lion in five years, but that was fifty years ago and circumstances of that time cannot be judged by those of today.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 273.

“…I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 255.

“They strolled with me through the streets hand in hand, as is usual with Arab friends, but I was lightly uncomfortable, having re-acquired my inhibitions with my trousers.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 185.

“I believe that most men have an inborn desire to hunt and kill and that even today this primitive urge has only been eradicated in a small minority of the human race.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p.115.

“In the deserts, however arid, I have never felt homesick for green fields and woods in spring, but now that I was in England I longed with an ache that was almost physical to be back in Arabia.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 187.

“I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 212.

“There is always trouble if meat is not divided by lot. Someone immediately says that he has been given more than his share, and tries to hand a piece to someone else. Then there is much arguing and swearing by God, with everyone insisting that he has been given too much, and finally a deadlock ensues which can only be settled by casting lots for the meat – as should have been done in the first place. I have never heard a man grumble that he has received less than his share. Such behaviour would be inconceivable to the Bedu, for they are careful never to appear greedy, and quick to notice anyone who is.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 71.

“I had felt the lure of the unexplored, the compulsion to go where others had not been.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Quelle: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 95.

“The biggest misfortune in human history is the invention of the combustion engine. Cars and airplanes diminish the world, rob it of all its diversity. Young men who meet me want to know how they could do what I've done. But all they can be is tourists now.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Book Report by David Streitfeld https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1999/06/06/book-report/664d575b-8615-4d17-9275-dd7eb11de8bd/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.213c896c1ac0. The Washington Post. 6 June 1999.

“The rifles with which they fought were all that they accepted from the outside world, the only modern invention which interested them.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 38.

“My first night in camp, as I sat eating sardines out of a tin and watching my Somalis driving the camels up from the river to couch them by the tent, I knew that I would not have been anywhere else for all the money in the world. For a month I travelled in an arid, hostile land. I was alone; there was no one whom I could consult; if I met with trouble from the tribes I could get no help; if I were sick there was no one to doctor me. Men trusted me and obeyed my orders; I was responsible for their safety. I was often tired and thirsty, sometimes frightened and lonely, but I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 8.

“I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither. When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes.”

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Wilfred Thesiger buch Arabian Sands

Quelle: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 257.