Showing posts with label train stuff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label train stuff. Show all posts
Wandering Books
There’s much to mourn in present day trains – gone are the little red curtains on copper railings, gone the iron luggage racks, not a splinter of wood nor a single shred of faux-velvet remains on the seats. All has been replaced by PVC and polyester. Even a summer railway breeze has become a thing of the past, what with air-conditioning and handleless windows.
But luckily a train still rolls on rails! Thus yet producing enough rattling and swaying to accompany a roving mind. And as handleless and tainted they may be, train windows do faithfully go on fulfilling their essential function of revealing fleetingness, be it of landscapes rushing by outside or of shimmering reflections inside.
Settling down with a book in a train, for me, still remains one of the most appeasing rituals – with both book and train offering a reassuring forward movement (and, at least for the length of a voyage, some purpose and a destination ) while still generously allowing one’s thoughts to wander off.
The book-specimen I was holding on these photos may well have been particularly conceived to enlighten the train-travelling masses – it’s a pocket, having once cost a handful of shillings only. But quite nicely designed (PHAIDON press oblige), and with a hardcover proudly announcing a “hundred plates” inside.
The bizarre resilience of high art ... three years after a bloody war the English were reading a book by the nifty Goncourt brothers about French 18th century painters? I could of course have acquired this book in French, and more lavishly illustrated with reproductions of much better quality at that. But I found it quite moving, this sturdy 1948 pocket with its delicately rustling pages. (Oh I do dread the day I’ll be fingering a smooth i-Pad’s touch screen instead of sensuous paper).
The reflection of an open book in a train window ... a quite joyous vision really. But photos (even digital ones) sometimes express an unexpected mood. How grave and ominous these reflections seem, dark letters floating in the sky....
“[Ils] vagabondent dans l'air - A la recherche d’un logis - Ils habitent dans mon âme” (Chagall)
Notes
(Showing off my 1948 pocket!)
for the love of trains
“I love trains, and they have always loved me back. What does it mean to be loved by a train? Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish”. (Tony Judt) (1)
(1) Tony Judt In love with trains NYRB March 2010 Issue
(2) The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits also operated the Orient Express
Sitting contentedly in a train, absorbed in some abstruse book, or engrossed in the erratic dance of light-patches…. enveloped in the “sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours” ….
Yes, certainly, ”I love trains, and they have always loved me back”.
My enduring love-affair with trains probably dates back to childhood, in particular to the yearly family holiday to the South of France. Our train-trip would start in a sooty but still grand Brussels station (quite impressive for the provincial little girl I was) , where we would board a night train from the venerable “Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-lit” (2)
Of course, the objects of my travel-contentment were not the same as now: at that time I doted on the comic-books and peaches my parents dealt out to keep us quiet, and even on the cute little plastic cutlery that went with the packaged meals distributed by the train attendant. My elder sisters, while also keen on comics & peaches, did not compete for the cutlery, but rather swooned over the male attendant.
As to the “sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours”, instead of a poetic incantation, it was a most sensuous and sleepy rhythm indeed back then: to my great delight, at night, the seats of our compartment were transformed into 6 sleeping bunks with real sheets & blankets & pillows.
Round about 9PM my parents invariably would start worrying about the train attendant not showing up in time to perform this remarkable transformation . My 2 sisters and I further added to my parent’s stress by quarreling over who would get the top-bunk. But in the end all the family members would join in the merry hunt for the diverse light switches, with my father authoritatively seizing control of the main switch.
In the morning I would excitedly climb down out of my bunk and look out of the window to discover a southern sunlit landscape with beige-colored houses having wooden shutters. My parents would be swapping sleepless stories of all the nightly stops & shouts & murmurs that had kept them awake, but which for me had only been enchanting echoes to my train dreams. And then of course started the big morning rush to the lavatories & washing facilities, with each family egoistically monopolizing a washing facility for all of its members.
After the washing ritual, my sisters would be allowed to wander about the train, taking stock of the other teenagers, peeping into the attendant’s compartment , starting to plan their activities at the holiday resort. I would stand in the narrow passage way just outside our compartment, looking out of the window (with the beloved “e pericoloso sporgersi” admonition and the red sign prohibiting the throwing of bottles). And I would feel, already then, the seductive transience of travelling, with its mixture of great expectations and melancholy.
(1) Tony Judt In love with trains NYRB March 2010 Issue
(2) The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits also operated the Orient Express
A couple of things I wanted to say about cities & rivers & trains & trams, but didn’t bring up during the conversation.
We’d only met 2 hours before, at a Sunday matinee-concert. And during after-concert -lunch with our mutual friends we had not really spoken to each other, though we did share a few indecently boisterous laughs.
It was still early afternoon when our party broke up and after the general goodbyes I headed back home on foot alone, enjoying the touristy bustle of the city-centre and looking forward to an undisturbed afternoon of reading.
But when I heard running steps behind me, the fast click-clacking of high-heeled boots on cobble stones, I knew it was her even before I turned.
She chattered happily along - about the National Geographic documentaries she watched late at night, about the importance of fresh vegetables for a healthy stomach-tissue , about the parties at which she liked to dance till dawn - often making me burst into helpless laughter by the utterly unexpected humorous associations she’d make.
And though we hardly knew each other and though I could only relate to the fresh vegetables story (being neither a National Geographic addict, nor a party-goer, but quite partial to fresh tomatoes), the fact is that we walked those streets in a merry, companionable aimlessness.
Spotting from afar some intriguing allegorical statues we wandered into a small park, facetiously speculating about the Egyptian & Roman symbols on display. And when upon passing the Musée des Beaux Arts I mentioned my predilection for its 19th C entry-hall, she promptly made us veer off for a quick improvised visit, so that we found ourselves arguing in front of a grand but rather uninspired painting of the 1830 Belgian Revolution (I thought it was so endearingly 19th C pompous, she found it merely so idiotically pompous).
Now for all our impromptu shared enjoyment & delightful connectedness, it was truly amazing how little we had in common qua interests and likings. In the highest of spirits we subsequently discovered how we disagreed about a stunningly wide range of topics : be it about the merits of different cities (Antwerp versus Brussels versus London versus Paris) , or regarding our penchant for early or rather for late rising, a fondness of trains & trams versus one of cars, the importance or not for cities to have a resident river, ….
Now obviously, at the speed we were walking & talking, and with only little time left before we had to go our separate ways – I could not really go into all the subtle ramifications of my taste for trains, trams and city-rivers. Neither do real life conversations allow for footnotes to back up one’s arguments. Hence the present blog-post as an indispensable afterthought to make my point with all due elaborateness.
Though I wouldn’t want to rob anyone from “their car = their freedom” and though I (grudgingly) acknowledge the existence of a kind of “route 66” car-travel romance, I myself do stubbornly stick to the romance of trains.
Trains are so solidly part of the world and yet so inspiring for the imagination: undauntedly spanning their railway-network over the globe, generously offering grand stations as both destinations and places of transit. What would the unpractical, contemplative (but restless & combative!) melancholiac be without their faithful logistic support?
Ah, how grateful I am for the urgency and the sense of purpose that trains offer to eternally doubting would-be travelers ( 1) : punctually leaving at a particular hour for a particular destination along a particular track, while at the same time firing on the imagination with a tantalizing list of possible stops and transit-combinations.
And the caring solicitude of trains! yes, you may read a book, yes, you may dream, you still will be brought to your destination. And don’t worry about catering and hygienic stops, each station is a harbor providing for all possible needs. Not to mention the irresistible train-aesthetics: I so love the sights & sounds & smells of trains, tracks and stations. And also, obviously, I like the fact that they are so intimately linked with cities – yes, stations are eminently representative of their cities (2) .
And trains, however banal, still ooze the glamour of the great traveling adventures of a bygone age. Even their modest urban cousin, the tram, retains something of this particular traveling aura (3) (which neither individual cars nor collective urban buses posses)
So I wonder, has it something to do then with the fact that trains & trams are wedded to tracks? These tracks shooting off into teh distance, don’t they combine the re-assurance of purposefulness and of being embedded, with the promise of dizzying vistas…? Yes, aren’t train-tracks like rivers, flowing in a bedding?
Which, at last, brings us to rivers, and how important it is for a city to have one. In fact, in my inner atlas cities are referenced by their rivers, stations, cathedrals & art galleries. Cities of course are in continuous transformation, many an urban landmark does not even span the lifetime of a mortal (4) .
But then there is the immemorial permanence of a river, and the relative permanence of cathedrals, museums and stations. ( And the deplorable self-destructive character of Brussels is pitifully illustrated by its having torn down its magnificent 19th Century ‘Gare du Midi ‘ and its burying underground, as were it a vulgar sewer, of the river Senne.)
But so, a river – yes a river does grant an immemorial dignity to a human settlement. Apart from all commercial motivations for communities to settle alongside rivers, what remains is their sense of history, of openness, their promise of escape to far-off destinations, even a whiff of the great vast oceans. And the great bridges spanning them, so intimately related to the history of the city….
And their soothing streaming movement, whether or not it carries ships…... Seducing the wanderer to keep walking along the shore, hoping to attain some far-off vista. Or inviting the weary city-dweller to sit down on the quay and watching it flow, to sit down and be dazzled by the light sparkling on the water …
(1) Proust – « Noms de pays: le nom » : “J’aurais voulu prendre dès le lendemain le beau train généreux d’une heure vingt-deux dont je ne pouvais jamais sans que mon cœur palpitât lire, dans les réclames des Compagnies de chemin de fer, dans les annonces de voyages circulaires, l’heure de départ : elle me semblait inciser à un point précis de l’après-midi une savoureuse entaille, une marque mystérieuse à partir de laquelle les heures déviées conduisaient bien encore au soir, au matin du lendemain, mais qu’on verrait, au lieu de Paris, dans l’une des villes par où le train passe et entre lesquelles il nous permettait de choisir ; car il s’arrêtait à Bayeux, à Coutances, à Vitré, à Questembert, à Pontorson, à Balbec, à Lannion, à Lamballe, à benodet, à pont-Aven, à Quimperlé, et s’avançait magnifiquement surchargé de noms qu’il m’offrait et entre lesquels je ne savais lequel j’aurais préféré, par impossibilité d’en sacrifier aucun.
(2) Proust : « L’opération mystérieuse qui s’accomplissait dans ces lieux spéciaux, les gares, lesquels ne font pas partie pour ainsi dire de la ville mais contiennent l’essence de sa personnalité de même que sur un écriteau signalétique elles portent son nom »
(3) Amélie Nothomb – « Biographie de la faim » : « […] Bruxelles. C’était une ville remplie de trams qui quittaient le dépôt à cinq heures et demie du matin dans un crissement mélancolique, croyant partir pour l’infini. »
(4) Baudelaire : « la forme d’une ville change plus vite hélas que le cœur d’un mortel »
(5) Stefan Hertmans – “Steden, verhalen onderweg” : [Steden met een] “stroom in hun binnenste gesloten” [of] “steden die zich langs de stroom hebben geschaard” . [Rivieren die ]“openheid bieden in beslotenheid”. [steden] “zien door hun hectische bezigheden een ader stromen die zuurstof aanvoert, een vergezicht, een bron van wereldbewustzijn en geschiedenis, een altijd voorhanden zijnde mogelijkheid om te ontkomen - zowel voor de reiziger als voor de thuisblijver een geruststellende gedachte”
“cities with a stream enclosed in their centre or cities ranging themselves on the side of a river. […] rivers offering an openness in the inner-city. […] right through their hectic activities streams an artery providing oxygen, a vista, a source of world consciousness and history, and an always available possibility to escape – a reassuring thought both for the traveler as the sedentary local”
winter light
Time: quite early on a Saturday morning during the Holiday season.
Weather: temperature well below zero; a clear sky.
Setting: a train rattling through Brussels’ industrial outskirts.
Mood: temporarily elated.
Ah, early morning frosty winter light…. Slowly illuminating a pale blue sky with the faintest of pinkish glows – and suffusing the roofs & upper parts of buildings with a warm coppery radiance. The kind of light that gets even the grimiest industrial landscape smoldering & glimmering. Riding a train through such a wintry limpid atmosphere is a pure delight. One could spend hours gazing out of the window.
Except that there’ s also a book demanding my attention.
A serious book, by a serious writer, deserving my full serious attention! Hmmm – how nicely the sun-light is refracted by the book’s rough paper . Shall I hold the book more upright, to capture all of the light streaming in? Or perhaps I should just tilt the book a bit to the right? And what if I lay it like that, obliquely on the little table? Look - it’s made of brittle golden parchment, this book. Soon it’ll be set ablaze! Oh…… now the train has taken a bent, the sun’s gone and there’s the plain black-lettered pale paper again. (photo’s shot: 11 - pages read: 2)
A few minutes before my train arrives, I get outside, walking shivering up & down the platform and watching the strange movements of a girl on the opposite, sun-flooded platform. What is she doing? Gliding forward, then stepping back, waving her arms, now feinting something like an attack, then almost doing a pirouette.
Oh, I see, to fend off the cold she’s fencing with her shadow!
From Tournai it’s only a short ride to Lille, in the North of France. When I first went there, almost 15 years ago, it was still a struggling town, uncertainly looking for a new life beyond its decaying industrial past. Since then it has become quite a confident, trendy city linked by fast trains with London and Paris. It has spruced up its historical centre, bubbles with shops & restaurants & bars, and has attracted many service industries & lots of cool folk.
But something of the vagueness & wistfulness of past glories, something of the tedium of decline, can still be sensed in the smaller towns surrounding Lille. Especially when taking the tramway to Roubaix, clattering through a sub-urban landscape now mercilessly & frostily lit by a glaring white sun. There is the fading glamour of early 20th century art-deco houses, mansions alternating with humble workmen’s houses. Then a non-descript post-industrial landscape with gaudy shopping malls surrounded by vast asphalted parking spaces. And finally, sturdy Roubaix itself, with its weighty decaying bourgeois-industrial heritage. But it’s now definitely much neater and more smugly middle-class than 15 years ago - the grime and the crumbling have mostly gone.
And yet, there’s still this air of provincial desolateness, of relative poverty. Or is this because, on this icy-cold Saturday between Xmas and New Year, people either stay at home or have flocked to the cozy shopping delights of Lille? Anyway, it’s not the merry-go-round (with only a few lonely kids on it), so utterly lost in the white winter glare of a large empty square, that will bring joy. Nor the freezing wind from the east, which blows scraps of papers through empty & vainly Xmas-lit streets. And the festive red carpets on the pavements only serve to highlight the pathetic lack of passers-by.
Most cafés & restaurants are closed, so it’s in a rather grubby sandwich bar that I replenish calorie reserves & warm my icy hands at a mug of hot tea. And there I decide that, at minus 3 ° C, aimless wandering about in desolate towns is perhaps not a brilliant Holidays idea.
And so I resume my voyage to find the Northern Light.
Because that was the true destination of this trip: an exhibit of Nordic painters in the Palais des Beaux Arts of Lille.
Readers of this blog know it is my firm conviction that a painter’s sensitivity to light is inversely correlated with his or her daily exposure to sun. It is light deprivation which makes artists attentive to the faintest variations in intensity & quality of light. Hence it are the painters of the North that can make us fall in love with what little light they get to see, not the sun-flooded Italians (except perhaps the Venetians , undoubtedly because of that strange lagoon-haze which filters their sun light).
And in my quest for Northern light I am not disappointed …. I can bask all I want in Nordic crispy crystalline light – refracted & reflected in snowy landscapes, or surreptitiously gliding over a wall, or so quietly shimmering at a window sill. The soothing stillness of winter light, whether it be outside or inside.
(But perhaps also the numbness of winter light? …. “as freezing persons recollect the snow” ….. also the oppressive stillness of winter light?.... “darin der Schnee des Verschwiegenen treibt”…. )
When I leave the museum, the city sparkles in the violet hour – an abundance of electric lights have gone up , mixing their glow with the purest indigo radiance coming from a frosty sky. And for a few dazzling minutes the world remains suspended in this violet hour, hovering between day & night, between city lights and luminous sky.
Soon the city lights win out, profusely pouring out of shop & café windows, glittering & twittering in decorations everywhere. People are thronging in the streets, cafés and restaurants are crammed full. Full of people eating & drinking & shouting & chattering to keep the cold dark night away. So, high time to seek refuge again in a train & a book.
people watching
That 7-year old kid at the fun-fair was quite a charmer, despite his quirky mood-swings. Or maybe, he charmed thanks to those shifting moods, because, truly, they were a delightful spectacle to watch. The boy was the youngest of a bunch of kids which had been set loose (under benign parental guidance of course) amongst the attractions of a local summer fair. As small as he was, he looked very brave amongst the bigger kids.
But then, as swift as a cloud passing over the sun, his face would fall, his lips would tremble, tears would start rolling. And soon he'd be sobbing as the unhappiest little boy in the world. To be all smiles again five minutes later, eyes sparkling and ready to go for it. Oh and then how combative he would look, with anger flaring up in his eyes, when he didn’t get right away the coveted red football…
As adults too, we get bombarded all the time by multifarious emotions of frustration, despondency, anger, elation, … but thick layers of self-control smother most of those emotions, before they even make it to the surface of our face. Haven't we all had years & years of training in self-control. Dignity! Restraint!
Indeed, “could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy” (1) - surely we all have been told something to that effect at some stage in our education (even if only by our own, sterner alter ego).
Therefore, watching adult people in public spaces, is usually not very exciting. Adult people have perfected strategies of non-expressiveness, routinely deployed when they're on their own in, say, trains, waiting rooms etc.
When I first started working (oh, ‘the horror the horror’ (2)) all those years ago, I had to commute each day by train & underground. If I wasn’t reading, I used to watch people – trying to guess their lives. But all those silent people on the 7.12 morning train, wrapped up in their thoughts or their newspapers ..... – it was impossible to guess what they thought or felt.
It was on that same morning train, wrapped up in my own somber Monday morning thoughts, seeking support in a book (3), that this brilliant passage (about people in a train-compartment) by Virginia Woolf struck me:
“Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of – what? That life’s like that, it seems. Five faces opposite – five mature faces – and the knowledge on each face. Strange though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket-book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth – the terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game – do, for all our sakes, conceal it!”
trying to confine the footnotes to credits only
(1) From the “Lost Girl” by D.H. Lawrence – must confess I never finished reading that book. But well, I did retain this piece of dour-governess- morality at page 60 : "Happiness is a sort of soap-tablet – he won’t be happy till he gets it, and when he’s got it, the precious baby, it’ll cost him his eyes and stomach. Could anything be more puerile than a mankind howling because it isn’t happy: like a baby in the bath!”
(2) 'Ever so useful, Joseph Conrad' – as Moss would put it. She (Moss) also coined the brilliant expression “life’s penitential status” which, coming to speak of it, was indeed how I thought of life when first being subjected to the harsh and inimical discipline of working life.
(3) Virginia Woolf: An Unwritten Novel (as published in ‘the complete shorter fiction’)
train cantata
Such a sensuous experience, traveling in a rattling slow train with its windows open - immersed in sounds that smell like iron , sounds that feel like sheer wheezing speed. Never will an air-conditioned, shock-proof fast train be able to match this physical sensation of speed in a jangling local train.
I don’t suppose Bach has written any of his cantatas to be heard on a continuous bass of a rumbling train. But devoutly straining to follow the intertwining lines of a violin and an alto voice - instrument & human voice become interchangeable. And completely captive to these voices, it then hardly matters anymore whether the buzz of the basso continuo is the rumble of a train or of an organ.
on a dark December day
Ah, childhood memories of those dark December days …. With the Xmas tree twinkling in a corner of the room , watching wintry and sentimental films on TV (blessed be those Dickens adaptations). Feasting on indecent amounts of chocolate & waffles (back in the old days European winters were cold and children’s metabolisms fast). Or going to town, well muffled in, enjoying the lights and the Xmas carols in the streets.
Those sheltered days, they “can’t come again, but are for others undiminished somewhere”.… (1) It’s lovely to watch now children engrossed in their Xmassy activities. Or take those teenagers loitering about the streets: their un-Xmassy bravado so very much a reminder of the schools’ Xmas vacation and the cozy Xmas trees at their homes.
But for an adult, these dark December days between Xmas and New Year hold other charms. Like travelling by train from Brussels to Paris. No, a car-ride won’t do, it’s the station-atmosphere you want in these December days. Whole families in thick overcoats and scarves, hauling big suitcases, are thronging in the station’s hall, anxiously watching train announcements on the screens. Yes, it’s another kind of travelling than in the ski-season or during summer – it’s less frivolously exotic, more family related and that’s perhaps why it feels more poignant. All those uprooted people travelling back home to their families for the holidays….. (2)Oh, I love to wander about stations in this period of year.
On the train, people then settle in their seats with their provisions for the journey: fruit, papers, books. I myself plunge into a book and shut out children’s cries & old ladies' chatter by hiding in headphones full of Mozart.
But then, when I look up from my book, staring vaguely into the compartment, my attention is arrested by that tragic portrait filling the entire first page of a fellow traveler’s paper: Benazir Bhutto… Brutally murdered during an election rally the night before.
I had been shocked upon learning the news on Internet. To me she had always seemed the embodiment of intelligence, grace and courage. Here was an educated, determined woman, loyal to her country and her faith but a secular democrat, the first female prime minister ever of a Muslim country. I had considered her return to Pakistan as an act of bravery, one offering some hope for the region. “Praying for the best, preparing for the worst”, as she had said herself.
Of course she was such an icon, and I only knew of her via articles and one or two appearances during debates on TV. So maybe I have always projected too many fine qualities in her. And of course there were the dubious family dealings, there was the whiff of corruption, there were the allegations of being manipulated by the US into returning to Pakistan.
So, granted, there is a shady haze surrounding the Bhutto dynasty and thus Benazir Bhutto herself . But still, this stubborn fact remains: she abandoned a comfortable life in London & Dubai to go back to Pakistan. She went back, knowing the risks. All for the sake of participating in the public debate and in the democratic election process. This is an act of bravery that no blinded kamikaze can suppress, that no slander campaign can ever squelch. Yes, Benazir Bhutto had this foremost of political virtues: courage.
And perhaps we can come to terms with her tragic ending by seeing it as an example of secular courage, of courage without bigotry or violence. Yes, maybe she gave an example that may inspire others … Or am I being too naively hopeful … Reading the papers now, the talk is of revenge, rioting, chaos …
But no, I do want to believe that the legacy of her actions during these last weeks will bring some good, proving as it were that rational proponents of democracy can muster more courage than any blinded zealot or despot. Benazir Bhutto as a symbol of democracy. So, I prefer to conclude with these TS Eliot lines as a tribute: “What [she] had to leave us – a symbol: a symbol perfected in death”
(1) From some poem by Philip Larkin – I’ve forgotten which one
(2) lo and behold, this might well be a bible flash back- the nativity story – didn’t Joseph and Mary have to travel to their ancestor’s home for a census?
Those sheltered days, they “can’t come again, but are for others undiminished somewhere”.… (1) It’s lovely to watch now children engrossed in their Xmassy activities. Or take those teenagers loitering about the streets: their un-Xmassy bravado so very much a reminder of the schools’ Xmas vacation and the cozy Xmas trees at their homes.
But for an adult, these dark December days between Xmas and New Year hold other charms. Like travelling by train from Brussels to Paris. No, a car-ride won’t do, it’s the station-atmosphere you want in these December days. Whole families in thick overcoats and scarves, hauling big suitcases, are thronging in the station’s hall, anxiously watching train announcements on the screens. Yes, it’s another kind of travelling than in the ski-season or during summer – it’s less frivolously exotic, more family related and that’s perhaps why it feels more poignant. All those uprooted people travelling back home to their families for the holidays….. (2)Oh, I love to wander about stations in this period of year.
On the train, people then settle in their seats with their provisions for the journey: fruit, papers, books. I myself plunge into a book and shut out children’s cries & old ladies' chatter by hiding in headphones full of Mozart.
But then, when I look up from my book, staring vaguely into the compartment, my attention is arrested by that tragic portrait filling the entire first page of a fellow traveler’s paper: Benazir Bhutto… Brutally murdered during an election rally the night before.
I had been shocked upon learning the news on Internet. To me she had always seemed the embodiment of intelligence, grace and courage. Here was an educated, determined woman, loyal to her country and her faith but a secular democrat, the first female prime minister ever of a Muslim country. I had considered her return to Pakistan as an act of bravery, one offering some hope for the region. “Praying for the best, preparing for the worst”, as she had said herself.
Of course she was such an icon, and I only knew of her via articles and one or two appearances during debates on TV. So maybe I have always projected too many fine qualities in her. And of course there were the dubious family dealings, there was the whiff of corruption, there were the allegations of being manipulated by the US into returning to Pakistan.
So, granted, there is a shady haze surrounding the Bhutto dynasty and thus Benazir Bhutto herself . But still, this stubborn fact remains: she abandoned a comfortable life in London & Dubai to go back to Pakistan. She went back, knowing the risks. All for the sake of participating in the public debate and in the democratic election process. This is an act of bravery that no blinded kamikaze can suppress, that no slander campaign can ever squelch. Yes, Benazir Bhutto had this foremost of political virtues: courage.
And perhaps we can come to terms with her tragic ending by seeing it as an example of secular courage, of courage without bigotry or violence. Yes, maybe she gave an example that may inspire others … Or am I being too naively hopeful … Reading the papers now, the talk is of revenge, rioting, chaos …
But no, I do want to believe that the legacy of her actions during these last weeks will bring some good, proving as it were that rational proponents of democracy can muster more courage than any blinded zealot or despot. Benazir Bhutto as a symbol of democracy. So, I prefer to conclude with these TS Eliot lines as a tribute: “What [she] had to leave us – a symbol: a symbol perfected in death”
(1) From some poem by Philip Larkin – I’ve forgotten which one
(2) lo and behold, this might well be a bible flash back- the nativity story – didn’t Joseph and Mary have to travel to their ancestor’s home for a census?
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