“I suspect that a good many people will read this book and be enthralled by it without once suspecting that it contains a mirror of what is most terrifying and cryptic within the Sahara of moral nihilism, into which the race of man now seems to be wandering blindly.”

#theShelteringSky #paulBowles #tenneseeWilliams #bookstodon

December 4, 1949

An Allegory of Man and His Sahara
By TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Review #nytimes #theShelteringSky #paulBowles #sahara #northAfrica #postwar #bookstodon

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/bowles-sheltering.html?_r=2

“Why are you afraid?” he said. “I know. Because you are rich. Because you have a bag full of money. Rich people are always afraid.”
#theShelteringSky #paulBowles

“There was no end to the world’s intense monotony.”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
#theShelteringSky #paulBowles
#bookstodon

“The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day has fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again—the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time.”
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.. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
#TheShelteringSky #PaulBowles #bookstodon #death #existenialism #dying

HE OPENED HIS EYES. The room was malignant. It was empty. “Now, at last, I must fight against this room.”

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“…and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present.”
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“If she could only give up, relax, and live in the perfect knowledge that there was no hope. But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. ”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
#theShelteringSky #paulBowles #bookstodon #extistentialism

“I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus. It would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth—” She hesitated.
Port laughed abruptly. “And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette.

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
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“It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
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“Then he remembered having heard that Americans did not speak English in any case, that they had a patois which only they could understand among themselves.”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
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“And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.
Under”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
#theShelteringSky #paulBowles #bookstodon

“Yes,” said Kit, “but I’m not sure I prefer the warm countries. I don’t know. I’m not sure I don’t feel that it’s wrong to try to escape the night and winter, and that if you do you’ll have to pay for it somehow.”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
#theShelteringSky #bookstodon #paulBowles #africa #Algèria

“His attention, however, did not spur him to additional thought. On the contrary, it merely provided him with an emotional satisfaction vis-à-vis the idea, making it possible for him to relax and admire it at a distance”

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles
#bookstodon #paulbowles #theShelteringSky

Latest read, The Circular Valley (1950) by Paul Bowles, from Big Book of Modern Fantasy; Bowles expresses a loneliness that suits dark fantasy and here he writes of a spirit that possesses, animals large and small, monks, bandits, soldiers, & lovers.
192 of #400FantasyStories
#Books #ShortStory #Fantasy #PaulBowles

"a solid sky as if it's protecting us from what's behind it"
There are quite few films that use vast exterior as a stand-in for character's inner struggle, but none like this. Based on the Paul Bowles' novel, Sheltering Sky the film lacks some of the feverish hallucination of Port as he lay dying in the middle of nowhere, but Storaro's cinematography more than makes up for it with stunning vistas: half solid blue sky and half bright yellow desert. #shelteringsky #paulbowles #adaptation #book