Whenever I travel, I try to read a novel written by a local or at least set in the country. So it was with considerable dismay that I read Paul Bowles' disclaimer. "Because the journey in the book was to start in Ouehrane (Oran, Algeria), I moved the hotel from Fez to that city. At no point did the protagonists’ itinerary take them to Morocco.” You could have fooled me! Existentialism isn't really my thing, but this went down pretty easy, much easier than Bernardo Bertolucci's film which I made the mistake of watching a few nights later, completely forgetting that I'd seen it before.
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. 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. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
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