Notes (and a tangent) from Tim Cahill's Hold the Enlightenment

I just finished Tim Cahill's newest book Hold the Enlightenment, which is tough to evaluate thematically, since (as is always the case with Cahill's books) his stories bounce us all over the world: Montana, Turkey, the Congo, Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Mali, and back to Montana again. As usual, Cahill shows his colors as a sharp humorist, an observant journalist, and a person who does not want to hear about anyone else's gastro-intestinal problems. As he says in the eponymous essay that opens the book:

"I am not a yoga kinda guy. Yoga people are sensitive, aware, largely sober, slender, double-jointed, humorless vegans who are concerned with their own spiritual welfare and don't hesitate to tell you about it. They are spiritually intense and consequently enormously boring in the manner of folks who, in their own self-absorption, feel you ought be alerted as to the quantity and texture of their last bowel movement."

From his misadventure at a Jamaican yoga camp, Cahill goes on to track platypus in Australia, visit Columbian rebels with Dangerous Places author Robert Pelton (who quips that "journalists are mostly pompous pussies"), and explain how the cottonwoods of a certain Montana valley once came to be filled with dead deer. "An adventure is never an adventure...

...when it’s happening," he observes on a trip to the Nevada wastelands. "Challenging experiences need time to ferment, and adventure is simply physical and emotional comfort recollected in tranquility."

In recollecting his own adventures, the charm of Cahill is that he explains things his own way. While talking about the bugs of the Congo basin, he refers to a prank he almost played in high school. In an essay about the behavior of gorillas, he uses an old football knee injury as a framing device. His trip to the Argentine coast is smattered with examples of Wisconsin folklore. Travel writing purists might whine that Cahill is inserting too much of himself into these stories, but I'd reckon these are the details that make his writing stand out. Cahill is at his best when he plays himself, and doesn't get too caught up in scholarship and objectivity.

Hence, in reading Hold the Enlightenment, a learned a good personal lesson for my own writing. [Note: this is where I go off on a tangent; if you're just reading this for the Cahill review, you can resume surfing other parts of the web.]

To explain: After the horrible terrorist events of 9/11, one of the ways I coped with the confusion was to read every scrap of international affairs intelligence I could get my hands on (or, more accurately, get my web-browser on). As I read the analytical works of the public intellectuals making noise at the time -- Thomas Friedman, Benjamin Barber, Fareed Zakaria, Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, etc. -- I began to keep notes on what I thought were the most intriguing arguments. In time, my international affairs quote-file grew to over 100 pages, and I found that (through a combination of this research and my travel experiences in the Middle East) I could pick apart the facts and arguments of the talking heads on CNN. I started to flirt with the idea of making a foray into the world of political essay writing.

Cahill's book, however, made me realize that this wouldn't be such a great idea. My calling isn't to be a policy wonk or a public intellectual; my calling is to be myself -- and I'm a person who enjoys the personal side of travel. I'd much rather have tea with a Wahhabi Muslim than analyze the political ramifications of his sect. I'd rather play cards with Afghani truck drivers in a Kabul café than opine on the stability of the Kabul government. I'd rather talk politics with Iraqi Kurds than evaluate Kurdish Iraqi politics. Indeed, I always bristle when the mainstream media leaves out the personal human elements of the places in the headlines, but I guess the human angle is what travel writers are supposed to do. And that's what I will continue to do, in my own, subjective way.

As for my international affairs quote-file, I've decided to give it back to the online world from which it came. Starting today, and continuing periodically, I will post quotes in a new blog category called "From the international affairs quote-file". I hope you find these outtakes enlightening (no irony intended, given the name of this blog entry).