My Years With Proust - Day 671

Perhaps he thought that he was merely shaking my hand, as no doubt he thought that he was merely seeing a Senegalese soldier who passed in the darkness without deigning to notice that he was being admired.  But in each case the Baron was mistaken, the intensity of contact and of gaze was greater than propriety permitted.  "Don't you see all the Orient or Decamps and Fromentin and Ingres and Delacroix in this scene?" he asked me, still immobilised by the passage of the Senegalese.  "As you know, I for my part am interested in things and in people only as a painter, a philosopher.  Besides, I am too old.  But how unfortunate that to complete the picture one of us two is not an odalisque!"

   It was not the Orient of Decamps or even of Delacroix that began to haunt my imagination when the Baron had left me, but the old Orient of those Thousand and One Nights which I had been so fond of; losing myself gradually in the network of these dark streets, I thought of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid going in search of adventures in the hidden quarters of Baghdad. The weather was warm and my walk had made me hot and thirsty, but the bars had all closed long ago and, because of the scarcity of petrol, the rare taxis which I met, driven by Levantines or negroes, did not even take the trouble to respond to my signs.  The only place where I might have been able to get something to drink and rest until I felt strong enough to walk home would have been a hotel. 

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 837

I'm  not certain exactly what struck me about this passage when reading through Time Regained several months ago (as we know, sometimes I was reading only days ahead of when I was writing, and other times the gap stretched to weeks or months).  It might simply have been his referencing the Thousand and One Nights, which made me think of the upcoming trip to Jordan.  I'm having the students read a selection of a relatively new translation, Husain Haddawy's Sinbad: And Other Stories from the Arabian Nights, although I was tempted to use his The Arabian Nights or even Richard Burton's classic (and fairly ribald) translation.  I've often proposed that Jordan is my favorite foreign country, or at least the one where I oddly feel most at home.  I don't think I grew up with a love of the Arabian Nights or even with a romantic attachment to the Arab world, but it certainly seems to have its hook in me now.  I've also never been a huge fan of Delacroix, and certainly few, if any, painters ever captured/created/promoted the Arab world as the definitive Exotic Other (which doubtless has much more bad than good).  Rather, my attachment has been forged in my adult years, specifically beginning with my trip to Jordan for the three week seminar on Islamic and Arabic culture in December 2004/January 2005.  It was also the first time I ever spent a holiday or birthday overseas, which now seems to be the norm; I'll be spending both New Year's Eve and my birthday in Zanzibar this year.  I used to keep track of how many holidays/birthdays I've been overseas, but it's long been too many to keep track of.