Spring Break in Afghanistan

I journey to Xanadu with a mouthy Brit

Xanadu, creatures! Mysterious oasis! Pleasure-garden of the great Khan! Place I know exactly one verse of poetry about, but good gravy, is it a verse:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

Cambridge undergraduate and delightfully-callow fool William Dalrymple applies for a grant on a lark and heads out to find it, in 1986, when its location had been utterly lost for at least a century. I won’t tell you what he did find (wait, no, I’ll tease you: one thing he maybe found, is the town the Magi came from) but I will tell you that there were far more marvels than Xanadu scattered along his route.

In Xanadu: A Quest is Dalrymple’s first book, published 1989, and it’s just a bravura accomplishment. You’ll know from the very first pages whether you’ll like it, as Dalrymple drops us in medias res in Jerusalem, as an extremely down-to-earth Irish Franciscan fetches him some oil from the lamps at the Holy Sepulcher. The Catholic lamps, that is—it’s very important that everybody uses their own lamps:

“Things are a bit tense at the moment. Last month one of the Armenian monks went crazy: thought an angel was telling him to kill the Greek patriarch. So he smashed an oil lamp and chased Patriarch Diodorus through the choir with a piece of broken glass.”

Dalrymple needs the oil because his quest is to repeat the journey of Marco Polo. Do you know, I never even asked myself why Marco Polo went wherever it was (China?) he wandered to? The answer is that he and his brothers claimed they could convert the Khan to Christianity. The Mongol Empire would then join forces with Christendom and win the Crusades for good. I am still not sure to what extent anybody involved thought this was a realistic prospect, but Dalrymple gives you the background on why it might have seemed like an urgent and plausible kind of folly (a Hail Mary? no… forget I said this).

From Jerusalem Dalrymple heads east, first with his frightening friend Laura, a sort of human field-hockey stick, and then with his more delicate and unprepared friend Louisa. He judges very old books (Marco Polo turns out not to write adventure tales, but mercantile manuals), he breezes past checkpoints (his journey takes him through the new Islamic Republic of Iran and a newly-opened highway into the People’s Republic of China), he’s truly a gentleman songster out for a spree. There are expected themes—food poisoning, squalor, sudden martial splendor of the ruins—but also some unexpected ones, of which my favorite was the way English literature looks from outside England:

“a very taut, sensitive study….” said a voice on the radio.

Nizar smiled.

“London,” he said, pouting slightly. “‘Kaleidoscope.’”

He sat down and looked intently at the radio.

“...wry … sensitive … deeply poignant,” said the radio “… lesbianism … warmly compassionate….”

He watches the new James Bond among Uighurs; he stumbles into a radioactive cafe. (This is real.)

I found this book via the Psmiths, where they say Dalrymple “has all of the best qualities of a British travel author and none of the bad ones.” Mr Psmith has read a lot more of this stuff than I have, and he says, “Perhaps it’s inevitable that the sort of personality that leads a man to try to bluff his way across heavily militarized borders sans visa will also lead him to have a snarky and bitchy narrative voice. Too many of these books drip with contempt for the people and places they portray.” Whereas Dalrymple “practically bubbles over with curiosity and compassion for the weirdos he meets, and he’s interested in...everything, and frighteningly erudite about it all.”

I wouldn’t go quite that far—I’m more on the side of Dalrymple’s 2016 foreword, in which he basically says, I was young and dumb and full of… the joys of ethnic stereotyping. Everybody likes to be the guy who knows what Baluchis are really like! Dalrymple unbuttons himself frequently on the subject of What They’re Like, and sometimes I did find it gleefully pleasing (the Armenians are commercial and violent, and truly come across as the Americans of the Near East, although they have a better excuse for it) whereas other times he doesn’t even seem to know he’s talking about people rather than characters in his personal psychodrama. The world is not an allegory—or if it is an allegory, the central hero is not you.

Still—there’s a zest here, a bloom of youth, the thrill of discovering a black market in a Communist country. Vistas you dreamt of when lying on a couch in childhood sicknesses, idly re-reading books you’d outgrown, with their castles and cliff battles; camel silhouettes along the horizon. This book is one last great summer night in the pleasure-houses of the Khan.

---

Links Losers Like

Speaking of journeys, I was reminded of this Canterbury Tales board game. Have any of you all played it? It looks sort of amazing.

Thoughts on children’s books that speak to the themes of the Gay Christian Reading Challenge? A Librarian Asks.

Nice review of The Modern Saints at Fare Forward—I contributed a reflection on St John the Beloved to this book.

DOMINICAN NUNS BREED ENDANGERED AXOLOTL. For 150 years, these Mexican Dominicans have been breeding salamanders; now they work with conservation programs. I’m sorry, these women are cooler than you.

And—if you know someone in the St Louis area who works in Christian pastoral ministry, or is personally homosexual (or adjacent… you know what the letters are), consider telling them about our workshop on accompanying and mentoring lgbt/same-sex attracted people, THIS COMING MON – WED at the Aquinas Institute. We’ll explore themes, obstacles, and opportunities in gay spiritual journeys, and suggest perspectives that can help you avoid common pitfalls. This is really the culmination of decades of experience for more than one person involved, and I’ve already found myself referring frequently to the frameworks we develop here—like, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a while, and I still learned a lot through putting this program together. $150 for the three-day workshop and I do genuinely think it’s worth it. Pass it along!

Kubla Khan, looking totally like a guy who would decree… a stately pleasure dome???, via the World History Encyclopedia and used under a Creative Commons license.