海天2011高级辅导精品课程讲义(15)

海天2011高级辅导精品课程讲义(15)

http://doc.guandang.net 2010年海天高辅内部资料

2011海天高级辅导精品课程讲义（十五） FEW modern travel writers excite more hostility and awe than Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died in 2003. Despising the “drab uniformity of the modern world”, Sir Wilfred slogged acrossAfrica and Asia, especially Arabia, on animals and on foot, immersing himself in tribal societies. He delighted in killing—lions in Sudan in the years before the second world war, Germans and Italians during it. He disliked “soft” living and “intrusive” women and revered murderous savages, to whom he gave guns. He thought educating the working classes a waste of good servants. He kicked his dog. His journeys were more notable as feats of masochistic endurance than as exploration. Yet his first two books, “Arabian Sands”, about his crossing of the Empty Quarter, and “The Marsh Arabs”, about southern Iraq, have a terse brilliance about them. As records of ancient cultures on the cusp of oblivion , they are unrivalled.

Sir Wilfred's critics invariably sing the same chorus. They accuse him of hypocrisy, noting that his part-time primitive lifestyle required a private income and good connections to obtain travel permits. They argue that he deluded himself about the motives of his adored tribal companions. In Kenya, where he lived for two decades towards the end of his life, his Samburu “sons” are calculated to have fleeced him of at least $1m. Homosexuality, latent or otherwise, explains him, they conclude, pointing to the photographs he took of beautiful youths.

This may all be true, but it does not diminish his achievements. Moreover, he admits as much himself in his autobiography and elsewhere. In 1938, before his main travels, for example, Sir Wilfred wrote of his efforts to adopt foreign ways :“ I don't delude myself that I succeed but I get my interest and pleasure trying.”

In this authorised biography, Alexander Maitland adds a little colour to the picture, but no important details. He describes the beatings and sexual abuse the explorer suffered at his first boarding school. Quoting from Sir Wilfred's letters, he traces the craggy traveller's devotion to his dead father, his mother and three brothers. At times, Sir Wilfred sounds more forgiving, especially of friends, and more playful than his reputation has suggested. As for his sexuality, Mr Maitland refers coyly to occasional “furtive embraces encounters”, presumably with men. Wearisome as this topic has become, Mr Maitland achieves nothing by skirting it; and his allusion to Sir Wilfred's “almost-too precious” relationship with his mother is annoyingly vague.

There may be a reason why Mr Maitland struggles for critical distance He writes that he and Sir Wilfred were long-standing friends, but he fails to mention that he collaborated with the explorer on four of his books and later inherited his London flat. If Mr Maitland found it so difficult to view his late friend and benefactor objectively, then perhaps he should not have tried. An earlier biography by Michael Asher, who scoured the deserts to track down Sir Wilfred's former fellow travellers, was better; Mr Maitland seems to have interviewed almost nobody black or brown.

His book is, however, a useful companion to the explorer's autobiography, “The Life of My Choice”. Hopefully, it will also refer readers back to Sir Wilfred's two great books, and to sentences as lovely as this :“Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me : firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy's voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen

海天2011高级辅导精品课程讲义(15)

http://doc.guandang.net 2010年海天高辅内部资料

crimson through the smoke of burning reed-beds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes.”

——Hitler's friend

NAZIS came in all shapes and sizes. Some were grotesque, many mere criminals. A few were clever, most were unthinking. Leni Riefenstahl was in a class of her own. She was never a party member and did not, overtly, commit any crimes. Indeed, she claimed through an astonishingly long life—she died in 2003, aged 101—that she was first and foremost an artist, never a Nazi propagandist.

In the 1930s she made two famous films which, only after the destruction unleashed by her compatriots in the second world war, became morally repugnant. She stood by those two films, “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia”, long after the events they celebrated—the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi rally and the 1936 Berlin Olympics—had come to be seen as representative of the spectacle of evil, if not precisely of evil itself.

They were radical films technically, and won awards outside Germany. Riefenstahl's use of moving cameras, telephoto lenses, distorted perspectives and aerial photography captivated audiences. In both these and other now less famous movies, her revolutionary approaches towards music and cinematography remain unquestioned. The problems began—and they still continue—when the films' intentions, particularly those of “Triumph of the Will”, whose star is Adolf Hitler, are examined, as they have to be, outside an aesthetic frame.

The woman behind “Triumph of the Will” had a rare hunger for success, and not just on the screen. Her sexual exploits in the 1920s, examined in impressive detail by Steven Bach, were operatic. Moreover, as Mr Bach reiterates, Riefenstahl's reaction on hearing of men—it was always men—of renown was often :“I must meet that man.” The central mystery of Riefenstahl, who though no intellectual was not stupid, is how her celebrity-chasing led to Hitler and how she allowed her artistry and, one has to assume, her soul to be corrupted by everything he stood for.

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