philosophy

Today is a special day. I finally finished La Peste, one of the key novels of Albert Camus. Even though there is no plot to speak of, only the plague taking unremitting hold of a city, the first two thirds of the book are an amazing read, a density almost comparable to the first 300 pages of Der Zauberberg, which cover three action-free months in the most captivating of ways. The last third, however, with the plague slowly receding and scores being tallied philosophically, seemed to stretch endlessly.

I started reading La Peste almost one year ago, on a dreary Saturday afternoon in November. The trigger was the idea a friend and I had of a vacation in Algeria. The book is set in Oran, the country's second biggest city and music hub, and was supposed to prepare me for the trip, get me acquainted with the locality and into the mood. On these counts, the book probably failed, but that doesn't matter anyway. We didn't go to Algeria.

The reason for our change of plans lay in the difficulties associated with entering the country. For naive Western Europeans it comes as a shock that a country would require a visa to be visited, but Algeria does one better. In order to get a visa, one has to have the trip planned ahead, hotels booked and train itineraries prepared. We were not in the mood for that. With the present political development of Algeria, drifting away from Europe while strengthening ties with the Arab league, conditions for a visit won't be as good as they were this spring for quite a while.

Despite a missed a window of opportunity, I have no regrets because we spend a marvelous week in Istanbul instead. Like any good vacation, this one offered plenty of what can't be found in any guide book. Flirting wildly across language and gender barriers at Cafe Munzur, for example, or being treated to tea and olives in Ali Osman's living room.

I had to think of this last encounter after reading a travel essay the other day. The writer took the Deccan Odyssey, a luxury train circling from Mumbai to Goa, the Ajanta caves and back to Mumbai. The stay aboard and all visits were splendid and nothing was left to be desired on this perfectly organized trip. Or so it seemed, because in her last sentence, the writer invalidated the many paragraphs before by writing how she talked to a member of the board service and learned about his life and culture. "Suddenly, the temples, palaces and natural wonders outside didn't matter anymore." She had finally arrived in India, on the last day of her journey.

While a professionally organized trip often sounds exciting at first, I certainly prefer beating my own path. It's time I go back to the book store to see which book grabs my attention and might direct my eyes on a land I haven't set foot on. Yet.