How Long the Lonely Road

Syria remained a vividly coloured racial and religious mosaic. Any wide attempt after unity would make a patched and parcelled thing, ungrateful to a people whose instincts ever returned towards parochial home rule. —Lawrence of Arabia Saira sent me this article from National Geographic magazine , titled "Shadowland," about Syria and its newly central role in Middle Eastern politics and foreign involvement. Don Belt writes: "Syria is an ancient place, shaped by thousands of years of trade and human migration. But if every nation is a photograph, a thousand shades of gray, then Syria, for all its antiquity, is actually a picture developing slowly before our eyes. It's the kind of place where you can sit in a crowded Damascus café listening to a 75-year-old story teller in a fez conjure up the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire as if they were childhood memories, waving his sword around so wildly that the audience dives for cover—then stroll next door to the magnificent ...

Leave the matters written of in the first eleven chapters of the Old Testament out, and no recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus... To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time, not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise, and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality. —Mark Twain Damascus, the oldest city on the earth , shows all the signs of gray aging. Its ancient landmarks bear modern attempts at smoothing those wrinkles through injections and time-consuming treatments. The long high hall of the Souq curves inward from the city ramparts and the statue of Saladin. Ancient walls open to new stalls that the package tourists peer into, and the stall-tenders say, “Hello, where are you from?” That tunnel of commerce opens onto a square with the remnants of Rom...

You were in the oldest city in the world—you must have seen something besides pretty women, places to buy whiskey, and the rooftop. —My Mother When Jean checked into the Riad Hotel in Hama, the man at the desk, a Palestinian named Abdullah, asked him, “When will your friends be arriving?” “Later I think,” said Jean. “They're taking the bus.” “The young man and the old man, right?” “No,” said Jean. “A man and a woman, Jon and Saira.” At the time Jean thought nothing of this supposition, but later it became an injection of paranoia in a conspiratorial pharmacy. Just how many pairs of Mentor and Telemachus traveled Syria, that Abdullah would guess at my own past associations? Let's say it is common—then how did he know, or think he knew, that Skip and I would be coming? The answer: The Mukhabarat had their eye on Little Jonnie the American writer, that lone traveler keeping notes in their den, hanging around jobless and aimless in Aleppo. Twas my pen condemned me! writing choice ...

If a pistol is put in a story, eventually it has to be fired. —Checkhov Jean and I cleaned up the roof a little after waking up there in the morning. “Imagine if some girl came up here,” said Jean of the couches covered in drunken nests, the roof in cigarette butts, peanut skins, and broken cans of Egyptian beer. “She would think this place was crazy.” We breakfasted on falafel rolls with egg and a big blended juice at a vitamin bar, and watched some Syrian soap opera on a television above the counter. That day two Polish girls had checked in, and Ahmad arranged for Jean and Jon to join accompany the small tour group he had arranged. One was Carolina and the other Dagmara, both very pretty and Polish. They both worked at the museum of a science institution in rebuilt Warsaw, Carolina managing and Dagmara arranging an exhibit of interactive media. First Ahmad brought us to a nearby mosque, to a cemetery with a great block tomb topped by two towers, the sarcophagus of a Pole who convert...

I was born a citizen of the world, and my inclination led me into all scenes where my knowledge of mankind could be enlarged. ―Rob Roy   I spent ten days in Aleppo, and most of that talking. I talked with travelers (Syria calls more interesting vagabonds than Paris or Greece) about the politics of the region and of their own country, about places worth seeing and experiences had. Far from television and Internet, we summarized new films and Youtube videos and Wikipedia articles—a less solitary, if also less accurate, path to culture. We gossiped about girls and other people in the hotel. I spoke with the Arabs over gifted tea, welcomed into conversation about my religion, politics, and non-profession, and received more good will as an interesting foreigner than many Arabs show their neighbors—not blamed for the faults of America, for every Arab can distinguish between a person and a country, strange as their own nations are.   The Arabs revel in dialog, rhetoric, and oratory;...