Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps is a holiday in a book. When you think things are rough, travel with Greene and his lady cousin on their first trip outside of Europe: to trek through Liberia in 1935.
Things will still seem rough now, but hey: you will have a way to escape them, to 1930s Liberia, as Greene's breathtaking prose transports you almost bodily to the crushing heat and dull jungle of Africa's West coast.
If you've never read Greene, he has an awe-inspiring way of making astute, circumspect observations at the ends of paragraphs, just so you need to pause for an air-gasping, what-but-wait-but-what moment before you read on.
Here then, are the mind-blowing lines that give his justification for the whole affair. As relevant now as in 1935, I think:
Today our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay for ever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.
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