One of the most striking features of the desperate age in which we live is its genius for finding good reasons for doing bad things. We, who are its children, can never be altogether free of this characteristic. Consciously or unconsciously, we live not only our own individual life but, whether we like it or not, also the life of our time. We are our own dark horses. All day long we avow motives and purposes that are oddly at variance with the things we do.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior”
I have never been able to believe that a woman’s task in life is limited to her children. I can quite well conceive that in my mother, as with more and more women of our own day, there is an urge to creativeness which lies underneath and deeper, above and beyond the begetting of children. These women have a contract with life itself, which is not discharged by the mere procreation of their species. Men recognize and try to honour this contract in themselves as a matter of course. Their contribution to life vibrates with their passionate rebellion against the narrowly conceived idea that would restrict their role to that of protectors and feeders of women and children. They do not acknowledge and respect the same thing so readily in women. Perhaps until they do the world will not see the full creative relationship that life intends there should be between men and women.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior”
It is one of the more unjustifiable pretensions of our age that it measures time and experience by the clock. There are obviously a host of considerations and values which a clock cannot possibly measure. There is above all the fact that time spent on a journey, particularly a journey which sets in motion the abiding symbolism of our natures, is different from the time devoured at such a terrifying speed in the daily routine of what is accepted, with such curious complacency, as our normal lives. This seems axiomatic to me; the truer the moment and the greater its content of reality, the slower the swing of the universal pendulum.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior,” in which he documents a journey to his mother’s homeland in Africa.
This is something I can wholly agree with from my trip to Viet Nam this past summer. Time was agonizingly drawn out, like a dream that morphed fluidly from one scene to the next, spanning days, weeks, months. But everything was real, sharply so, and it was almost painful to live through.
(via vignettesofvietnam)
I had travelled nearly 7,000 miles; I had passed from a spring of sunshine, of uncompromising and unending blossom into an early and barren winter. I had not, it is true, travelled faster than light and I had travelled in an absolute rather than a relative way, but I felt as if I had come back much earlier than the previous night, at some unfinished, unresolved moment far back in the past; and I was more relieved than I can express to have done with flying for some months at least.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior” (pg 71, Chapter VII)
To me, one of the most striking things about fevers is their mysterious connection with our sense of time and space. It is almost as if one incorporates within one’s own individual being all the time that has been and can ever be, and that fever is either the vehicle itself, or evidence of the means by which one is forced from one time context into another. The moment one’s temperature changes from normal, one’s self ceases to be contemporary. Before now I have emerged from serious illness with the conviction of having been in a time and a self anterior to the present, and the feeling has persisted despite my failure to analyse or define it. So I have come to believe that, in its most profound sense, our battle for survival is fought out at a level and in a spirit of which we have little conscious understanding.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior”
One of the most pathetic things about us human beings is our touching belief that there are times when the truth is not good enough for us; that it can and must be improved upon. We have to be utterly broken before we can realize that it is impossible to better the truth. It is the very truth we deny which so tenderly and forgivingly picks up the fragments and puts them together again.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior”
I am sure one cannot love life enough; but I believe, too, one mustn’t confuse love of life with the love of things in it. One cannot pick the moment and place as one pleases and say, ‘Enough! This is all I want. This is how it is henceforth to be.’ That sort of present betrays past and future. Life is its own journey; pre-supposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one’s eternal peril.
Laurens van der Post, “Venture to the Interior”
