The price of experience is life's great sorrows

It is a fact, though, that for some time now I have known about life. As for love, on that score there is not only no illusion left in me, but also no desire for illusions, no urge to try to make these things last which are only sweet and good because they are ephemeral . . . But then, this kind of thing is so personal, so much my problem, that it is impossible to explain it clearly, let alone to make anyone else understand me. The price of experience is life's great sorrows, but it cannot be shared.

One book inevitably leads to another. Maggie Nelson in Bluets dreams of being subsumed into a tribe of blue people, years before learning of the Tuareg (those "abandoned by God"). Nelson cites Isabelle Eberhardt: "Long and white, the road twists like a snake toward the far-off blue places, toward the bright edges of the earth."

[I recall the startlingly infinite blue of the eyes of Brahim, and occasional strangers, in a desert town in Tunisia. I remember believing they had a secret knowledge, like Fremen. Years later, lying on the dunes at the eastern edge of Morocco, I learned the desert is an ocean. Dig down, water everywhere. I'm rocked to sleep on the undulating sand, the sound of the wind through the dunes like crashing waves. Their eyes an ocean.]

An almost cold wind blew through the night, and in the dunes a murmur like that of the sea.

I was less interested in Isabelle Eberhardt's writing than in the myth of her. I realize now I might better understand her through the words she used to articulate her artistic vision. I settled instead for her tired jottings, curated and annotated by an editor with a different focus than mine. The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt, features selections from four notebooks, beginning January 1, 1900. The final entry is January 31, 1903. She wrote mainly in French, with occasional passages in Russian (her mother's tongue) and Arabic (a language of spiritual interest). In October 1904, she was killed in a flash flood in Aïn Séfra, Algeria.

She was educated. She published short stories under a male pseudonym. She dressed as a man. She was anti-colonialist and traveled across North Africa. She was a mystic and converted to Islam, joining a Sufi sect. She was attacked by a man who may have been a hired assassin. She had lovers. She was unbearably sad.

Apart from all (well, most) of these things, she reminds me of myself. "Even I, as someone intimately convinced that I do not know how to live." She tortured herself with becoming a better version of herself.

Seen from the outside, I wear the mask of the cynic, the dissipated and debauched layabout. No one yet has managed to see through to my real inner self, which is sensitive and pure and which rises above the humiliation and baseness I choose to wallow in. No one has ever understood that even though I may seem to be driven by the senses alone, my heart is in fact generous.

The journals give themselves over to mundane concerns: finances and the logistics of travel and lodging. She grapples with artistic insecurities. She confesses that she is often so preoccupied with the day-to-day that she has neither time nor inspiration for her writing.

While the diaries document a unique life, they don't really stand up on their own. They don't always provide sufficient biographical detail for me to understand what was at issue. What insight it offers into her character, her artistic process, is mostly meaningless without being familiar with her output. I shall have to seek out The Oblivions Seekers someday.

How could I have believed in the mysteriousness that I thought I sensed in this country, which was only  a reflection of the sad enigma of my own soul? I am condemned to carry my unnameable sorrow, this whole world of thought along with me like this, wherever I go, through the countries and cities of the earth, without ever finding the Icaria of my dreams!

I am as ignorant about myself as I am about the outside world. Perhaps that is the only truth.

The Paris Review: Feminize Your Canon: Isabelle Eberhardt