In War and Peace Tolstoy offers this description of Pierre Bezuhov imprisoned by the French army: “Here and now for the first time in his life Pierre fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating because he was hungry, of drinking because he was thirsty, of sleep because he was sleepy, of warmth because he was cold, of talking to a fellow creature because he felt like talking and wanted to hear a human voice.”
Compare Wilfred Thesiger, the great twentieth-century British Arabist and desert traveler, as he traversed the Empty Quarter of the Arabian desert in the late 1940s: “I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which springs from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn.” While Thesiger acknowledges that his supplies in the desert included War and Peace, along with a volume of Gibbon, the similarity in these two passages is not primarily a matter of literary imitation. Rather these are complementary images of Rousseau’s dream: confinement in a “happy prison” and necessity in the desert are both conditions free from the alleged corruption of civilization.
Wilfred Thesiger is the central figure in Mark Cocker’s informative study of British travel writing in the twentieth century. Mr. Cocker, a young English biographer and reviewer of travel books for the Daily Telegraph
