The Sheltering Sound

Paul Bowles in 1987, near his home in Tangier, Morocco.
"In a 1975 interview, the poet Daniel Halpern asked the author and composer Paul Bowles why he’d spent such a significant chunk of his life scrambling about the globe. I imagine Bowles’s speaking voice here as matter-of-fact, exegetic: 'I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born,' he answered (that place was Flushing, Queens, in 1910; he was the only child of a rancorous, unloving father and a meek, bookish mother). 'Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.' What was Bowles darting around after for all those years? Travel invariably expands a person’s parameters, like air huffed into a balloon: there is an intellectual broadening, a widening of the precincts. But there’s a metaphysical utility to that kind of movement, too. Who among us has not left home expressly to find home, casting about for a place that feels like the right place, that isn’t necessarily the ancestral plot but, instead, is where a person feels whole, awake to something, realized? ..."
New Yorker

2007 November: The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site, 2010 February: Paul Bowles (1910-1999), 2011: January: Halfmoon (1996), 2013 July: Tellus #23 - The Voices of Paul Bowles, 2014 January: Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles (1998), 2014 March: The Sheltering Sky (1949), 2015 January: Things Gone & Things Still Here, 2015 October: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – a cautionary tale for tourists, 2015 November: The Rolling Stone Interview (May 23, 1974), 2016 June: Let It Come Down (1952), 2016 December: Paul Bowles & the Music of Morocco, 2017 July: Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles