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Сэр Уилфрид Патрик Тесайджер — британский путешественник и литератор, географ, исследователь Азии.

Родился в столице Эфиопии в семье британского консула. Учился в Итоне, затем окончил оксфордский Магдален-колледж со степенью по истории. Серьёзно занимался боксом — в 1930-33 гг. представляя по нему Оксфорд, затем будучи капитаном его боксёрской команды. В 1930 году вернулся в Эфиопию, чтобы присутствовать на коронации Хайле Селассие I — по личному приглашению последнего. В 1933 году возглавил экспедицию по изучению течения реки Аваш и стал первым европейцем, посетившим вассальный эфиопский Султанат Аусса. С 1935 по 1940 год служил в чиновничьем аппарате англо-египетского Судана. С началом Второй мировой войны вступил в Силы самообороны Судана и участвовал в боях на суданско-эфиопской границе против итальянских войск, будучи награждён за освобождение эфиопского города Агибар. Впоследствии служил в Сирии и Северной Африке, в 1943—1945 годах был советником наследного принца Эфиопии.

В 1945 году впервые посетил Аравию — формально с целью изучения пустынной саранчи. С 1945 по 1949 год путешествовал по южным районам Аравийского полуострова, в том числе по Оману, дважды пересёк Руб-эль-Хали. Впоследствии путешествовал также по Ираку, Ирану, странам Французской Западной Африки, Пакистану и Кении; в последней остался жить на много лет и вернулся в Англию только в 1990-х годах; в 1995 году был посвящён в рыцари. О своих путешествиях им написано несколько книг, также он является автором огромной коллекции фотографий, сделанных в их ходе.

Почётный член Британской академии . Wikipedia  

✵ 3. Июнь 1910 – 24. Август 2003
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Тесайджер, Уилфрид: Цитаты на английском языке

“In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.  I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there.  I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which derives 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.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 22.

“Arabs rule but they do not administer.  Their government is intensely individualistic, and is successful or unsuccessful according to the degree of fear and respect which the ruler commands, and his skill in dealing with individual men.  Founded on an individual life, their government is impermanent and liable to end in chaos at any moment.  To Arab tribesmen this system is comprehensible and acceptable, and its success of failure should not be measured in terms of efficiency and justice as judged by Western standards.  To these tribesmen security can be bought too dearly by the loss of individual freedom.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 32.

“It is difficult to analyse the motive that induced me to make those journeys, or the satisfaction I derived from such a life. There was of course the lure of the unknown; there was the constant test of resolution and endurance. Yet those travels in the Empty Quarter would have been for me a pointless penance but for the comradeship of my Bedu companions. All they possessed were their camels and saddlery, their rifles and daggers, some waterskins and cooking pots and bowls, and the very clothes they wore; few of them even owned a blanket. They possessed, however, a freedom which we, with all our craving for possessions, cannot experience. Any of them could have found a job in the towns and villages of the Hadhramaut; but all would have rejected that easier life of lesser men. They met every challenge, every hardship, with the proud boast: 'We are Bedu.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 398.

“As I listened I thought once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu.  Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control.  It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self-reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), pp. 209-210.

“As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 310.

“I also questioned whether it was right to try to impose on the Sudanese the conventions and values of our utterly alien civilization, and sometimes expressed these doubts in letters to my mother. I could not help feeling that other races were entitled to their own customs and moral standards, however much these might differ from ours.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 202.

“I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 20.

“Looking back on my attitude to the commonly accepted pleasures of life, I can say that I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation. Existence in the desert had a simplicity that I found wholly satisfying; there, everything not a necessity was an encumbrance. It was those three months in the Sahara in 1938 that taught me to appreciate things that most Europeans are able to take for granted: clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from the rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 295.

“They [the Middle East Anti Locust Unit] were the golden key that unlocked Arabia for me. To somebody who was interested in desert exploration the Empty Quarter offered the, sort of, ultimate challenge.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mx06, Fri 12 Oct 1979.

“All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert: their deep religious instinct, which has found expression in Islam; their sense of fellowship, which binds them as members of one faith; their pride of race; their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humour, their courage and patience, the language which they speak and their passionate love of poetry.  But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under conditions of extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 82.

“God, you must be a couple of pansies.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Newby, Eric (1958). A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Secker & Warburg.
The final sentence of the book as Thesiger watches Newby and Hugh Carless inflate their air beds

“I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again.  But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed.  Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world.  This I do not believe.  I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and light-hearted gallantry.  Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 310.

“Later he [Evelyn Waugh] asked, at second-hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I refused. Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 92.

“At first glance they [his Bedu companions] seemed to be little better than savages, as primitive as the Danakil, but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of very welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority. They were Muslims and Bedu and I was neither. They had never heard of the English, for all Europeans were known to them simply as Christians, or more probably infidels, and nationality had no meaning to them.  They had heard vaguely of the war as a war between the Christians, and of the Aden government as a Christian government.  Their world was the desert and they had little if any interest in events that happened outside it.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 36.

“After all, many people feel today that it is morally indefensible to hang a man, even if he has raped and killed a child, but I could not forget how easily we ourselves had taken to killing during the war. Some of the most civilized people I had known had been the most proficient.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 94.

“Strike a Bedu and he will kill you either then or later.  It is easy for strangers to give offence without meaning to do so.  I once put my hand on the back of bin Kabina’s neck and he turned on me and asked furiously if I took him for a slave.  I had no idea that I had done anything wrong.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 148.

“What use will money be to him in the Sands.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 122.

“We parted before I went to Abu Dhabi, which I found an Arabian Nightmare, the final disillusionment.  For me this book remains a memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Preface to the 1984 edition
Arabian Sands (1959)

“I believe that day [Ras Tafari's victory parade, Addis Ababa, 3 Nov 1916] implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 56.

“It is not hunger nor thirst that frightens the Bedu; they maintain that riding they can survive in cold weather for seven days without food or water.  It is the possible collapse of their camels which haunts them. If this happens, death is certain.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 103.

“They were Bedu, and these empty spaces where there was neither shade nor shelter were their homelands.  Any of them could have worked in the gardens around Salala; all of them would have scorned this easier life of lesser men.  Among the Bedu only the broken are stranded among the cultivations on the desert’s shore.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Источник: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 85.

“A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease….. No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.”

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Wilfred Thesiger книга Arabian Sands

Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)

“I think the harder the life, the finer the type, yes, and I certainly felt this about the Bedu. When I went there, I felt that the difficulty was going to be living up physically to the hardships of their life. But, on the contrary, it was the difficulty of meeting their high standards: their generosity, their patience, their loyalty, their courage and all these things. And they had a quality of nobility.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Answer to “Do you think that hardship and, indeed, suffering bring nobility?”
Interview with Sir David Attenborough first broadcast on Channel 4 in August 1994.
Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Chris Morton and Philip Grover (2010), p. 82.

“In July 1969 I happened to be in Kenya, on the shore of Lake Rudolf, when I heard with incredulity from a naked Turkana fisherman that the 'Wazungu' as he called Europeans, including Americans - had landed on the moon. He had heard the news at a distant mission station. To him this achievement, being incomprehensible, was without significance; it filled me, however, with a sense of desecration, and of despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of modern man. Even as a boy I recognized that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity. My forebodings have been amply fulfilled.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 443.

“To me it is always the people rather than the places that matter.”

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Wilfred Thesiger

Источник: Desert, Marsh and Mountain (1979), p. 122.