Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky

Some years ago, the British film director (and  wonderful friend and collaborator) Nicolas Roeg gave me a  book and told me, “Read this, it will change your life.”I    had no  idea what to expect – except that with Nic, I trusted that he    knew what  he was talking about.  I went home and read the book, Paul Bowles’  magnificent novel, The  Sheltering Sky,    set in Morocco and first published in 1949, and  indeed it both woke   me  up, psychologically and emotionally, and changed  the way I thought    about things.The    novel is set in Morocco, where American-born  composer and writer    Bowles lived for most of his life, and among its  other effects, The  Sheltering Sky    made me fall in love with the country, too.   Marrakesh became one of    my favorite cities in the world (I still dream  of its exquisite    architecture, its wonderful people and its  unforgettable desert beauty)    and the drive from there to the Sahara  through the Atlas Mountains  is   still one of the most memorable and  remarkable journeys I have  ever   made.  To touch snow in the Atlas  Mountains on the same day that  you   ride a camel up a Saharan sand dune  is to know how extraordinary  our   world is.Recently    I  mentioned to a friend, Lisa Anderson, my favorite passage from the    book –  which literally made me sit up and think differently about   life,  so  startling are the words.  Lisa, who also found it remarkable,   was  kind  enough to look it up and email it to me, so here it is.    Please  read it,  and read the whole of The  Sheltering Sky.Bernardo  Bertolucci’s    1990 movie of the book captures some of its mystery,  but nothing can    compare with reading Paul Bowles’ masterpiece.  (His  short stories  are   also probably the best I have ever read.)"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't  know when it willarrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life.  It's that terribleprecision that we hate so much. But because we don't know,  we get to thinkof life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a  certain number oftimes, and a very small number, really. How many more  times will youremember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some  afternoon that's sodeeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive  of your lifewithout it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not  even. How many moretimes will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.  And yet it allseems limitless."
    - Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)