Freya Stark is a personal hero of mine.
Perseus in the Wind is Freya Starks most personal published work. Instead of writing about a particular place or culture, in Perseus, She shares how her travel experience and literary explorations have informed her attitude toward universal human themes. If that sounds elevated or snobby, rest assured the fault is mine. Freya Stark does not.
Freya takes a very common sense perspective on everything. From personal style to death, how could she be anything but practical? In her travels, she met, ate, and walked with the common men and women from all over the world.
Her thoughts on service could inform our current conversation about unionization and the relationships between labor, management, and corporate owners.
“When service is offered with pleasure, how boorish to take it as a right!”
Her thoughts on style are especially relevant in today’s culture of mass-produced standard fashion.
“Style is fundamentally a truthful statement, if we take for truth something more careful than the not telling of a lie.”
Freya Stark’s observations on women’s education and status could have as easily come from the lips of Hillary Clinton today.
“What would we say of an electrician so anxious to avoid shocks that he tries to eliminate the current altogether?”
And her firm but gentle convictions regarding choice and tolerance both chastised mine, “the true secret of persuasiveness is that in never converts: it speaks to it’s own only, and discovers to them the unexpected secrets of their hearts” and encouraged them, “Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.”
By far, my favorite part of Perseus in the Wind is savored in the last three sections. “Travel” “Courage” and “Old Age.”
When Freya Stark wrote Perseus in the Wind, she was “a woman of a certain age.” She looked back on a life of travel and education but also forward to future travels and learning new things. Quickly approaching a “certain age” myself, I know my greatest adventures are still ahead to be executed in a body that is no longer young. I read Freya’s words on these things very personally.
I think what will resonate most with wander-readers is that Freya is one of of us. She is well read and educated. She values the insight she has gained from poetry and literature. She values it as highly as her practical travel experience. The reading of the thing and the experience of the thing are entwined in her life and in her writing of it.
Yes – Freya Stark was one of us… the best of us.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie
Special Thanks to Macmillan for providing copies of Perseus in the Wind to WanderLit.
Stay tuned for more on the life of Freya Stark and how YOU can win a free copy of Perseus in the Wind for your own bookshelf!