The Psychological Orientation Towards Growth in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet" Page: 78
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78
like a battle plan" (B, p. 83)- As Narouz reaches "the
thinning edges of cultivation—the front line so to speak
where the battle was actually being joined at present—
a long ragged territory like the edges of a wound," Narouz
can see that "along the whole length of it infiltration
from the arable land on the one side and the desert
drainage on the other, both charged with the rotten salts,
had poisoned the ground and made it the image of
desolation" (B, p. 8^). "Here only giant reeds and
bulrushes grew or an occasional thorn bush. No fish could
live in the brackish water. Birds shunned it. It lay
in the stagnant belt of its own foul air, weird,
obsessive and utterly silent—the point at which the
desert and the sown met in a death-embrace" (B, pp. 8^-85).
Although this dark territory is associated with Narouz,
Narouz is clearly on the side of growth, for "he had
already mentally planted this waste with carobs and
green shrubs—conquered it."
Actually, once the desert is entered, and the war
between light and dark yields to the desert's principles,
the ways of darkness are less ugly, bearing "the first
pure draughts of desert air, and the nakedness of
space, pure as a theorem, stretching away into the sky
drenched in all its own silence and majesty, untenanted
except by such figures as the imagination of man has
invented to people landscapes which are inimical to his
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Fordham, Glenn Wayne, Jr. The Psychological Orientation Towards Growth in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet", dissertation, May 1981; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc330626/m1/84/?q=war&rotate=90: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .