There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly trying to make sure everyone around you is okay with you. You start measuring your decisions by other people’s reactions. If they are happy, you feel relieved. If they are disappointed, you start wondering what you did wrong. Over time, what Jesus teaches about people-pleasing becomes something we desperately need to understand.

I think many of us confuse love with responsibility. We believe that if we truly care about someone, then we should be able to keep them from being disappointed, angry, hurt, or frustrated with us. But learning to follow Jesus without living for approval means accepting something difficult: you can love someone deeply and still not be responsible for how they feel about every decision you make.

Jesus showed us this over and over again. He cared about people. He listened to them, healed them, fed them, taught them, forgave them, and gave Himself for them. But He did not allow their expectations to become His master.

In Mark 1, people were searching for Jesus after He had been healing and helping crowds. His disciples found Him and said, “Everyone is looking for you.” It would have been easy to hear that as an obligation. People wanted Him. People needed Him. People expected Him to come back.

But Jesus did not return simply because everyone wanted Him to.

He told His disciples that they needed to go to other towns so He could preach there too.

I find that deeply freeing.

Jesus did not ignore people. He did not stop caring. He simply knew that not every expectation placed on Him was an assignment from the Father.

That is something I have to remind myself of too.

Not every request is my responsibility. Not every disappointment means I failed. Not every unhappy reaction means I need to change my decision.

Sometimes people are disappointed because we were wrong. When that happens, we should admit it. We should apologize. We should make things right.

But sometimes people are disappointed simply because we said no.

Sometimes they are upset because we created a boundary.

Sometimes they are frustrated because we stopped doing something they had grown comfortable receiving from us.

Their feelings may be real, but that does not mean we have sinned.

Jesus disappointed people too.

Peter once tried to convince Jesus to avoid the suffering that was ahead of Him. Peter loved Jesus. He did not want Him to suffer. His concern was sincere.

But Peter’s preferred path was not the Father’s plan.

Jesus loved Peter, but He did not obey Peter’s emotions.

That matters.

Someone can love you and still want the wrong thing for you.

Someone can care about you and still pressure you toward a decision you should not make.

Someone can be disappointed with you even when you are trying to do what is right.

This is where people-pleasing becomes dangerous.

It can look like kindness on the surface. We tell ourselves we are just trying to keep the peace. We do not want conflict. We do not want anyone to think badly of us.

But eventually, keeping everyone happy can become more important than being honest.

We start saying yes when we mean no. We stay in situations we know are unhealthy. We avoid conversations that need to happen. We keep giving away our time and energy because guilt feels easier than disappointment.

That is not freedom.

Jesus never promised that following Him would make everyone happy with us.

In fact, His own life proves the opposite.

There were days when crowds followed Him and praised Him. There were other days when people rejected Him, argued with Him, misunderstood Him, and walked away.

Jesus did not change who He was every time the crowd changed its opinion.

He knew who He was.

He knew who His Father was.

And He knew what He had been sent to do.

I think that is where peace begins for us too.

We have to stop asking, “Is everybody happy with me?” and start asking, “Am I being faithful to Jesus?”

Those are not the same question.

You can make someone happy and still be disobedient.

You can disappoint someone and still be faithful.

That does not give us permission to become cold. Jesus was never cold. He was compassionate, patient, generous, and forgiving.

The goal is not to stop caring about people.

The goal is to stop carrying what belongs to them.

I am responsible for how I speak.

I am responsible for whether I forgive.

I am responsible for whether I act with kindness and integrity.

I am responsible for whether I tell the truth.

But I am not responsible for controlling another person’s emotions.

Neither are you.

Sometimes love sounds like, “I care about you, but I cannot do that.”

Sometimes love says, “I understand that you are disappointed, but I believe this is the right decision.”

Sometimes love means staying close.

Sometimes love means creating distance.

The important thing is that our decisions come from prayer, truth, humility, and obedience rather than fear of rejection.

So if someone is disappointed with you today, bring it to God.

Ask Him to show you whether you were wrong.

If you were, make it right.

But if you were honest, loving, prayerful, and faithful, do not automatically assume that another person’s unhappiness means you need to change course.

You cannot keep everyone happy.

Jesus did not.

What you can do is love people well, follow Christ faithfully, and trust God with the reactions you cannot control.

That burden was never yours to carry.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

I suppose it’s presumptuous to assume that my posts are of any interest to anyone, let alone worthy of a few minutes of attention to be read. But that assumes I’m writing this because I desire or crave attention. Honestly, I do not.

But I am compelled, for reasons I myself do not entirely understand, to share my thoughts and opinions here on things that probably should not be shared.

Does writing this go against my better judgment? That depends. What constitutes ‘better’ judgment? Is it the act, the process, the substance, or the consequence of such writings? Writings that would certainly be labeled as strange at least, insane at most. Or, worse perhaps, as I have a limited imagination.

As a writer, I’m a mere amateur. This means I have something to say but lack the language to make it truly compelling and memorable. But after five decades on this earth, the prose I offer here is likely the fullest and best version of my written capabilities.

But that doesn’t really answer the question of why I’m doing this. And after much soul-searching and back-and-forth in my mind, the best answer I can offer is this: Because to keep what burns inside me has begun to devour me from within.

Speaking my truth to the world is better than letting my inner world consume me whole.

I recognize the risks.

Our world has tidy boxes for what it considers untidy things, no matter how wrong the world’s boxes may be.

Human societies and civilizations have a long history of misunderstanding, preservation bias, and erasure when it comes to the weird, anomalous, or uncanny — the atopic. The system is efficient and expedient with its assigning of labels: episode, delusions, possession, psychosis, blasphemy, mania, hallucination. Pick your favorite. The thesaurus has plenty more. And modern medicine has an endless array of chemicals they’re happy to pump into you at cost, while religion has an endless array of dogmatic corrections they’re happy to also pump into you at cost.

To both I say, “I’d rather not.”

I suppose it's safer and easier to stay silent. After all, there’s no real benefit for me here other than some hope of processing, integration, and, if I’m lucky, a bit of solace. I thought I’d say peace of mind, but that seems impossible at this point. At least, not in this lifetime. Silence would certainly keep me out of the vile filing systems of this world. But.

Silence also corrodes.

If left unmanaged, some unspoken words and thoughts become toxic. They rush the mind, body, and soul like a firestorm, leaving nothing but ash and cinder in their wake.

And there’s a naive part of me that clings to the old-fashioned notion that the sort of thing that happens to one person and is never shared has no resistance against the onslaught of preservation bias and erasure the world never seems to get enough of.

No.

It folds inward. It becomes indistinguishable from reverie, invention, and madness. Writing it down, even into the void of the internet where no one listens, and no one cares, gives it the one thing silence can’t: continued existence outside the tiny vessel of the mind that now contains it.

This is all I have to offer the world.

In Summary: * This has been a quietly successful Monday. Two main chores: my weekly laundry, all done early; and a grocery shopping trip to Walmart, got what I intended and stayed within my budget.

The Rangers are scheduled to play the A's tonight with a start time of 7:05 PM CDT, I may try to catch at least the first few innings before heading to bed. We'll see how that goes.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 152/87 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana * 06:20 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie * 08:10 – cottage cheese * 09:30 – 1 hot dog & bun * 13:20 – sausage, scrambled eggs, biscuits and jam, pancakes * 16:15 – 1 fresh apple * 17:10 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:26 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 06:55 – start my weekly laundry * 12:10 to 13:10 – grocery shopping * 13:20 – lunch * 14:30 – an afternoon spent mostly listening to relaxing music and working on my chess

Chess: * 16:00 – moved in all pending CC games, winning one, losing another, and started one new one

In Summary: * This has been a quietly successful Monday. Two main chores: my weekly laundry, all done early; and a grocery shopping trip to Walmart, got what I intended and stayed within my budget.

The Rangers are scheduled to play the A's tonight with a start time of 7:05 PM CDT, I may try to catch at least the first few innings before heading to bed. We'll see how that goes.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 152/87 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana * 06:20 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie * 08:10 – cottage cheese * 09:30 – 1 hot dog & bun * 13:20 – sausage, scrambled eggs, biscuits and jam, pancakes * 16:15 – 1 fresh apple * 17:10 – 1 slice of lemon meringue pie

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:26 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 06:55 – start my weekly laundry * 12:10 to 13:10 – grocery shopping * 13:20 – lunch * 14:30 – an afternoon spent mostly listening to relaxing music and working on my chess

Chess: * 16:00 – moved in all pending CC games, winning one, losing another, and started one new one

To end the month of August with Blaugust, I wanted to write about some lessons learned.

I will reach my 15 blog posts goal as I publish this one, which is great! I did it! 🙌

One thing Blaugust helped me with was to lower my expectations, meaning, less perfectionism. I usually have an idea to write a blog post, and then I want to write a structured post, with intro, development and conclusion. And get all the references right, and edit it perfectly, and add the right images, and so on. Doing all of that takes time, and I realized I don’t have that much time anymore. Blaugust helped me see that I can break a few self-imposed rules about what a “proper” blog post needs to be.

And that means that I can share my thoughts while they are still fresh, without being over-polished. Not all posts need to have a conclusion, I can just throw away some thoughts and hit publish and that’s okay.

The post No big deal was from a draft I started two years ago and had never published because I thought it wasn’t good enough.

The post The only woman in the room was written during a lunch break, and I didn’t worry too much about structure.

The post Iron Maiden: Run for your Lives 2026 was written in a hotel lobby on some downtime before I left to catch a train. And I hit publish in the train station lobby minutes before entering said train. And that meant there were some typos in that post, which were corrected when I saw them.

All these really pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I’m glad they did!

But also, I don’t have that much energy anymore. Aging is real, and with it comes a shift in priorities where protecting my time and energy matters far more than obsessing over an ideal draft. Between work, personal life, house chores, reading, blogging, my well-being routines and whatever else, I have to be intentional about where my energy goes.

I planned on reading more of the other blogs participating, and I did read a few, here are some blog posts I enjoyed from which I discovered new bloggers for my RSS feed:

• Kobo vs Kindle – Divergent Rays
• Blaugust 2026 Group Project: Tell Us About Your Very First Blog – GamerLady P Blog
• The Internet Doesn't Exist – Matt's Blog
• I Don’t Want to Be the Product: Returning to the Tiny Internet – Pour The Coffee
• My Writing Workflow – Heart Soul Machine

Looking back on this month, I am so happy I decided to participate in Blaugust. It was exactly the push I needed to re-evaluate my relationship with writing and get back into a healthy rhythm. Writing 15 posts per month might be my upper monthly limit as of right now, and that’s okay!

Congrats to everyone else who took part this year! It doesn’t matter if you hit your goal, posted once or just spent the month reading along. I believe we’ve all learned something! It’s great to see that there are people interested in keeping the personal web alive and delightfully imperfect!

Post 15 of #Blaugust #NoisyMusings #blogging

Another Q-R Checkmate. Again playing White, but this time coming at the Black King from the right side of the board. This CC tournament game began on 03 August and ended a few minutes ago when my 25. Qxh7# delivered the mating move, my Queen being covered by my h4 Rook. The games in this tournament are being played with a comfortable 2 days allowed per move time control. Position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record below:

1. d4 d5 2. h3 Nc6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. Nc3 e6 5. a3 Bd6 6. e3 O-O 7. Bb5 Qd7 8. O-O a6 9. Bxc6 Qxc6 10. Ne5 Qe8 11. Re1 Be7 12. e4 dxe4 13. b4 Bd6 14. Nc4 b6 15. Nxe4 Nxe4 16. Rxe4 Qc6 17. Qd3 Bb7 18. f3 b5 19. Na5 Qb6 20. Nxb7 Qxb7 21. Rh4 e5 22. dxe5 Bxe5 23. Rb1 Rad8 24. Qf5 Qd5 25. Qxh7#

And the adventure continues.

Like most Bostonians when he was mayor, I met Tom Menino a couple of times. (This isn’t an exaggeration. I saw a poll or something the last time he ran for re-election that said that over fifty percent of Bostonians had met Menino personally). He seemed affable, and his complete inability to do competent public speaking was strangely charming.

I don’t have any personal animus, is what I’m saying. People revere Menino largely because he seemed like a good guy. Which may be true. But he wasn’t good for Boston, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge this lest a present or future mayor repeat his mistakes.

Menino neglected Boston Public Schools and failed to address the affordability crisis which began when he was mayor and continues to this day. But I’d like to talk about Menino’s most visible and worst legacy: The Seaport.

Basically Menino looked at a chunk of Boston real estate that featured some working fishing piers, the place where people embark on cruises, an outdoor concert venue and a ton of parking lots and said, “let’s put a neighborhood there!”

Now, this isn’t, on its face, a terrible idea. Oh wait, yes it is, because climate change is going to put the whole area underwater eventually, and we’ll probably have to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on sea walls or other mitigation strategies to keep it from turning into Waterworld.

Okay, okay, but let’s put climate change on the back burner just like everyone else does and say creating a new neighborhood out of what is mostly parking lots is not in itself a terrible idea.

Except what arose was not a real neighborhood, but rather a neoliberal YIMBY* hellscape. If you’re not familiar…well, this video sums it up nicely. The Seaport is, as the video says, a collection of sterile offices, hotels, and luxury apartment buildings. Though people live there, it feels immediately off for reasons that can be hard to pinpoint. You get the sense you’re in a simulacrum of a neighborhood.

This is in part because it’s got no public services at all. That’s the neoliberal part! There are park-like spaces in the Seaport, but they’re not actual city parks maintained at public expense, and their private owners can repurpose them at any time. (Also since they are not public property, they can keep any protests or other undesirable gatherings out). There are no schools. There is no public library. There are no police or fire stations. There are also very limited views of the water in this waterfront neighborhood. Yes, there is a public sidewalk that runs along the water, but if you really want to sit and enjoy the view, you need to pay for a restaurant table or live on the upper floor of one of the apartment buildings.

The problem here isn’t really the existence of The Seaport so much as the fact that with high approval ratings and strong political clout, this is what Menino chose for his bold, legacy-defining initiative. What might he have done for the real neighborhoods of the city had he devoted his energy to improving the city rather than building a playground for rich suburbanites who will move out as soon as their kids reach school age?

I don’t know the exact mechanics, somehow Menino got the Commonwealth involved in this idiocy as well, building the “Silver Line,” which is a tunnel that buses run in, to serve the Seaport. The Silver Line stations in the Seaport are beautiful, and nearly empty, because rich people don’t use public transportation, and especially not buses. Recent MBTA usage data shows the Red, Blue, and Green lines all serving over 100k passengers per day, with the Blue Line serving about 50k and the Silver Line dead last at about 30k passengers. And that’s with passengers from the useful part of the Silver Line (Nubian Square to Downtown, where the bus runs above ground) pumping up the numbers.

This happened while the rest of the MBTA system, the parts that people actually use, nearly fell apart from decades of deferred maintenance that the system is only now starting to recover from. What if, instead of building tunnels and beautiful stations for buses that are rarely used, the MBTA had made everybody else’s buses free? Or just maintained the tracks and signals so we wouldn’t have had to endure closures and shutdowns?

What might Boston have been like if we’d had a mayor whose vision for the city wasn’t just “turn a chunk of the city over to developers”? Could we have kept the rest of the city affordable or made it more liveable? Might our children learn in buildings with functioning HVAC systems? (Most Boston Public Schools do not have ventilation systems, which leads to illness and absenteeism, but nobody wants to put their “education reform” money into giving BPS students and staff breathable air).

The problem isn’t just that we have a neighborhood for wealthy white people; it’s that the Seaport aesthetic and economics are coming for the rest of the city. And that’s why I say Menino ruined Boston. Boston is unaffordable and difficult to get around in. Kids who grow up here have to move to Randolph or Brockton or somewhere else that they can actually afford to live. We bring tens of thousands of young people here every academic year, and we’re losing them immediately after graduation because Boston is less and less livable. Even if you live in the Seaport.

We need bold action to save this city. But our only model for bold action is the creation of The Seaport. Is there anyone out there with a vision for the city that actually includes people who live here? If so, could you please stand up?

*YIMBY is a religious cult comprised mostly of white men who worship the invisible hand of the free market. They have been blessed by the god of late capitalism and, because they took econ 101, believe that the affordability crisis is a simple matter of supply and demand, and if we just capitalism harder, we can make housing affordable. This is a faith-based movement impervious to rational argument.

O meu pai não era uma pessoa de escrever. Foi uma pessoa que não pôde completar os estudos mas foi uma pessoa que sempre me ensinou a importância de estudar. Eu adoro escrever. É o meu escape para todo o turbilhão de ideias, emoções e conceitos que me surge ao longo da vida. Estive sem escrever mais de 20 anos. Estive sem escrever as minhas emoções, os meus pensamentos livres, troquei essa escrita por uma escrita cientifica, igualmente importante durante esses 20 anos. Acredito que as emoções são sentidas com uma intensidade apenas durante um período e com o tempo e com a rotina acabam por se perder, envoltas numa neblina, como se tivesse sido em outra vida. Acredito que colocar em palavras aquilo que sentimos, nos permite voltar a sentir, a viver de forma mais real um determinado momento. Acredito que escrever nos permite olhar para trás e cuidar, amar, e empatizar com a nossa própria história. O meu pai não era uma pessoa de escrever, ele era a pessoa do abraço apertado, do sorriso sincero, do amar fácil. Talvez ele escrevia na vida das pessoas assim. Neste momento, tenho ainda esperança de ser surpreendida por ele, mesmo não sendo ele uma pessoa de escrever quem sabe apareça uma carta perdida, um possível bilhete de ultimas palavras que o pudesse trazer pelo menos mais uma vez para perto de mim. Tenho 41 anos da sua voz comigo mas neste momento tenho medo de esquecer essa voz que tanto me acolhia. Acho que se tiver que listar um arrependimento é não ter gravado mais a sua voz... Eu fecho os olhos e sim consigo ouvir e sentir, preciso que essa memória auditiva me acompanhe sempre e que não seja como as emoções que vivemos, que ao fim de um tempo não conseguimos sentir igual porque não foram escritas. Sinto falta das tuas palavras pai.

Sketchbook 63 Flipthrough July 2025

https://vimeo.com/1101416922/7edd97d69d?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

#nonfiction #books #memoir #history #war

During World War I, a British archeologist singlehandedly forged a multitude of Arabian tribes into a unified army, leading them to victory over a decaying Ottoman Empire, in so doing bringing Arabia into the modern world, i.e. that of Western-style national statehood. This hero would become the legend known as Lawrence of Arabia, the white man who donned desert garb and with his Arabian comrades conquered Damascus. At least, that’s the story of the movie, as I understand. The story told by T.E. Lawrence himself in his autobiographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom is rather more complex and ambiguous.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence’s own account of his role in the Arab Revolt, written some years after events from his notes and diaries (though most were lost) and going through several iterations before its final version. From the outset, Lawrence recognises that the Arab Revolt played only a minor part in the Allied victory in World War I, and that if it was critical to this victory, it was so in the sense that British authors tend to ascribe a sense of crucial importance to any single operation because it was part of the totality of the war effort (see also dambusters etc.). Nor does Lawrence suggest he tells his story because he was uniquely instrumental to the events of the Arab Revolt. By his own words, he tells his story because he was there. As such, he is as much, or perhaps even more, of an unreliable narrator as you might expect. Nevertheless, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is assuredly not a heroic tale or adventure novel about how good old British pluck saved the day. Instead, we accompany a profoundly emotionally conflicted man into a struggle where he is forever doomed to be an outsider to both his own and his adopted peoples. On top of which Lawrence is emblematic of so many of the pathologies of 1920s English repressedness that his memoir could double as a psychoanalytical field manual. Seven Pillars of Wisdom is now the sort of historical artefact that requires a 100 page introduction (which my copy duly has), and on the whole, the surface level war story of a few brave fighters facing overwhelming odds is the least interesting part of it.

Events, dear boy, events

Its nature as a memoir rather than a novel means that Seven Pillars of Wisdom lacks an overall plot, at least in the traditional narrative sense. There is a trajectory, starting in the deserts of the Hejaz in 1916 and terminating with the fall of Damascus in 1918. Damascus is Lawrence’s lodestar from the very beginning, but with the book written after events unfolded, it is hard not to suspect some of this is a backward projection. The narrating Lawrence at any point in the book is always a superposition of the contemporaneous Lawrence in situ and the future Lawrence telling his story with the benefit of hindsight. Combined with his literary writing style and tendency to embark on long introspective digressions, all this makes Seven Pillars of Wisdom oscillate unsteadily between being a memoir, a historical account, and a war story.

Real life is much messier than a story, with less structure, and hence Lawrence’s retelling often feels like a series of disconnected events following one after the other without much in the way of connecting tissue. Seven Pillars of Wisdom presents the reader with a constant procession of people, places and communities, many of whom are introduced with an assumed familiarity, only to never be seen again. Keeping track of the manifold characters and places isn’t made easier by Lawrence’s refusal to adhere to a single rule for transliteration from Arabic to English. With Lawrence rushing between villages, riverbeds, oases and most importantly, railway lines, always in the company of an rotating cast of comrades, there is simply too much going on, a significant part of which would be considered irrelevant digression from a narrative perspective. There is a sense in which Seven Pillars of Wisdom truly is ‘one battle after another’, with its endless sequence of skirmishes, reconnoitres, and a truly astonishing level of destruction levelled at railway lines.

War of manoeuvre

Lawrence’s account of the campaign in Arabia contrasts markedly with the common understanding of World War I as fought on the Western Front. Where the the latter is remembered as a war of stasis, the Arab Revolt is a mobile guerrilla war predicated precisely on refusing a pitched battle with the enemy. The Arabian forces use stealth and mobility, tying down the Ottomans in a futile defence of their extended supply lines. In the first chapters of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence muses on contemporary military theory and its applicability, or lack thereof, to the situation in Arabia, foreshadowing the contrast between wars of position and wars of manoeuvre that we see developed a decade later by Antonio Gramsci. Compared to the masses of forces involved elsewhere in the war, the Arab forces are pitifully limited in number, ill-equipped and riven with internal tribal rivalries. Even within the Middle Eastern theatre of war, the Arab Revolt is a side-show to the main event, which is the British and French advance against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence himself is fully aware of this, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom never pretends the fight to be anything else.

Given Lawrence’s knowledge that the Revolt will only play a minor part on a secondary front within the Great War, his determination to claim victory is not based on the strategic value of his efforts, but a professed desire to help the Hashemite dynasty, in particular Crown Prince Faisal I, secure a truly independent Arab State. This is to be achieved through a combination of direct conquest of the lands to be incorporated into the putative Arab Kingdom, consolidating the variegated tribes into a single national body politic, and lending sufficient assistance to the British to gain standing as a reliable ally. It is this latter consideration that causes Lawrence no end of anguish, given his fears that Britain will in the end do what serves the Empire, even if it means reneging on its promises to its Arab allies. Time and again Lawrence returns to the feeling he is a traitor, engaged in a deception against the Arabian tribes whose fealty he is working to enlist for Faisal, and it is no surprise that on entering Damascus, victory tastes bitter to him.

Complex white saviour

Lawrence’s constant unease about the trustworthiness of his British superiors towards the Arab forces is only one part of the profound emotional turmoil that afflicts him, which means Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not the straightforward Orientalist white saviour narrative that I had come to expect. At a surface level, the Orientalism is definitely there, with a white man leading a motley collection of noble savages towards their destiny, i.e. a modern, European-style nation state. Below the surface however, Lawrence is aware that his leadership is less to do with the innate superiority of the white race, and more with his role as a conduit for British rifles, money and supplies for the Arab cause, as well as his status as a neutral outsider with no stake in the many inter-tribal rivalries flaring across a still divided Arabian peninsula. Significant parts of the book are devoted to Lawrence describing debilitating illnesses, fatigue and lack of endurance compared to his fellow guerrillas, even as his experience with desert warfare increases. Conversely, once he has adopted the indigenous ways of living with the desert, Lawrence can only gaze in bemusement on his compatriots who refuse to exchange their patently unsuitable khaki uniforms for the much more appropriate indigenous dress. Although he does not articulate this explicitly, one gets the sense that Lawrence is well aware that British supremacy is not due to the innate superiority of the white master race, but the result of being the ones holding the Vickers machine guns.

Not that this means the racism and Orientalism isn’t there. In keeping with Western sensibilities of the era, Lawrence cannot help but essentialise his Arab comrades, as well as every other people, including the English. It makes for a pervasive but also uncommitted and inconstant racism, with Lawrence readily pronouncing on the innate characteristics of the Arab race on one page, only to completely deviate from all of this in his detailed psychological profiles of the most prominent members of the Revolt or his most intimate companions. There is something intriguing about seeing the racist logic operate so openly on the page, with Lawrence unable to grasp how the immense diversity of personas and communities he describes directly contradicts the generalising tenets of his racist ideology. Time and again Lawrence will make sweeping pronouncements about Arabs, Turks, Indians or the French, only for these to immediately break down in his recounting of the actual people he meets. Even the Turks, who come in for most of Lawrence’s spite, are humanised when encountered as individuals, in particular the conscripts, prisoners of war, and the many casualties. His role in the Revolt makes Lawrence acutely aware of the great variety across the Arabian tribes he encounters, and while he is unable to divest himself of a belief in some inherent ‘desert culture’, the racism on display in Seven Pillars of Wisdom is of a completely different nature than our prevailing ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse, which lets Western leaders launder their realpolitik via some putative grand theory of history. The idea of unified ‘Christian’ and ‘Islamic’ cultural blocs will have seemed patently absurd to Lawrence, engaged as he was in enlisting the aid of Arab muslims against their Turkish overlords as part of a protracted European ‘civil war’.

Nor is it only his deep ambivalence over his role in the Revolt that causes Lawrence anguish. From his writing emerges a profile of a conflicted man profoundly repulsed by all things physical, most of all his own body, and hence with a deep-seated envy of people who inhabit their bodies with ease. Time and again Lawrence seems to seek bodily transcendence in the harshness of the desert, but this remains always beyond his reach. Neither is he intellectually confident, for while he is an educated man, he is not a trained soldier and therefore feels inferior to the military command in which he is embedded. If it were not for his duty to king, country and the Revolt, Lawrence might plausibly have taken the road of Frank Herbert’s [Dune Messiah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuneMessiah “Dune Messiah – Wikipedia”)_ and walked into the desert to disappear forever.

Imperial mandates

I cannot help but wonder to what degree the recurring episodes of self-loathing were retroactively amplified by the developments that followed the end of World War I. As Lawrence was writing his memoirs on return to England in the 1920s, the Arab state that he helped bring into being was destroyed in its infancy by French colonial forces, exercising their ‘mandate’ to Lebanon and Syria as agreed with Britain in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, of which Lawrence was probably already aware when fighting with his Arab irregulars. Only a few years later, Arabia is indeed unified, but not under the Hashemite dynasty of Faisal I, but under the rival house of Saud, again with connivance and support of the British. Within a decade of the conquest of Damascus, everything that Lawrence told his Arab comrades they were fighting for has been crushed, one way or another, by the European Powers, endorsed in this by the nascent League of Nations. It is the beginning of a long series of betrayals that endures to this day, which includes Mandate for Palestine, the Nakba, the Suez Crisis, the assassination of Iran’s Mossadegh and the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Iran, as well as the unwavering support for Israel’s military adventurism and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Seen in the light of the abject failure of the League of Nations to defend Arabian right to statehood in the 1920s, is it any wonder that the newly established Arab nations of the 1940s were disinclined to abide by a United Nations decree that the better half of Palestine was to be awarded to its recently arrived minority Jewish population?

Over a hundred years after its first publication, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is mainly interesting as a historical artefact that shows both the continuities and discontinuities of Western involvement in the Middle East. The British Empire has been eclipsed by the United States and its Israeli vassal as the primary imperial force, but the subordination of people’s right to self-determination to Western national interests remains. Direct colonial subjugation has disappeared, replaced by indirect economic control. And the racism is still there, but now grounded in Islamophobia rather than Orientalist essentialism. From the perspective of a family in Syria, Iran, or Palestine today, it must seem that everything changes so that everything can stay the same. The question is how many more white saviours they must suffer before they can take charge of their own destinies.

Notes & Suggestions

• An unavoidable comparison on reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom is with Frank Herbert’s Dune, for which it was a direct inspiration. In between the fighting and travelling, Lawrence gives a great deal of attention to the desert itself: the different compositions of sand and stone, the shape and topography, the sensation of various environments. Echoes of the desert, the Bedouin, and the outsider become leader can all be found in Dune. This essay offers an interesting discussion of the similarities, differences, and varying degrees of Orientalism in both books.
• Lawrence’s account of the exercise of imperial power is by its nature personal and small in scale. For an impersonal and macro-level account of how colonial policies readily sacrificed the lives of millions on the altar of imperial ambition, Late Victorian Holocausts gives a gruesome account of the catastrophic famines inflicted on European colonies in the 19th century as a consequence of their forcible integration into the global market.
• The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is the main British organisation campaigning to secure Palestinian rights and defend them against the ongoing occupation and genocide.

• Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9) by James S.A. Corey, 529p: I didn’t want it to end, but all good sagas must come to a close. We see what’s left of the Rocinante crew as fugitives, now joined by Teresa Duarte (daughter of the Laconian high consul, Winston Duarte). There is a lot going on as bizarre, physics-bending anomalies begin to manifest within the ring space, threatening the existence of humanity. It’s tense, and full of high stakes with interesting viewpoints from Colonel Tanaka and Elvi. I think it was a satisfying conclusion to the series even though it does not answer all the questions. Sometimes, knowing less is better.
• Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries #8) by Martha Wells, 256p: Another adventure with Murderbot. Very consistently good, delivering the usual cynical humor and inner monologues. To be honest, nothing in particular stood out to me, but it is still a solid comfort read.
• Cryoburn (Vorkosigan Saga (Publication Order) #14) by Lois McMaster Bujold, 345p: We get into cryogenics shenanigans and politics with Miles investigating a major “cryocorp” called WhiteChrys, on the distant planet of Kibou-daini. I enjoyed the three different POVs: Miles, his Armsman Roic, and a local boy called Jin Sato. We also get to see Raven, a cryo-revival specialist from the Durona Group who assisted in reviving Miles after his death on Jackson's Whole in a previous book. Another great book in the Vorkosigan saga, that brings me closer to finishing the series!

Post 14 of #Blaugust #readinglist #books #reading

22 August 2026

Ruba brought a copy of Turner's Last Sketchbook (published by Yale University Press London in 2024, a roughly 7x4.5 inch “facsimile of the last known intact sketchbook by J. M. W. Turner”) to coffee. Perfect before my upcoming travels. Amidst the mental clutter that has formed while getting ready to uproot everything again, here was the simple, powerful fact of a practice. On the move with only water and a few colors at hand, his eye hones relationships; between colors, forms and space, forms and material. All with a thinness of application that serves as a constant reminder to revere.

People continue to ask me for directions on the street. One today, six this month, and I would say upwards of thirty across this whole year. Is that an uncommon amount? Feels like it. Especially because I'm definitely not the person to ask.

20 August 2026

Skee Mask—Resort (2024)

I've made some progress on Foolish Earth Creatures this month, although most of that has been filling out chapter structures with placeholder text so there's nothing very interesting to show. Unless you find this kind of thing interesting:

One fun thing about writing a new kind of game is that you get to reinvent your whole work process! When I started writing Foolish Earth Creatures I went straight into writing first-draft text in order to get the hang of the game's 'voice', but now I've been working on the game for a while I don't need to do that. What I've settled on is to start by writing a bare-bones outline for each chapter with simple placeholder text, then to do progressively more detailed placeholder structures, then first-draft text, and eventually (although I haven't got to this stage yet) the final text. Right now I've got placeholder outlines for nearly the whole game, so I've decided to do the outlines for the last few chapters before I go back to writing the first drafts.

My placeholder writing got faster when I realised that I didn't need to think of solutions to the player's problems at this point, I can just put “[[Correct option]] / [[Incorrect option]]” and move on!

I should have the rest of the game's placeholder structure done in the next few days, and hopefully by next month's developer diary I should have most of a first draft.

PLACEHOLDER: Can our hero do the thing? Find out next month!

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Eyes on screens see with no sense of true scale The cosmos can be reduced to an inch The colors of reality made pale And all can be rearranged with a pinch Do you want to erode your will to live? Do you want to see without being seen? Do you want to waste what you have to give? All this and more can be found on the screen. Stop! Do you remember your childhood? When your mirror was your parents' faces, When the veil was thin, between you and Good, And love and hate not warped, public races? Go outside if you want to remember. Love on the scale of love, and no other.

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#poetry #sonnet

Thank you for reading! I greatly regret that I will most likely never be able to meet you in person and shake your hand, but perhaps we can virtually shake hands via my newsletter, social media, or a cup of coffee sent over the wire. They are poor substitutes, but they can be a real grace in this intractable world.

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