In the days before internet, roaming South America with a backpackful of curiosity and doubt, I met two other soulful explorers high in the Peruvian Andes. Over the following weeks, we shared trials, delights and other lessons of travelling and became firm friends. Thirty-seven years later, Ian sent me this travelogue and the past stirred in me once more.
 
The journey is through Chile. I recalled a particular image here and there, “the varnished curve of Brian’s closed, upper birth” on the Tamuco to Santiago train, although I was sick by then and my memory preserves few clear moments of that country.
 
Ian’s intention was, I know, more to evoke the lands that we knew together, Peru and Bolivia. The impressions that remain, the heaving first gear of the bus engines, the acrid stench of rotting produce in the streets, the silent faces in a village at dawn, the unknowable land stretching away. He also reminds me how fellow travellers can have quite different experiences of the same events. And how much does the self we know match the person our friends see?
 
The powerful background to Keenan and McCarthy’s trek is the infamous and long incarceration that they endured together in Beirut under Islamic Jihadists. One of the fabulous stories they told, to keep the flame of hope alive, was that they would farm yaks in Patagonia. In 1995, five years after their release, they met again to make their trip of discovery, not to find a farm in earnest, but to travel as liberated men, to meet the vast and varying wildness head on and fulfil a karmic promise.
 
I don’t know why the Sunday Times described the book as “funny” (as if an account of travels has to be amusing or it’s not worth the bother). It’s more interesting than that. From the desert of Arica to the other desolation at Puerto Williams in Tierra del Fuego, the book is written in tandem, one man’s diary entry followed by the other’s. The more laidback Keenan has Neruda and the revolutionary O’Higgins as his spiritual guides. McCarthy is the detailed organizer. In the end, for all that their personalities and interpretations differ, it is interesting how much they coincide. Both think that their way is for the best and, with their differences and similarities, an arduous odyssey pushes onward. They are mature enough, their friendship more than deep enough to see it through, even if “the profound need for mutual support we had in Beirut is not now so vital.”
 
What they don’t do is dwell on their years of terrible imprisonment in a tiny cell. They hardly ever refer to it. But the reader knows. Their journals are characterized by a poetic worldliness that they both have. Keenan is imaginative and lyrical, McCarthy equally insightful and also, when the mood takes him, elegantly poetic also.

In 1972, the term “near-death experience” was unheard of. When a six-year-old Belgian girl nearly drowned in a lake and attempted to explain where she had gone and what she had seen, the adults dismissed it as childish nonsense.
 
That might have an end to the story, but then Maryse came close to death again: and again, many times over. She had been born with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome which caused her heart to stop without warning. This occurred twice a week on average over a period of 25 years and each time, she would enter a magical, timeless world of living colours, where she soared and pulsated with their loving vibrations. And each time, her heart would kick back in at a terrifying speed and she would be back and breathing again.
 
It made her into an apprehensive, misunderstood child and a vulnerable adult until, at the age of 31, a surgeon finally diagnosed her condition and cured her heart. She was now physically well, but her secret world, the one that meant so much to her, was lost. A long, dark depression followed until she at last emerged through the medium of painting, had life-changing experiences with a dolphin and native people in Australia, and then discovered the practice of Vedic Art, which she now teaches in order to bring out the creative life force in others. She is also an accomplished artist in her own right.
 
Maryse has never made a fuss of her near-death experiences—a quick calculation tells you there were about 2,500 of them—partly out of modesty, mostly because she is focussed on the present and her work, but what she learned in these epiphanies and in dream visions underlies all her teaching and makes for a very interesting and readable autobiography.
 
The drama of Maryse Alen’s story is that much more effective for the simple, direct style in which it is written.
 
The Colours of Freedom is published as an ebook and illustrated with 21 reproductions of Maryse’s paintings, which she made at crucial life moments to accompany and help her make sense of them. Flemish/Dutch readers can also buy the physical book.

At my mountain cottage, I can go days without seeing another soul and then my relating is with the trees, the butterflies and the warm wind. I will say hello to a lizard and scoop insects from the pool. I never feel truly alone. I can walk to villages and visit a friendly bar and see people whenever I want.
 
What struck me when I read Annie Dillard’s book was how committed she was to her solitary experiential exploration in the Virginia mountains. It was back in the 1970s. She was only 28 and she devoted an entire year of her young life to venturing out on her own from a cabin in the foothills, to the creek and its river and beyond, in a very particular quest. I admired the courage of her perseverance in observing and witnessing the local wildlands, and the intelligence of her reflections. Her book of meditative philosophy in natural surroundings is said to be in the tradition of Thoreau. I never read his “Walden”, but it sounds like they belong next to each other on the shelf.
 
“What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to its object.”
 
Annie is clearly desirous of opening her eyes to the glory of creation in all its brutal manifestation and, perhaps, being vouchsafed a kind of revelation by virtue of the very intensity of her scrutiny. Or, failing that, by means of stalking and creeping up on a secret vision or rapture.
 
She has no social existence here and something of the self-denial of a nun. Annie Dillard herself insisted that she was no naturalist. The intent is more theosophical and self-aware. If she draws any conclusion, it seems to be that the cruelty of nature is not evil, but simply mindless. She wishes to vindicate the world she sees and its fascination.
 
There is a tendency to grandiloquence in her prose, and then instead of being lucid it can be too rich, the style too prodigious, but never excessively so. The tone is always gentle and the portrayal captivating.
 
“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”

It’s all down to that first-person narration: Paula, in her head, in her hellhole of a marriage, in her Dublin vernacular.
 
Because she knows how to tell her story, straight out, it’s incredibly alive with undiluted truth and emotion and pain even as she jokes about it.
 
“Something had gone wrong.
I fell.
I’d been too near him; he hadn’t realised.
He’d only been warning me.
He didn’t know his own strength.
He had things on his mind.
Anything.
It wouldn’t happen again. Anything. It wouldn’t happen again. How could it? It had been a mistake. We’d laugh about it later.”
 
This is domestic physical and emotional abuse. This is exactly how it happens, what it looks like and how it feels. Paula is too emotionally invested, too scared, too bewildered to leave Charlo. There are no safeguards in these suburbs and so she takes it, again and again. 
 
This, too, is alcoholism: how it happens, what it looks like... When she goes to the shed and necks the wine, it is a killer of a description.
 
Brutally eloquent, pitch black with humour, brilliantly written. Hats off to Roddy Doyle. He doesn’t know it (or me), but I have a double connection with him, via Fighting Words and Fish Publishing.