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Man Without a Country
| Article
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18364 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
3,211 Words |
| Author
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Patricia Summerside
Patricia Summerside is a free-lance writer living in Pierre,
South Dakota. Her articles on social issues have appeared in
several national periodicals. |
THE SADDEST PLEASURE
A Journey on Two Rivers
Moritz Thomsen
St. Paul, Graywolf Press, 1990
276 pp., $9.95
In 1965 Moritz Thomsen and I joined the Peace Corps. In its wisdom it sent him to a Montana mountain valley to prepare for life in the Ecuadorean jungle, and me to Columbia Teachers College to prepare for rural Kenya. These experiences seemed irrelevant, but we did learn to expect the unexpected.
Years later, I met Thomsen by reading Living Poor. It made me realize how sheltered my own experience in Kenya had been, despite chalking up the usual experiences with local government corruption, illnesses such as malaria and dysentery, and the absence of electricity and hot water. But teaching high school in Kenya was a situation that had visible progress built right into it. Unless you were grossly incompetent, you couldn't lose.
Thomsen was thrown into a situation with the odds stacked the other way. The tale of his struggle to bring peace and prosperity to the village of Rioverde, recounted with humor, candor, and compassion, made Living Poor a minor classic.
These qualities, augmented by greater reflective depth, are again apparent in The Saddest Pleasure. Like most of us in the Peace Corps of the sixties, Thomsen had drunk deeply of that decade's idealism. Unlike most of us, he was already in his forties by then. And unlike most of us, he never returned to the world of middle-class comfort.
Instead, he settled in Ecuador to farm with an Ecuadoran partner. His goals were to develop that Ecuadoran's obvious potential and to make a life of simple decency that other Ecuadorans could emulate. Thus Thomsen's life gives us a rare example of someone living sixties ideals consistently enough and long enough to genuinely test them.
In Saddest Pleasure, Thomsen assesses that life. He retains many of his sixties ideals and, holding up his life against that back-drop, finds it wanting. I, on the other hand, judging his unconventional life by the traditional values to which I have reverted, judge that life a success. The irony of this would probably not be lost on
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