Quotations from the introduction to the second edition of *Under Western Eyes*
Joseph Conrad
1857-1924 Polish/British

Truth alone is the justification of any fiction which can make the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time.
—Joseph Conrad, the introduction to the second edition of Under Western Eyes

The most terrifying reflection (I am speaking now for myself) is that all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the general—of the normality of their place, and time, and race. The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names.
—Joseph Conrad, the introduction to the second edition of Under Western Eyes

Quotations from “The Emptied Prairie”
*National Geographic* magazine, 2008 January
Charles Bowden
1945- American

A torn page from a textbook flutters in the breeze from a broken window in the Gascoyne school. The lesson reads: “Write the Other Word for CRY, AFTER, BAD, ALWAYS, GOOD-BY, LOST, and DARK.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Ghost towns stud North Dakota, and this empty house is just one bone in a giant skeleton of abandoned human desire.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

Bjella explains the man walked the tracks each day for the two miles into town, did this year after year. One day he apparently did not hear the train and was killed. Bjella pauses, lets the tale float almost weightlessly in the air with its whisper of suicide. Self-destruction is not a forbidden subject in North Dakota, and people easily tick off cases in their neighborhoods. One woman came across a death book compiled in the early decades of the 20th century. She says the records show a remarkable number of people killed by trains.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He’s looked through his granddad’s diary from 1908 and notes, “a lot of the entries are about wind.”

“There were a lot of suicides,” he says.
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

He and his brothers and his late friend Oscar all served in World War II. Every winter he’d go by Oscar’s and say, “Well, do you remember how you were years ago at this time?” and Oscar would always answer, “Cold.”
—Charles Bowden, “The Emptied Prairie”

You know I sit here alone for six months at a time, nobody comes to see me. I’ve outlived them all.
—Ragnar Slaaen, in “The Emptied Prairie” by Charles Bowden

Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 1 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

The German physician and literary critic A. L. Vischer has investigated the parallel relationship that exists between a man’s total personality and his relationship to death. “Simple, uncomplicated souls,” he writes, “who do not attach such great importance to their own life, are able to accept their illness, because they accept their fate: life and heart have done their work, time for them to go. By contrast, successful and self-assured people are usually at a complete loss when faced with the reality of physical collapse.”
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

...the thought that he must die harassed him almost to the point of insanity. The very rationality of death became for him the most irrational thing of all.... He felt he could not live if there was death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

“Take the saving lie from the average man and you take his happiness away,” said Ibsen. The biggest saving lie is to accept a friend’s death and not one’s own.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy was highly experienced in death, and from childhood onward his diaries, letters, and books reveal how much it intrigued him. His death “notes” range from the detailed studies he made of slaughter on the battlefield to an execution in Paris, from the animallike acceptance of death by the muzhiks on his estates to the greatly varying reactions he had to the many deaths in his own family.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

With all but two exceptions, those surrounding Ivan Ilyich at his end feel sorry for him, “but not very.” Sorrow is a formality and he himself knows it. Nearly everything in his life has been a formality—his outlook, his marriage, his work, and his hopes—and he is hurt but not surprised by the conventional reaction to his tragedy.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

There is the appalling possibility that the “I” upon whom this whole world of intimate impressions depends will soon have to face its absolute annihilation. The sun will rise as before, and the winds will blow as before. People will talk of the weather in the same tone. The postman will knock as did just now and the letters will fall on the mat. But he won’t be there. He, our pivot and the center of everything, will be nowhere at all.
—John Cowper Powys, in an introduction by Ronald Blythe to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 2 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

Maeterlinck was amazed by the crudeness of Western man’s thought when it came to the subject of his own death. The fatuity and shallowness of man’s philosophy appalled him. “We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct,” he writes in La Morte, “and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous, remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power we never look in the face? To fathom its abysses we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of life arrive.”
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

How should I fear death? When I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not.
—Epicurus, in an introduction by Ronald Blythe to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Present trends are to make us conscious of death as a mass social tragedy which, by means of compassion, economics, improved medicine, and the like, can be conquered. Multiple death in wars, famines, epidemics, accidents—even as a statistic issued by the anti-smoke and drink lobbies—is shown as not incurable, and talk of this death sends no shiver down the individual spine.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Ilyich’s gray tragedy is that of a man who debased life and who tried to fight off death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

What did you do with this divine asset, Life? demands Tolstoy. You made no attempt to live it outside the meanest terms. You played safe according to the most selfish rules. You took care to see that everything you did was done with “clean hands, in clean shirts, and with French phrases.” You never put a foot wrong and so you never stepped out of your rut. Your life has been “most simple and commonplace—and most horrifying.” The bleak indictment continues with Ivan Ilyich’s opportunism, marriage of convenience, vanity, and limitation, and then, with astonishment, the reader finds himself beginning to like this conventional man and to be sorry when he starts to lose out to death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

...we are sympathizing with ourselves and all the little hopes and aspirations we have; aspirations which are so despicable or laughable when put into our dossier or official record but which are so precious to us.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 3 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

It was an experiment that was eventually to lead him to excommunication as well as to the meaning of death, pain, and the conflict between loving life and having to accept that it was temporal.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Below him lies a spinning darkness. Agony is created by those above accepting the situation, by even being rational about it. A nonidentifying process has moved across their usual view of him like a filter, and already, with the breath still in him, he is outside their comprehension. One of Tolstoy’s themes is about the inability of the dying to communicate and of the sick to remain inside the old circles of relationships. The very first hint that Ivan Ilyich is poorly begins the pushing-out business, as wife, children, and colleagues prepare to live in a world that will no longer contain him. Self-interest reigns. Gain runs parallel with loss. It is a busy period for everyone and there really isn’t much time for being sad. Afterward, when he has slipped from the ledge and out of sight, empty words are politely muttered in the empty space he has left. There is coarse honesty when the dead man’s friend takes the opportunity to set up a game of whist while viewing the corpse. The widow acts out the grief she is supposed to feel and receives the condolences of those who are not sorry. It is finished—a life that proved to have no meaning for anyone except he who possessed it and who parted with it with fear and incredulity.

Ivan Ilyich is the climax of Tolstoy’s death writing. It also acted as the purgative to his own extreme death fears which reached their crescendo during a visit he made to the town of Arzamas. The incident is crucial to Tolstoy’s obsessional fascination with death in all its variety. Shortly after the publication of War and Peace, when his body had never felt more vigorous or his mind more active, with praise and success ringing in his ears, and when his life should have been bursting with a sense of well-being, he fell into a deep despair that took the form of being irreconcilably opposed to the inevitability of his own death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The trip began happily enough, then the frightfulness started to return, dogging his footsteps, catching up with him just when Sergey’s cheerfulness and goodness promised protection. Saying nothing to the boy, Tolstoy took a room at the inn at Arzamas, and there the classic existentialist nightmare overwhelmed him. The room was death and he was in it. “I was particularly disturbed by the fact that it was square,” he wrote. It was full of torment and the torment was irrevocable. What was in the room with him had to be—this was the delirium of it. There was no escape, no way out—or in, if it came to that. He was. Death was.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Quotations

The United States of America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play a great part in the world. It must play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.
—Theodore Roosevelt, in The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

It is a complex fate to be an American.
—Henry James

We are all Americans.
—Jean-Marie Colombani, in Le Monde

Quotations from *Into the Wild*, 1 of 3
Jon Krakauer
1954- American

I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
—Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness, in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

It should not be denied ... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west.
—Wallace Stegner, The American West As Living Space, in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
—Alexander Supertramp (Christopher McCandless), in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Quotations from *Into the Wild*, 2 of 3
Jon Krakauer
1954- American

It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.
—Theodore Roszak, “In Search of the Miraculous,” in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

“Everett was strange,” Sleight concedes. “Kind of different. But him and McCandless, at least they tried to follow their dream. That’s what was great about them. They tried. Not many do.”
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Early in his senior year at Woodson, Chris informed his parents that he had no intention of going to college. When Walt and Billie suggested that he needed a college degree to attain a fulfilling career, Chris answered that careers were demeaning “twentieth-century inventions,” more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

It took me a few hours to clear my tools and other belongings out of the crummy job-site trailer where I’d been squatting. And then I climbed into my car and departed for Alaska. I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Quotations from *Into the Wild*, 3 of 3
Jon Krakauer
1954- American

For two days I slogged steadily up the valley of ice. The weather was good, the route obvious and without major obstacles. Because I was alone, however, even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker. To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Roman’s observation underscores how difficult it is for those of us preoccupied with the humdrum concerns of adulthood to recall how forcefully we were once buffeted by the passions and longings of youth. As Everett Ruess’s father mused years after his twenty-year-old son vanished in the desert, “The older person does not realize the soul-flights of the adolescent. I think we all poorly understood Everett.”
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

It is not merely the young, of course, who are drawn to hazardous undertakings. John Muir is remembered primarily as a no-nonsense conservationist and the founding president of the Sierra Club, but he was also a bold adventurer, a fearless scrambler of peaks, glaciers, and waterfalls whose best-known essay includes a riveting account of nearly falling to his death, in 1872, while ascending California’s Mt. Ritter. In another essay Muir rapturously describes riding out a ferocious Sierra gale, by choice, in the uppermost branches of a one-hundred-foot Douglas fir:

“[N]ever before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.”

He was thirty-six years old at the time.
—Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm, in Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

Quotations from *Young Men and Fire*, 1 of 2
Norman Maclean
1902-1990 American

In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Yet we should also go on wondering if there is not some shape, form, design as of artistry in this universe we are entering that is composed of catastrophes and missing parts.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

His whole flight to the ground takes an average of only a minute. This minute is about the only moment a Smokejumper is ever alone, and it is one of the most lonely moments in his life... Nothing is there except the jumper and his equipment made by the lowest bidder, and he himself has thinned out to the vanishing point of being only decisions once made that he can’t do anything about ever after.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

They were young and did not leave much behind them and need someone to remember them.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Quotations from *Young Men and Fire*, 2 of 2
Norman Maclean
1902-1990 American

He had been sick and had been advised to drop his full-time duties and retire to California, but not wanting to live in California he had hunted around until he found a doctor who told him California would be bad for his health. In Montana there are two kinds of doctors—those who tell you you should move to California for your health and those you tell you that you will die if you do; so Brackebusch didn’t have to hunt long to get the advice he wanted.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Long ago a science teacher told me, “The universe, she is a bitch.”
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

There is always time lost just in the mechanics of turning a crew around and getting it started in another direction. But the greatest loss was the loss that came in morale and organization in turning a crew around and retreating from the fire. The training schedule of Smokejumpers includes no class on how to run from a fire as fast as possible.

The fire was having no organizational problems. It was gaining speed all the time.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

You can see tragedy coming from a considerable distance when you are older, but when you are young tragedy does not pertain to you and certainly never catches up to you. There are pieces of premonitions of tragedy floating around, but they do not yet add up to your tragedy. There are separate stabs of fear, of pity, of self-pity, but to a degree in separate parts of the body. Then suddenly they all merge into one sense, the encompassing sense of inevitability.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

To project ourselves into their final thoughts will require feelings about a special kind of death—the sudden death in fire of the young, elite, unfulfilled, and seemingly unconquerable. As the elite of young men, they felt more surely than most who are young that they were immortal. So if we are to feel with them, we must feel that we are set apart from the rest of the universe and safe from fires, all of which are expected to be put out by ten o’clock the morning after Smokejumpers are dropped on them.
—Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Quotations

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber, Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 1 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

The country has developed quickly since 1921, when the revolutionary leader Sukhe Bator rode into Mongolia with a Soviet Red Army back-up. From that date the country has embraced Communism, and in doing so has necessitated a rewrite of the Marxist-Leninist textbooks, because the pre-revolutionary country had never left the ‘feudal’ state. Thus, the phrase that lingers on the tip of every Mongolian interpreter was born: Mongolia had ‘bypassed capitalism’. It is this rapid shift from old to new that gives today’s Mongolia its mystical air as a sort of People’s Republic of Shangri-La.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Just outside the airport a Chinese-looking gateway straddles the road and the Cyrillic script on the large hoarding beside it proclaims the entrance to the city. But as we drove through the arch the view all around was the same one of grassy treeless hills with not a soul in sight.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

I opened the windows, double frames against the bitter continental winter, and surveyed the city. Across the park outside the hotel the valley hills were fading fast at the end of the day. The neon sign on the building opposite flickered into life. In my Western ignorance I imagined it to be advertising a shop. Later I discovered it said: ‘Let’s make our capital a good socialist city.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Mongolia is waking up from its long history of domination by foreign powers. It is probably fair to say that today the country is looking forward to a future which will be more autonomous than at any time in the seven centuries since Genghis Khan, their national hero who has been resurrected from a shady Communist past, to be revered once more as a symbol of truly Mongolian independence.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The declaration of Mongolia’s independence in 1911 had encountered a problem: it was ignored.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 2 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

Her eyes wandered back to the screen of a television set on the other side of the landing. It was surrounded by a dozen or so students, all in track suits and all from North Korea. They were engrossed in what I assumed to be a comedy programme, judging from the laughter and chuckles coming from their ranks. I followed the floor hostess’s gaze and looked at the TV set. The programme was showing graphic footage of a seal cull in the Arctic.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘Listen to this for a reasoned explanation of why the socialists did away with the Mongolian alphabet: “In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.”

‘Life demonstrated the expediency?’ I repeated.

‘Sure,’ replied Bulcsu. ‘What he means is that if you didn’t change to Cyrillic they shot you. Really very simple.’

We both laughed but Bulcsu had not been joking.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

We chatted in English about the Russian influence in Mongolia. Norbu told us he could take us to see the Russian military camp, tucked away up a side valley, and there was a gold mine on the outskirts of Ulan Bator from which the refined gold was flown out to the Soviet Union every night on a special jet.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

To say that Mongolian Buddhism has taken a bit of a pasting in the years after the Revolution is an understatement: it was almost totally annihilated.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘...The march of time would sort everything out. Once the Revolution had taken place, once Communist parties were in power, once collectivisation had been accomplished, once the means of production were in the hands of the self-appointed representatives of the people, then religion would disappear of its own accord. The fact that this train of events simply didn’t happen threw the Communists into disarray. Their reaction to the obvious failure of their ideology was predictable. They couldn’t admit failure, so they resorted to violence.’

‘Reach for the revolver,’ I chipped in.

‘Well, reach for the armoured cars, the high explosives and the entire Soviet Army if necessary, more like,’ Bulcsu replied. ‘Of course the Mongolians never acted without good advice from Moscow, but the ultimate fate of Buddhism in Mongolia was sealed because the theory that said it would disappear was wrong, and yet it had to be proved right.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 3 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

All governments are guilty of double standards, but Mongolia was the first country I had seen in any detail where the contradictions of the Soviet system were quite so evident. While the Soviet Union had long championed the cause of anti-Imperialism, and had for decades been issuing venomous statements about the West’s exploitation of their empires, here in Mongolia they had quietly been doing exactly the same thing for the past sixty-nine years.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

For Russian advisers and their families a brand of Soviet apartheid was in force. They lived in separate housing blocks with their own shops, stocked with ‘riches’ unavailable to the average Mongolian. These shops had guards on the door who scrutinized passes before allowing entry. The Russians also had their own bus system, always much less crowded than their Mongolian counterparts, and the wages paid to the Russian advisers were greater than those paid to Mongolians in similar positions.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

While the Central Committee in Ulan Bator could hail the founding of some 400 collectives throughout the country in just two years as a great victory for socialism, in reality the boast meant little more than a collapse of herding, the country’s main source of wealth. By 1932 socialism’s victory had cost Mongolia seven million beasts, or roughly one-third of the national herd. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ had turned into a crippled backward somersault.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The so-called ‘New Turn’ that followed in the second half of the 1930s saw a complete about-face with regard to agriculture. All the collectives were dismantled and private herds were encouraged in a desperate attempt to save the country from disaster.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

When the Revolution came in 1921, Mongolia had few if any of the symptoms of a society ready for development along Marxist lines. ‘It was the antithesis of the industrial society in which the proletariat would be the vanguard of the revolution,’ comments one Western historian of the country’s affairs. Whereas on paper Marxist development should be ignited by a working class revolt, Mongolia bucked the system by not having a working class to do the revolting.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 4 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

When they had finished their lunch the two pilots left abruptly and hurried across the dusty courtyard to a couple of aircraft that had just been refuelled by a man with a lighted cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

How could it possibly be, I wondered, that the Soviet Union, which was responsible for all this, had managed to send manned rockets into space?
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Jim was a Scotsman, whose job it was to get the first satellite ground station installed. He was a sort of telecommunications troubleshooter, who sat at home in Milton Keynes waiting for the phone to ring and tell him where he was off to next. He thought Mongolia was about the weirdest place he had been in, and Jim had been in a few weird places which he was apt to tell you about.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

The trouble here was that hard currency did not buy a lot. No currency did. There simply was not much available in Mongolia.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

These tantric practices were accepted without much comment by the practitioners of the dominant religion of the time, Shamanism. Shamans were a laidback pantheistic lot who simply interpreted these new Buddhist deities as special manifestations of Shamanic gods.

The net effects of the two approaches were very similar. Both aimed to put the practitioner in touch with the gods by inducing a state of trance. The Shamanic path to assimilation with a deity was usually to get high on hallucinogens whereas the Buddhist reached the same state through meditation and reciting holy texts.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 5 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

I told her that the British Embassy in Ulan Bator seemed to do very little as far as I could see. Four men and their wives to look after British interests in Mongolia? What British interests?
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

So while Lamujab carried on, the rest of us all lined up across the railway track and ceremoniously pissed in the direction of the Soviet Union.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Lamujab was looking noticeably less perplexed and may even have been enjoying herself. She asked Bulcsu and me continual questions about life in the West. What sort of food we ate, how big our flats were, which type of books did we like reading, did we travel about in England, what did the countryside look like, and what about the shops. But each one of our answers seemed to drive another nail into the coffin of her life in Mongolia, although we were trying hard to give her as unglossy an account as possible.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Three years later when I returned to Ulan Bator, the discotheque had been closed down and the party was over. In Moscow President Gorbachev was gallantly trying to dismantle the beast that had emerged from the ideological test-tube some seventy years before. In Ulan Bator the disco-dancing advisers were packing their bags and heading for home. For them it was truly the last disco in Outer Mongolia.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Behind us the Gobi plains were laid out flat and dark like the ocean.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Quotations from *The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia*, 6 of 6
Nick Middleton
British

Snow leopards are internationally endangered as a species. No one really knows how many there are lurking in the mountains of the Gobi-Altai and Khangai ranges, but it is feared that their numbers are declining to the point of no return. They are magnificent creatures, with tails up to three feet long. Mongolia lost a good deal of sympathy in the international conservation world in the mid-1980s when a BBC correspondent from Beijing interviewed the then Environment Minister, who rather proudly declared that anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare could come to Mongolia and shoot a snow leopard.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

A camel, pulling a cart, ambled by en route from nowhere to nowhere else as we entered the small hotel building.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

‘...The Shah of Iran also enjoyed hunting in Mongolia formerly. His son who was in the army died here in a hunting accident. They made up another story to explain his death, but he fell from his horse and broke his head.’
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Mongolia is a big noise in the dinosaur world. Back in the 1920s a young curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York led several very large scientific expeditions to the Mongolian Gobi Desert. His name was Roy Chapman Andrews. He was an explorer and a scientist, a man of bluff, bravado and drawn guns, the only approach possible in a land of nomads and brigands which had just come under Soviet control after a decade of uncertainty ruled by characters such as the Bloody Baron.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia

Many of the show trials were admitted to have been just that, and a number of the offenders were slowly revealed to be victims of unfortunate events. But that was as far as that first re-examination of the time went. The fact that Choilbalsan was responsible for exterminating fellow Mongolians, most of whom were members of Mongolia’s inadequate reserve of educated and experienced men, was not dwelt on. It is still one of the extraordinary enigmas of modern Mongolian history that an underdeveloped country could rip itself apart in the service of an imported ideology, supporting its brutality with wholly fabricated evidence, and continue the self-deception until the political climate in another country allowed it to begin a partial refurbishment of the truth.
—Nick Middleton, The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia