Aidan Hartley

“Lizzie and I arrived in the polluted heat of a London summer. We stood frozen at street corners as a blur of pedestrians burst out of the subways and spilled like ants down the pavements. The crowed bars, the expensive shops, the fashionable clothes - to me it all seemed a population rushing about to no avail...I stared at a huge poster of a woman in her underwear staring down at her own breasts. HELLO BOYS, she said. At the movies we witnessed sickening violence, except that this time we held tubs of popcorn between our legs and the gunfire and screams were broadcast in digital Dolby. We had escaped a skull on a battlefield, only to arrive in London, where office workers led lines of such tedium and plenty that they had to entertain themselves with all the f****** and killing on the big screen. So here then was the prosperous, democratic and civilized Western world. A place of washing machines, reality TV, Armani, frequent-flier miles, mortgages. And this is what the Africans are supposed to hope for, if they're lucky.”
― Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands

“We throw ourselves into the journey and when it's done, even while having learned that all experience involves the loss of something beloved, what is ledt in the residue of memory is love.”
― Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands