Paul Spencer Sochaczewski's Blog

  Happy Birthday Thomas Barbour     When writing about historical characters, scholars search letters, journals, media accounts, and personal memories for the holy grail that “proves” a speculation about events and motivations. From these sources, historians then evaluate and triangulate until, like Miss Marple, they reach a satisfactory solution to the puzzle. (Or as […]

  Happy World Rainforest Day – June 22   Rema and Olivia were like pit bulls that refused to let go of the prey in their mouths. Few things are as hard to dislodge as a belief that you have repeated to yourself over and over.  The psychologists call this embedment.  When we invest energy […]

  Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird Intro to a speculative biography of Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace’s assistant in the Malay Archipelago       Consider Alfred Russel Wallace’s iconic hero’s journeys, exceptional even by the standards of other intrepid 19th-century British explorers. In 1848, Wallace and his friend Herbert Walter Bates said, in […]

  Lightning Teeth Help Win a Lover’s Heart and Guarantee an Election Victory An isolated Philippines island has cornered the market on love potions and magical healing.   SAN ANTONIO, Siquijor Island, The Philippines What a wonderful world we live in, I thought. For just ten dollars I could buy a small bottle crammed with […]

Alfred Russel Wallace is best known for his scientific achievements — collecting and documenting hundreds of new species of “natural productions,” major insights into biogeography, island endemism, and cultural anthropology, and notably, his development of a theory of evolution by natural selection independently of and prior to that of Charles Darwin.  But Wallace was also […]

  THE ALMOST LAST SHAMAN It’s been a good ride, but Borneo healer doesn’t expect many others to follow his path.    SERUBAH ULU, Sarawak, Malaysia  To the untrained eye he seems an unlikely magician.  Frail, but with a hundred-watt smile. He has two wispy whiskers, short grey hair, and he walks a bit slowly.  […]

There are worse travel strategies than to visit places with evocative names.

There’s Timbuktu, Congo, and Okavango in Africa; and Salvador de Bahia, Darien, and Patagonia in Latin America, names which purr with history and poetry. 

But Asia’s resonant place names beckon to me above all others.  There’s Sumatra, Java, and Borneo; Malacca, Vientiane, and Makassar; Kelantan, Kathmandu, and Ayudhya.  Not to mention the rivers: Ganges and Yangtze, Mahakam and Mekong. And the one I was headed towards: Ayeyarwady.

My destination was Katha, a small town on the  Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, which has achieved a modicum of recognition.  It was here, between 1926 and 1927, that a British policeman named Eric Blair spent six months as one of 90 British police officers in Burma.  Eric Blair, who subsequently took the pen name George Orwell, based his 1934 novel Burmese Days on a fictionalized version of Katha that he dubbed Kyauktada (which is derived from the name of a district in Rangoon). 

Quests is a volume of 24 personal adventures pursued over more than 50 years— at times obscure, long-gestating, sentimental, and ridiculous.

Quests don’t have to be cinematic or physical. A quest might be as seemingly low-key as getting a degree, eating escargots in Paris, learning a language, or mastering the art of making puff pastry.

I will never climb K2 or windsurf across the Atlantic. I don’t intend to attempt to “discover” an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, locate the source of the Nile, or find the Holy Grail.

I’d like to know what quests you’ve chosen. Big or small? Distant or close to home? Did you achieve your goal? If not, does it matter?

My uncle and aunt’s love affair illustrates the challenges of trying to decipher a relationship.

How could I not love an uncle who, when he babysat me, let me stay up well past my bedtime to watch wrestling (Antonino Rocca was my favorite) and horror movies (Boris Karloff’s The Mummy was the scariest)? How could I not love an uncle who lived in the middle of Greenwich Village, who took me to my first Broadway show, who tried to disprove Einstein? How could I not love an uncle who invented a slew of often-useless gadgets, and who chastised major corporations for their lousy ad campaigns — and then offered them new campaigns that were hardly better? How could I not love an uncle who married a wannabe Romanian noble and bought a farm in the middle of the Adirondack mountains because it resembled his wife’s native Transylvania?

Uncle Joe Rubin died of colon cancer in 1960 when I was 13. I was at an age when I was particularly incurious about life’s complexities and more than a little spooked by having a close family member wither away in our spare room.

Consider the great cultural and religious myths — the Mahabharata, Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Faust, the Divine Comedy, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, the Odyssey, the Ring cycle — which feature a hero (I’m using the term to encompass men and women) who undertakes a journey to uncover a mystery, right a wrong, seek fame or fortune or happiness.

Now think of the classic films — Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Die Hard, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind — which explore similar “searching-for” dynamics.

Philosopher Joseph Campbell called these archetypal scenarios the Hero’s Journey. And I suggest they are as important to you and me as they are to Luke Skywalker or Dorothy from Kansas.