It was in a used bookstore off Shats Street that I found a spectacular section of old Jerusalem books occupying three or four of their own little shelves. Coated in that lovely worn smell, tucked away in a hidden basement nook, I was introduced to W. H. Bartlett and Karl Baedeker, two 19th century British travelers who compiled guides from their trips to the Holy Land. Their common names are bound to be lost if not quite lost already to the long passages of time.
I never read the travelogues of today, the Lonely Planet reference guides that every backpacker clutches like a Bible across the world's main thoroughfares and monuments. I always find them a nuisance, like cell phones, keeping eyes glued to a screen rather than the foreign views and escapades going on around you, which themselves offer far more insight. However flipping through these pages, looking at outdated maps, it provided some fascinating perspective on the Old City just outside my door, a bridge between different times. There is no mistaking, then or now, that elation one feels rising up over the Judean hills knowing Jerusalem itself is near, and that soon you'll be seeing it for the first time.
"We pursued our way along the wild and stony path - an hour yet remained - one of strange and indescribable excitement. I had stood alone within the awful circle of the Coliseum, when faintly touched by the light of the rising moon, and had watching the lunar rainbow spanning the eternal foam which rises from the base of Niagara; but this nocturnal approach to the ancient capitol of Judea, across her bleak and desolate hills, awoke a more sublimed thrilling emotion. The walls of that city, the scene of events which must ever remain the most touching in their influence upon the human heart, which I had so long and earnestly hoped to see, were, after one disappointment, at length at hand."
I never read the travelogues of today, the Lonely Planet reference guides that every backpacker clutches like a Bible across the world's main thoroughfares and monuments. I always find them a nuisance, like cell phones, keeping eyes glued to a screen rather than the foreign views and escapades going on around you, which themselves offer far more insight. However flipping through these pages, looking at outdated maps, it provided some fascinating perspective on the Old City just outside my door, a bridge between different times. There is no mistaking, then or now, that elation one feels rising up over the Judean hills knowing Jerusalem itself is near, and that soon you'll be seeing it for the first time.
"We pursued our way along the wild and stony path - an hour yet remained - one of strange and indescribable excitement. I had stood alone within the awful circle of the Coliseum, when faintly touched by the light of the rising moon, and had watching the lunar rainbow spanning the eternal foam which rises from the base of Niagara; but this nocturnal approach to the ancient capitol of Judea, across her bleak and desolate hills, awoke a more sublimed thrilling emotion. The walls of that city, the scene of events which must ever remain the most touching in their influence upon the human heart, which I had so long and earnestly hoped to see, were, after one disappointment, at length at hand."
A few days before in Tel Aviv, an old Jewish woman who ran a lovely little poster shop sold me a tourism magnet from the 1930s exclaiming, "Visit Palestine!" It raised a few questions about territory, politics, and this whole 3000 year old situation, which she was more than happy to oblige. "It's complicated," she said, "and I just want peace," and those words stuck with me at the bars that night and in the four quarters of Jerusalem and later that week walking amongst blown out buildings in Beirut. We often forget the human element of complex quagmires driven by fear and hate. I wonder how many people on all sides just want the simple things that this woman wants to see for the world just outside her shop door. How do you forge that necessary empathy on both sides of the wall to a level that makes any difference?
Just days after I stood outside the Damascus Gate, a man was shot dead in the very spot. How many people have died for religion in Jerusalem, from the Bible to the Crusades to their present day manifestations? How many unmarked graves layer the walls and city streets? How many more will have to go too soon before it is all said and done? You cannot visit Jerusalem without appreciating man's supreme need for higher belief. You also can't help but notice the faults in it.
