Nina Ballerina

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an interesting read circa 1939

This is my week for houskeeping, and I usually find him and his assistant in a far corner of the kitchen squatting over a book of qasidas while the meat boiling itself to toughness, bubbles in the middle of the floor. A servant in England would be abashed when surprised in literature, but Qasim leaps up delighted to show his poems, beautiful in red and black script. To have him and us in the same house, is like the Orient and the Occident under one roof. The Orient does not get much done: it looks upon work as a part only - and not too important a part at that - of its varied existence, but enjoys with a free mind whatever else happens besides. The Occident, busily building, has its eyes rigidly fixed on the future : Being and Doing, and civilization, a compromise, between them. There is too little of the compromise now. Too much machinery in the West, too little in the East, have made a gap between the active and the contemplative; they drift ever more apart. Woman hitherto has inclined more to eastern idea – the stress being laid on what she is rather than on what she does; and if we are going to change this, taking for our sole pattern the active energies of men, we are in danger of destroying a principle which contains one-half of the ingredients of civilization. Before ceasing to be, it is to be hoped that our sex will at least make sure that what it does is worth the sacrifice.

from ‘A Winter in Arabia’ by Freya Stark, first published 1940.

three drawings of the same thing