People: Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live Without Them
We are social animals, but how tempting the desert island sometimes is.
I entertain daydreams, sometimes, about escaping the world and all the people in it, but the late Sir Laurens van der Post, a South African writer and explorer, followed through on his fantasy.
Van der Post considered himself a people person, but even he had his limits, and what he saw as a Japanese prisoner of war in Sukabumi and Bandung — he was captured during an Allied Forces’ special mission to evacuate personnel from Java — pushed him over the edge. “It is one of the hardest things in this prison life,” he wrote in his journal, “the strain caused by being continually in the power of people who are only half-sane and live in the twilight of reason and humanity.”
He lived to tell the tale — writing about his experience in The Seed and the Sower (1963) and The Night of the New Moon (1970) which were turned into a film, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), starring David Bowie — but he’d had enough of human beings, and all the terribleness of which we are capable. So he got a truck, bought supplies and a gun, and took off into the bush. “There was a certain place that came to my mind that I must go to,” he told the BBC in 1996, “and there I camped. Every day the war seemed to slip…
