ZERZURA

There is a city in the Libyan desert that probably never existed.

It is called Zerzura. Medieval Arab geographers wrote about it. European explorers in the 1930s mounted expeditions from Cairo to find it. Count László Almásy — the man The English Patient was loosely based on — spent years of his life following rumors of it across the Sahara. None of them found it. Zerzura sits in the archive of human longing the way Atlantis does, the way El Dorado does: a place you can never actually reach, because reaching it would ruin what it was for.

The word for this pattern was coined by a man who had been chasing something similar, in a different desert, sixteen hundred years earlier.

In the year 397, Augustine of Hippo — a teacher from North Africa, former hedonist, professional rhetorician — sat down in what is now Algeria and began writing the Confessions. It is the first autobiography in Western literature. He was forty-three. He had spent thirty years of his life looking for meaning in philosophy, in other religions, in sex, in career, in the cities of the empire. And then in book ten, in a passage now quoted for centuries, he put down the sentence that describes the whole shape of the search.

Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris.

Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me, and I was outside.

Everyone you have ever envied was looking for the same thing, in a different direction. The city is inside. The miles outside were just the way you got here.

He was writing about God, but every seeker of every kind has recognized that sentence since. The thing you were looking for was never where you looked. It was in you the whole time — and the looking was the only way you could have found it. This is not the same as saying the looking was wasted. The miles outside were the price of being able to see what was inside. Augustine did not shortcut to the insight. He lived his way toward it.

Everyone you have ever envied was looking for the same thing, in a different direction. The city is inside. The miles outside were just the way you got here.

Six hundred years later, a Persian poet named Farid ud-Din Attar wrote the other version of this story. His poem Mantiq at-Tair — The Conference of the Birds — describes thirty birds who set out to find a legendary king called the Simurgh, crossing seven valleys of searching. Most of the birds die on the way. The ones who survive arrive at the Simurgh's palace and are granted an audience. What they find is a mirror. The name Simurgh is Persian for thirty birds — sī murgh. They had been the king the whole time. The journey they survived was the only way they could have learned it.

Augustine and Attar are writing the same observation in two different vocabularies — one North African Christian, one Persian Sufi — separated by six centuries and by the breadth of the medieval world. They agree on one thing. The destination is inside. The travel is necessary anyway.

Zerzura, the lost city, is neither of them and both of them. The image of it — sand, oasis, white walls, nothing — is pure mirage. And yet it has lived in human imagination for seven hundred years, because mirage is exactly what the word is for: a thing you see in the distance, which you are in fact already closer to than you know.

ZERZURA is the sound of arriving at the same bar you started on, and finding it was a different bar all along.

— Augustine of Hippo, 354–430 AD; with Farid ud-Din Attar, c. 1145–1221 AD