if the experience of Africa provided him with the insight that he required for his observations to reach meaning. He remembers seeing for example a young woman weeping uncontrollably, unembarrassed, in a bar in Liecester, speculating on the reasons for her sadness: "I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. The unconscious mind is often sentimental; I have written la shape', and the shape, of course [of Africa] is roughly that of the human heart" (Greene, Journey Without Maps 37).
Greene's thematic core is suggested as early as the first paragraph, when he refers to "this first going astray," at the moment in Freetown that he first finds the Liberian Consul who will provide him with papers authorizing his travel from Sierra Leone into Liberia via back roads (Greene 15). It is the process of going astray psychologically as well as physically, as the journey without maps becomes a journey into unexpected human and geographical territory, that Greene seeks to convey. Africa, on this view, is only the most egregious of platforms from which to abstract insight into the human heart. But Africa is also a place of profound difference from the environment of European life, and the journey that Greene undertakes is consciously conceived as a back-to-basics adventure, a journey away from the moral and physical squalor of civilization toward life at its most fundamental, stripped of nonessential, artificial life-coping
strategies and material goods. That is what he means when he comments that "when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us (Europeans], one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray" (Greene, Journey Without Maps 21).
Greene is of course also a working reporter, and it is plain that part of his intent is as much to ...