From Nagasaki to Afghanistan... Burnt Shadows

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

“Sometimes, when Hiroko looked back on the first years of marriage what she saw most clearly was a series of negotiations – between his notion of a home as a social space and her idea of it as a private retreat; between his belief that she would be welcomed by the people they lived among if she wore their clothes, celebrated their religious holidays, and her insistence that they would see it as false and had to learn to accept her on her own terms; between his determination that a man should provide for his wife and her determination to teach; between his desire for ease and her instinct towards rebellion. It was clear to her that the success of their marriage was based on their mutual ability to abide by the results of those negotiations with no bitterness over who had lost more ground in individuals encounters. And also, Sajjad added, taking her hand, when she once told him this, it helped that they found each other better company than anyone else in the world.”

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Theirs is the stoneless fruit of love
Whose love is returned.
~ Tiruvalluvar, The Kuralu

“I hope one day you will see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your own slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. if you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
~William Yeats, “The Choice”

Rediscovering Tom Robbins

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests that it isn’t love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstasy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror, a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. we glimpse it when we stand still.
The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important fact I know:
(1) Everything is part of it.
(2) It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. to be unmasked, it has no choice.

CHOICE. A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.

When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. when, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on – series polygamy – until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to out lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

“Well, do you think it’s possible to make love stay?”
“Sure. It’s not at all unusual for love to remain for a lifetime. It’s passion that doesn’t last. I still love my first husband. But I don’t desire him. Love lasts. It’s lust that moves out on us when we’re not looking, it’s lust that always skips town – and love without lust just isn’t enough.”

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

There is only one serious question. And that is:
Who knows how to make love stay?

Catching up with my reading...

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
“All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.” “…. I understood a simple fact: if you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world – indeed, nowhere is the world.”

“’I understand your dismay, Fraulein Averbuch. I truly do. I am not certain I would be able to make the decision I am asking you to make. I would be just as tormented, just as anguished. I would be angry at those who asked me to decide. But I cannot be you; we cannot be someone else. We are within our life and we stay there for as long as possible, that’s our home. We need life. There is too much death already, and there is probably more coming our way.’
‘What is life? This is no lie. Who wants this life?’
‘The dead leave it to us to struggle in this world. They go elsewhere, wherever it is, and wait for God to sort it all out. But we have to stay here, to be here, no matter how hard it is. Nobody can be alone. Life is the life of others. My life, your life, that is nothing.’
‘Curse upong your head, Herr Taube. May you reach the bottom of my suffering and die there.’ ‘Think of life, I beg you. Let’s live. We have to live.’”

“Between the licks of his swirling-candy stick, Lazarus asks Olga if she love someone. Yes, she says. He asks her if she is going to marry him. Probably not, she says. Why not? Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.”


The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way.”

“I wondered if we’d ever leave the bed. I didn’t want to. Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.”

“The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.”

“Their love blazed from them. And then they left. I think now that everything that was concentrated in that one look – there in raising me, their patient lessons in every subject they knew to teach, their wincing efforts to give me freedoms, their example of fortitude in work – allowed me to survive myself.”


Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
“What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.”

“’Never love a wild thing. … That was Doc’s mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can’t give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they’re strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky.”


The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
“All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.” ~ Isak Dinesen

“I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.”

“Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.”

“It’s my time to die, and it’s your time to live. Don’t mess it up.”

“Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”

“If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.”

Coming Home

Home by Marilynne Robinson

“That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”

“The old man nodded, ‘Yes, we did. We had some good times, too, didn’t we?’ He looked at his hands. ‘Hard to believe it now, when I can’t even tie my own shoes! I think back to those times, when I was just an ordinary man, not even a young man, and it’s like remembering that I used to be the sun and the wind! Taking the steps two at a time --!’”

“Ames took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He felt a sort of wonder for this wife of his, in so many ways so unknown to him, and he could be suddenly moved by some glimpse he had never had before of the days of her youth or her loneliness, or of the thoughts of her soul.”

“How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around the table.”

Traveling with Anne

Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott

“Here are the best two prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me,’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, ‘Whatever,’ and then for the evening, ‘Oh, well,’ but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.”

“Don’t forget, God loves us exactly the way we are, and God loves us too much to let us stay like this.”

“God: I wish you could have some permanence, a guarantee or two, the unconditional love we all long for. ‘It would be such skin off your nose?’ I demand of God. I never get an answer. But in the meantime I have learned that most of the time, all you have is the moment, and the imperfect love of people.”

“’I guess it’s like discovering you’re on the shelf of a pawnshop, dusty and forgotten and maybe not worth very much. But Jesus comes in and tells the pawnbroker, “I’ll take her place on the shelf. Let her go outside again.’”

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance,
and there is only the dance. ~ T.S. Eliot

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” ~ Eugene O’Neill

The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. ~ Joanna Macy

“There are picture of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition. But I like that, when who we are shows. Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the world, and it’s so touching when you get to see something real and human. I think that’s why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull – because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance; we’re allowed to escape from underneath one of the fatwas.”

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings. Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
~ Rumi

Random Acts of Kindness

On my nine, yes, nine hour train ride from Delhi to Lucknow this weekend I sat between, amongst, in the throngs of many people. I was on the second class train, which in Indian terms means everyone and their mother, brother, sister, two babies, huge suitcases, goods wrapped in large cloth sacks, mamaw and papaw and enough tiffins for a day’s journey need apply. It was on this journey that I realized how incredibly old and set in my ways I have become.

Caro at 23 traveling in India for the first time: “Ooh! Second class train, what a fun adventure! We should only travel on second class to really get a feel for India!”

Caro at 27 living in India for the first time: “Holy crap. Dear dear God, create within me an effective, strong bladder stopper so that I will not have to take a pee pee on this dirty train because there is a huddle of 30 men and women in front of the squatter train toilet that I will have to maneuver through where I know I will drop that one piece of tissue that I have brought to the loo through the hole that is the toilet. If you help me resist the temptation of chai, coffee, and water I will be dehydrated but forever grateful. Amen.”

But I digress.

On the train, in these throngs of people pushing and shoving to board and exit my train car (there are assigned seats, but there are also many “general” seats that are basically standing room only) I began to notice some random acts of kindness which, though small in gesture, have always meant much to me in meaning.

The sixty-plus auntie who must must must be in far greater back stiffness pains than I shifts her weight and lovely sari to allow a young mother with a sick two-year-old child with a “general” seat to skootch beside her.

The kind uncles in my compartment (“compartment” is used quite generously here) who give me some of their snacks and ask about experience in India so far. And even though human rights (HR) somehow turns to human resources (also, um, HR), I am warmed by their small acts of generosity towards a perfect stranger. As the train was pulling into the station at Lucknow, one of the kind gentleman said to me that it was good I was open to new things, that although taking food from strangers is dangerous, he was happy I let him feed me his masala cheesy poofs.

It reminded me of another act of kindness that I used to see all the time in Korea that I wish could translate to the States and elsewhere. Any time a “senior citizen” (affectionately known as halmonis and harabojis, grandmother and grandfather, respectively) boards a bus in Korea, their juniors immediately offer their seats, giving them first priority to rest their feet. That in and of itself would be miraculous to see in DC. But it’s what sometimes happens after, when the high school student or young mother, who is inevitably carrying a paper bag because Ko-reans love to carry paper bags the time (fact), stands up and offers his/her seat that makes me smile to myself. The halmoni or haraboji insists on taking this package and placing it in his/her lap, carrying it through the rest of the bus ride for the person now standing.

It’s such a feeling of community, this short bus ride across town, where everyone is helping to relieve a burden in some small way.

These small acts, however, will not change my mind about second class seater trains. I may be an elitist, old, stubborn, rejecting-the-simple-volunteer-lifestyle-outright snob, but my back and neck will not forgive me if they are forced in such contortions again.

More on Lucknow in a bit.

Falling Man

Falling Man by Don Delillo

“’What I’m saying is simple. This is for them,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s theirs,’ he said. ‘Don’t make it yours.’

“The world changes first in the mind of the man who wants to change it."

‘What we carry. This is the story in the end,’ she said remotely.

“This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.”

“’Who is that man? You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition.’”

“’Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be,’ he said. ‘This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.’”

“Fortune favors the brave. He didn’t know the Latin original of the old adage and this was a shame. This is what he’d always lacked, that edge of unexpected learning.”

The Namesake

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Within three months they have clothes and toothbrushes at each other’s apartments. He sees her for entire weekends without make-up, sees her with gray shadows under her eyes as she types papers at her desk, and when he kisses her head he tastes the oil that accumulates on her scalp between shampoos. He sees the hair that grows on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerge between appointments at the salon, and in these moments, these glimpses, he believes he has known no greater intimacy.”

Quotes not reviews

Apologies for not explaining the random appearance of book titles in this blog. A friend recently indicated that he did not read any of the book reviews found here, of which there are none by the way, at which point I corrected him that they were actually quotes from books I’ve been reading.

Since high school I have dog-eared the bottom corner of a page with what I consider to be little word gems, a sign of appreciation and attention in the midst of a story. I think that I also do it because of my faulty memory for plots and characters, trying to hold on to a bit of each book that I read. It is for that reason that I am usually quite disappointed in a book that affords no such dog-earing opportunity.

India has definitely been a great chance to catch up on pleasure reading, as my fellow fellow Suzanne pointed out in her blog last month. The books are cheaper than in the States and the bookstores here always seem to have an interestingly random assortment as you peruse the aisles.

Anyway, read the quotes if you want, they are a part of the blog that is exceptionally selfish and for my own enjoyment and record keeping. If you have read one of the books then I hope reading the quotes has a similar affect on you as it does on me – plopping you right back in the middle of the quoted author’s narrative, the fictional lives that become intertwined with yours for a couple hundred pages, exploring the Cave of Swimmers with the English Patient or the personal aftermaths of 9/11 with Joseph O’Neill. Enjoy!

The English Patient

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

"A novel is a mirror walking down the road."

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”

“A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing – not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”

“But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.”

“’If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?’”

“Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter if I ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it is how much you can bear.”

“’I just want you to know. I don’t miss you yet.’
His face awful to her, trying to smile. Her head sweeps away from him and its hits the side of a gatepost. He sees it hurt her, notices the wince. But they have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. Her jerk, her pain, is accidental, is intentional. Her hand is near her temple.
‘You will,’ she says.”

“There is one month in their lives when Hana and Kip sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy between them. Discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilization, a whole country ahead of them. The love of the idea of him or her. I don’t want to be fucked. I don’t want to fuck you. Where he had learned it or she had who knows, in such youth. Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evenings about his age, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was, after all, a mortal age. The boy’s desire completed itself only in his deepest sleep while in the arms of Hana, his orgasm something more to do with the pull of the moon, a tug of his body by the night.”

“I promised to tell you how one falls in love.”

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked my nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

"‘Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.’”

Delhi is not far....

Delhi is not far by Ruskin Bond

"How evanescent those loves and friendships seem at this distance in time. I wonder what they are doing now, the people on whom these characters are modelled, if indeed they have survived. We move on, make new attachments. We grow old. But sometimes we hanker for the old friendships, the old loves. Sometimes I wish I was young again. Or that I could travel back in time and pick up the threads. Absent so long, I may have stopped loving you, friends; but I will never stop loving the days I loved you."

"Tagore wrote: 'Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.'"

"'I wonder why God ever bothered to make men, when he had the whole wide beautiful world to himself,' I said to Suraj one summer night. 'Why did he find it necessary to share it with others?'
'Perhaps he felt lonely,' said Suraj."

"A few things reassure me... The desire to love and be loved. The beauty and ugliness of the human body, the intricacy of its design. Sometimes I make love as a sort of exploration of all that is physical; and sometimes falling in love becomes an exploration of the mind. Love takes me to distant, happier places."

"Yesterday I was sad, and tomorrow I may be sad again, but today I know that I am happy. I want to live on and on, delighting like a pagan in all that is physical; and I know that this one lifetime, however long, cannot satisfy my heart."

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

“Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.”

“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” ~ David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

“We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence.”

“With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. … It is the hunger, what we do not have, that holds us together.”

Netherland

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill

"Perhaps the relevant truth - and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me - is that we all find ourselves in temporary current and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you into deep trouble."

"An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to take nothing less than a mortal action."

"Smugness, however, requires a certain reflectiveness, which requires perspective, which requires distance; and we, or certainly I, didn't look upon our circumstances from the observatory offered by a disposition to the more spatial emotions - those feelings, of regret or gratitude or relief, say, that make reference to situations removed from one's own. It didn't seem to me, for example, that I had dodged a bullet, perhaps because I had no real idea what a bullet was. I was young. I was not much extracted from the innocence in which the benevolent but fraudulent world conspires to place us as children."

"I was thinking of the miserable apprehension we have of even those existences that matter most to us. To witness a life, even in love - even with a camera - was to witness a monstrous crime without noticing the particulars required for justice."

"Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage's course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize."

Reluctant reader

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

“It seemed to me then – and to be honest, sir, seems to me still – that America was engaged only in posturing. As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own indifference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the rest of humanity, but also in your own.”

“Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is not within us.”

Taking it bird by bird

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott

“Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help up understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life – wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing detail during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

“E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

“’My mother’s first criterion for a man is that he be interesting. What this really means is that he be able to appreciate my mother, whose jokes hinge on some grammatical subtlety or a working knowledge of higher mathematics. You get the picture. Robbie is about as interesting as a pair of red high-top Converse sneakers. But Robbie points to the mattress on the floor. He grins, slowly unbuckling his belt, drops his jeans. “Lie down,” says Robbie. This is interesting enough for me.’” ~ Abigail Thomas

“We read Faulkner for the beauty of his horrible creations, the beauty of the writing, and we read him to find out what life is about from his point of view. He expresses this through his characters. All you can give us is what life is about from your point of view. You are not going to be able to give us the plans to the submarine. Life is not a submarine. There are no plans.”

“Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass – seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”

“Is life too short to be taking shit, or is life too short to be minding it?” ~ Violet Weingarten, Intimations of Mortality

Quotable Quotes

• "That's an elephant" - Matt, a fellow fellow exclaims on our tuk tuk ride back from the Lotus Temple and Hare Krishna Temple in East of Kailash. There actually was a Jumbo on the side of the highway. Chillaxin. Note to self: Hare Krishna cooking just not up to par...

• "Did you go with your lover?" - my new friend Claudy, a Keralan travel agent asking me about my past journey through the Indian hill station of Ooty. Um... I guess "are you married?" is looking like a softball question now eh?

• "Do you like getting smashed?" - my new officemate. Day three. wow.

• "The monkey is gone now." - my new officemates after our new friend outside the window completed his visit.
  

The Translator by Leila Aboulela

“And she was someone else because of what he had said to her today. From early on it was the way he spoke to her, to the inside of her, not around her, over her head, around her shoulders. That was how others spoke to her, their words bouncing against her skin and ears, cascading, and she perfectly still, untouched, always alone. If he would speak to her all the time, everyday. If all of life could be like that. The light in her head was too bright to see what was in the room. She couldn’t see the suitcases anymore, the bed she leant against as she sat on the floor, the bottle of perfume he had given her. She couldn’t see.”

"... the fog cleared and I awoke, on the second day of my arrival, in my familiar bed in the room whose walls had witnessed the trivial incidents of my life in childhood and the onset of adolescence... I heard the cooing of the turtledove, and I looked through the window at the palm tree standing in the courtyard of our house... I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down to the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like stormswept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots... " ~ Tayeb Salih

Lightly housekeeping

"Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up on Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.
I know that. But I know something else too, because I was brought up to Lighthousekeeping. Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quickly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken."
~ Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

"She never had time. He came and went.
Why didn't Babel Dark marry Molly?
He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling you the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it."
~ Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Rushdie and Shalimar

"You have come into our story at the end. ... If my dear father were still with us he could answer all your questions. But maybe the truth is that, as he used to say, our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets. Maybe too much time has passed for you and you will have to accept , I'm sorry to say it, that there are things about your experience you will never understand. My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility, the silence of the unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. Such was his credo." ~ Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

"For the rest of his life Max Ophuls would remember that instant during the shape of the conflict in Kashmir had seemed too great and alien for his Western mind to understand, and the sense of urgent need with which he had drawn his own experience around him, like a shawl. Had he been trying to understand, or to blind himself to his failure to do so? Did the mind discover likeless in the unlike in order to clarify the world, or to obscure the impossibility of such clarification? He didn't know the answer. But it was one hell of a question." ~ Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

"In the old stories, love made possible a kind of spiritual contact between lovers long separated by necessity or chance. In the days before telecommunications, true love itself was enough. A woman left at home would close her eyes and the power of her need would enable her to see her man on his ocean ship battling pirates with cutlass and pistol, her man in the battle's fray with his sword and shield, standing victorious among the corpses on some foreign field, her man crossing a distant desert whose sands were on fire, her man amid mountain peaks, drinking the driven snow. So long as he lived she would follow his journey, she would know the day-by-day of it, the hour-by-hour, would feel his elation and grief, would fight temptation with him and with him rejoice in the beauty of the world; and if he died a spear of love would fly back across the world to pierce her waiting, omniscient heart. It would be the same for him. In the midst of the desert's fire he would feel her cool hand on his cheek and in the heat of battle she would murmur words of love into his ear: live, live. And more: he would know her dailiness too, her moods, her illnesses, her labours, her loneliness, her thoughts. The bond of their communion would never break. That was what the stories said about love. That was what human beings knew love to be." ~ Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown