Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy.
And so it’s interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea.
How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then?
Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold.
But a man may dream, and in his dreams be other than he is.
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood.
By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl.
I don’t want to be elite. Am I elite?” “You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual.” “Is that the same as fictional?” “Fiction’s elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It’s what people want.
Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.
Little rich boy, that’s all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-humanity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.
Nathuram Godse. “Thank God,” Amina burst out, “it’s not a Muslim name!
She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became – there is not a polite way of putting this – blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief.
We are in the process of instituting a reign of terror on earth, and there’s only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god. In name of a divine entity we can do whatever the hell we like and most of those fools down there will swallow it like a bitter pill.
We celebrate donut culture, it’s sweet and it tastes good but there’s a void at the heart?
There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what’s the word. Incoherent.
Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy.
Murder is a crime of violence against the murdered person. Suicide is a crime of violence against those who remain alive.
It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody’s listening.
He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.
Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.