Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.
Once you’ve been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness.
I must say a word about fear. It’s is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. it begins in your mind, always.
Under the pathologist’s microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist’s job is to find the bull among the matador cells.
A very long sentence, anchored in solid nouns, with countless subordinate clauses, scores of adjectives and adverbs, and bold conjunctions that launched the sentence in a new direction – besides unexpected interludes – has finally, with a surprisingly quiet full stop, come to an end.
The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being.
And I survived because I made a point of forgetting.
Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others- and I am one of those-never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter what the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It’s not a question of courage. It’s... an inability to let go. It may be nothing more than life hungry stupidity.
Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.
Now he realized that this matter of faith was either radically to be taken seriously or radically not to be taken seriously.
The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.
Another favorite position of his was sitting with his back to me, his rear half resting on the floor of the boat and his front half on the bench, his face buried into the stern, paws right next to his head, looking as if we were playing hide-and-seek and he were the one counting. In this position he tended to lie very still, with only the occasional twitching of his ears to indicate that he is not necessarily sleeping.
Memory is a glue: it attaches you to everything, even to what you don’t like.
We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more – there is no greater relationship.
A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us... as individuals-and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind.
Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
While Odo has mastered the simple human trick of making porridge, Peter has learned the difficult animal skill of doing nothing. He’s learned to unshackle himself from the race of time and contemplate time itself. As far as he can tell, that’s what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by a river, watching the water go by. It’s a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.
His heart is expended that way, of loving the single, particular individual. He loved Clara with every fibre of his being, but now he has nothing left. Or rather, he has learned to live with her absence, and he has no wish to fill that absence; that would be like losing her a second time. Instead he would prefer to be kind to everyone, a less personal but broader love.
The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.
Ageing is not easy, Senhora Castro. It’s a terrible, incurable pathology. And great love is another pathology.