p. xii Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you remember all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You remember episodes that you have not thought of for years and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.
p. 19 I walk up and down through the empty hall examining everything carefully in the brightly lit cases, delighted to discover that there is absolutely nothing there that I would wish to own. I had spent forty years modestly collecting this kind of garbage and then, let us hope, grown wiser, the next twenty years giving it away.
p. 27 Into that chill building rushes a great warm, soft, languorous movement of tropical southern air that is simply amazing in its power to seduce. It is the sweet air of Brazil...
p. 46 My curiosity is too easily satisfied - or rather I have learned that the fascination of a strange place is centered in its people rather than in its views and monuments.
p. 76 Here is what is horrible about dying, I decide: not that you are obliterated by death but that everything you love is also obliterated. The eyes close for the last time, the brain deprived of oxygen comes unplugged, and everything, everything is destroyed, the world disintegrates - trees, lakes, mountains, children, wind and sunshine, the sea, canoes floating across tranquil rivers, ponds full of frogs, night and the stars, music and the music of silence.... [but] death destroys not only everything we love, but everything we hate as well. Our rages, our betrayals, our failures, our capacity for evil. It is all destroyed. How can death, then, be anything but a friend since so much more pain than joy is obliterated.
p. 83 And what suffering won't a man endure to live in his own hut on his own land, proud and half-mad with the delusion that to some extent he is in control of his own destiny.
p. 90 What is heaven for most of us if it is not the satisfaction of having worked hard for yourself, and of knowing that after you have eaten well that you will lie down, make love, and fall into the deep eight-hour sleep of total obliteration that you have earned?
p. 106 [Salvador] is a city where, underneath the normal pursuits, the people in it seem to be thinking of nothing else but their power to attract and of the great psychic charges that are going off between people in their most casual encounters. Connections are being made; people are looking at one another and with innocent delight.
p. 135 It is intensely moving to be in a city where everyone believes in God, and I consider joining them, not because I believe in God, but because, though the spectacle is depressing for its ritual, I believe in the emotion that has joined them together.
p. 171 If life has any meaning at all toward the end, it is certainly only in one's ability to draw from the well of memory a satisfying amount of intense experience to contemplate, for the things that are forgotten are only symbols for the parts of us that have already died. Part of the middle-class tragedy lies in the facility with which intense experience can be synthesized and bought.
p. 206 When I refuse to cook for them and drag them off to some restaurant to eat strange food that is past their comprehension, I feel a vague guilt now as though I were taking them to a pornographic movie that would by teaching perverse techniques confuse and complicate the pure, straightforward intensity of their romantic and passionate sensibilities.
p. 236 Are we not all born with a certain bias, an innate proclivity for feeling either that man is more good than bad or that he is more bad than good? This basic way of looking at mankind probably even determines the way we vote. Do we join a political party that demands more freedom to more nearly achieve our potential, or a party that wants more restrictive laws to curtail our evil instincts? Did I, who had always believed in more freedom, still believe in the face of the abuses that had been committed in its name?
p. 270 In a larger sense home, that symbol of stability, is only one more concept being shattered by a crazy world where whole nations are stood against the wall and where millions are driven to clog the roads as they stagger toward another border and a temporary haven. There is no way to buy or beg continuity; there is no spot on earth from which one may not be driven. Home is where you are; home is where you find yourself. (Reading that sentence over and giving it a double meaning I note with a glow of pride that we have arrived at the edge of profundity.) It is that cubic space that the body claims - if roofed, that area where you store your dirty clothes and your books.
p. 273 Man is most godlike when he sweats; the potential moral beauty of man lies in this simplest of things; man doing well something that he loves doing - the juggler juggling, the baker baking bread, the teacher before a class of children; a farmer hoeing out a row of corn. Even the trained killer who kills well fulfills, in some inscrutable way, his deepest contract with life and forgets for a time his own mortality, that stinking death that awaits him, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment