NotitiesShantaram
Gregory David Roberts
"Shantaram" is a reflective narrative exploring themes of freedom, identity, and the complexities of human experience against the backdrop of India. The protagonist grapples with personal demons, the nature of love and suffering, and the moral ambiguities of life, ultimately seeking meaning and connection in a chaotic world. The story intertwines moments of beauty and despair, revealing profound truths about existence and the human condition.
The past reflects eternally between two mirrors—the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say. (Location 759)
I was numb, in those first years after the escape: shell-shocked by the disasters that warred in my life. My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man. (Location 773)
Notitie - Locatie 775 (Location 774)
Note: Diep
And what about you, Lin? What did you say?’ ‘He didn’t say anything yet, and now that you’re here, he won’t get a chance.’ ‘Now be fair, Karla. Tell us, Lin. I would like to know.’ ‘Well, if you press me, I’d have to say freedom.’ ‘The freedom to do what?’ he asked, putting a little laugh in the last word. ‘I don’t know. Maybe just the freedom to say no. If you’ve got that much freedom, you really don’t need any more.’ (Location 841)
And I was a writer. In Australia I’d written since my early twenties. I’d just begun to establish myself through my first published work when my marriage collapsed, I lost the custody of my daughter, and I lost my life in drugs, crime, imprisonment, and escape. But even as a fugitive, writing was still a daily custom and part of my instinctual routine. (Location 891)
I never stopped writing. It was what I did, no matter where I was or how my circumstances changed. One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair. (Location 895)
He was speaking out of the corner of his mouth, like a prisoner under the eyes of the warders. It struck me as funny. In Australian prisons, that whispering technique is known as side-valving. The expression spoke itself clearly in my mind and, together with Didier’s mannerism, the words put me back in a prison cell. I could smell the cheap disinfectant, hear the metal hiss of the keys, and feel the sweating stone under my fingertips. (Location 1001)
The blue-white light from a street lamp melted to liquid on her lips and in the spheres of her large eyes. (Location 1264)
‘WHAT YOU’RE SAYING is that we’re finally going to get down to the real deal.’ (Location 1322)
Note: Opener van hoofdstuk
And I’d learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. (Location 1634)
Ask any man with a long-enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice. (Location 1641)
There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabaker told it to me, just as I’m telling it to you now. (Location 1658)
There’s a dark feeling—less than hatred, but more than loathing—that ugly men feel for handsome men. It’s unreasonable and unjustified, of course, but it’s always there, hiding in the long shadow thrown by envy. It creeps out, into the light of your eyes, when you’re falling in love with a beautiful woman. (Location 1758)
People like Vikram, people who can wear an obsession with panache, always win me over because their honesty speaks directly to my heart. (Location 1802)
Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it. (Location 1815)
‘He put you through it in the last two weeks, your friend, Prabaker, didn’t he?’ ‘Well, there was much worse than that. But the real problem is that you can’t do anything. You see kids who ... well, they’re in a lot of trouble, and you see people in the slums—he took me to the slum, where he lives, and the stink of the open latrine, and the hopeless mess of the place, and the people staring at you from the doorways of their hovels and ... and you can’t change anything. You can’t do anything about it. You have to accept that things could be worse, and they’ll never be much better, and you’re completely helpless in the face of it.’ ‘It’s good to know what’s wrong with the world,’ Karla said, after a while. ‘But it’s just as important to know that sometimes, no matter how wrong it is, you can’t change it. A lot of the bad stuff in the world wasn’t really that bad until someone tried to change it.’ ‘I’m not sure I want to believe that. I know you’re right. I know we make things worse, sometimes, the more we try to make them better. But I want to believe that if we do it right, everything and everyone can change for the better.’ (Location 1941)
What is necessary? That was the unspoken but implied and unavoidable question everywhere in India. (Location 2098)
The real hypocrisy, I came to realise, was in the eyes and minds and criticisms of those who came from lands of plenty, where no-one had to fight for a seat on a train. (Location 2103)
There’s a kind of luck that’s not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that’s not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment. (Location 2372)
But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you. (Location 2460)
PRABAKER’S FATHER introduced me to Sunder village, but it was his mother who made me feel at home there. Her life enfolded mine within its triumph and sorrow, just as easily as her red shawl sometimes enswathed a crying child that passed the doorway of her house. (Location 2469)
I swallowed prejudice, fear, and the milk all at once, gulping it down as quickly as possible. (Location 2570)
The working day was divided into two brackets of about three hours, with a lunch break and siesta between. (Location 2582)
usually consisted of the ubiquitous roti, spicy lentil dhal, mango chutney, and raw onions, served with lime juice. After eating the meal as a group, the men moved off to find quiet, shady spots to doze in for an hour or so. When work resumed, the fed and rested workers applied themselves with great energy and enthusiasm until the senior man in the group called a halt. Assembling on one of the main pathways, the farmers then walked back past fields they’d sown and tended themselves, often laughing and joking all the way to the village. There was little work for the men to do in the village itself. Cooking, cleaning, washing, and even routine house-maintenance were all done by the women—mostly younger women, supervised in their tasks by older women. On average, the village women worked a four-hour day. They spent much of their free time playing with the young children. The village men worked six hours per day for an average four-day week. Special efforts were required for plantings and harvests, but in general the Maharashtrian villagers worked fewer hours than working men and women in cities. (Location 2583)
And there was a sense of certainty, in the village, that no city I’ve ever known provides: the certainty that emerges when the soil, and the generations who work it, become interchangeable; when the identities of the human beings and the nature of the place are one and the same. (Location 2601)
They stood, of course: no-one ever sat in the presence of the Standing Babas. (Location 2959)
‘It’s amazing. It’s horrible and holy at the same time. I can’t make up my mind which is the holy part, and which is the horrible part. Horrible—that’s not the right word, but it’s something like that.’ (Location 2975)
‘I’m sorry, Lin,’ he said quietly. ‘In this India we can see everybody sleeping, at some times. And we say that the face, when it is in sleeping, is the friend of the world.’ (Location 3213)
If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke. (Location 3240)
‘I’ll do it,’ I said. I tried to sound confident and strong, but there are some lies that the body just won’t believe, and the words came out as a squeak. (Location 3341)
The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, Didier once said, is that it works so well. (Location 3568)
They are love songs to God. These men are singing about loving God.’ I nodded, saying nothing, but my silence prompted him to speak again. ‘You are a Christian fellow?’ he asked. ‘No. I don’t believe in God.’ ‘There is no believing in God,’ he declared, smiling again. ‘We either know God, or we do not.’ ‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘I certainly don’t know God, and frankly I’m inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I’ve come across.’ ‘Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.’ He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, I thought. You’re getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who’s famous for them. He’s testingyou. It’s a test, and the water’s deep. ‘Let me get this straight—you’re saying that because something is impossible, it exists?’ I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas. ‘That is correct.’ ‘Well, wouldn’t that mean that all the possible things don’t exist?’ ‘Precisely!’ he said, smiling more widely. ‘I am delighted that you understand.’ ‘I can say those words,’ I answered, laughing to match his smile, ‘but that doesn’t mean I understand them.’ ‘I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.’ ‘I still don’t get it. I don’t see how possible things don’t exist.’ ‘Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea—and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?’ ‘Not really. It seems to me that if everything we think we know is wrong, or is an illusion, then none of us can know what to do, or how to live, or how to stay sane.’ ‘We lie,’ he said with a flash of real humour in the gold-flecked amber of his eyes. ‘The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier.’ ‘And that’s how we stay sane?’ ‘Yes. Let me tell you that I can see you as my son. I was not married, and I have no son, but there was a moment of time, yes, when it was possible for me to be married, and to have a son. And that moment of time was—how old are you?’ ‘I’m thirty.’ ‘Exactly! I knew it. That moment of time, when I could have been a father, was exactly thirty years ago. But if I tell you that I see it clearly, that you are my son, and I am your father, you will think that it is impossible. You will resist it. You will not see the truth, that I see now, and that I saw in the first moments when we met, a few hours ago. You will prefer to make a convenient lie, and to believe it—the lie that we are strangers, and that there is no connection between us. But fate—you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language—fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?’ I did see. My heart knew what he was saying, even as my rebellious mind rejected the words and the man who spoke them. Somehow, he’d found that sorrow in me. The hole in my life that a father should’ve filled was a prairie of longing. In the loneliest hours of those hunted years, I wandered there, as hungry for a father’s love as a cellblock full of sentenced men in the last hour of New Year’s Eve. (Location 3706)
‘The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men—it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.’ (Location 3815)
Years into the banishment, I realised that I was exiled to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast. Like outcasts everywhere, I courted danger because danger was one of the few things strong enough to help me forget what I’d lost. (Location 3971)
Suffering, Khaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for God. I didn’t know God, as he’d put it, but even as a disbeliever I failed the test that day. I couldn’t love God—anyone’s God—and I couldn’t forgive God. (Location 4094)
Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can’t hide what you are, in prison. You can’t pretend to be tough. You are, or (Location 4117)
It was dirty work, and I was glad to do it. (Location 4148)
And there was a certain kudos in the job: humble and important tasks were as esteemed in the slum as they were reviled in the wider community. (Location 4149)
As head man in the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein was involved in every plan and decision in those preparations. His authority was clear and unquestioned, but it was a subtle, unobtrusive leadership. (Location 4151)
Someone turned a radio on in a hut not far away, and a Hindi love song wailed through the lanes and gullies of the busy slum. A child was crying somewhere. Chickens scratched and pecked at the place where Joseph’s circle of torment had been. Somewhere else, a woman was laughing, children played, the bangle-seller sang out his enticement-call in Marathi. A bangle is beauty, and beauty is a bangle! As the pulse and push of normal life returned to the slum, I walked back to my hut, through the winding lanes. Fishermen and fisherwomen were coming home from Sassoon Dock, bringing baskets of sea-smell with them. In one of those balancing contrasts of slum life, it was also the hour chosen by the incense-sellers to move through the lanes, burning their samples of sandalwood, jasmine, rose, and patchouli. I thought about what I’d seen that day, what the people did for themselves in their tiny city of twenty-five thousand souls, without policemen, judges, courts, and prisons. I thought about something Qasim Ali had said, weeks before, when the two boys, Faroukh and Raghuram, had presented themselves for punishment, having spent a day tied together in work at the latrine. After they’d scrubbed themselves clean with a hot bucket-bath, and dressed in new lungis and clean, white singlets, the two boys stood before an assembly of their families, friends, and neighbours. Lamplights fluttered in the breeze, passing the golden gleam from eye to eye, as shadows chased one another across the reed-mat walls of the huts. Qasim Ali pronounced the punishment that had been decided upon by a council of Hindu and Muslim friends and neighbours. Their punishment, for fighting about religion, was that each had to learn one complete prayer from the religious observances of the other. ‘In this way is justice done,’ Qasim Ali said that night, his bark-coloured eyes softening on the two young men, ‘because justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’ (Location 4366)
The ghetto was a living organism: to counter external threats, it responded with the antibodies of courage, solidarity, and that desperate, magnificent love we usually call the survival instinct. (Location 4572)
The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that. (Location 4614)
I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.’ (Location 4663)
I can’t stand politicians. A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.’ (Location 4760)
‘We are the not-people,’ Prabaker said happily, ‘And these are the not-houses, where we are not-living.’ (Location 4775)
‘I don’t know what scares me more,’ she declared, ‘the madness that smashes people down, or their ability to endure it.’ (Location 5020)
‘I’m still ... I don’t know. I’m just ... Jesus! But I’m happy to like you. I like you a lot. I’ll be head over heels in like with you, Lin, if that’s enough.’ Her eyes were honest, and yet I knew there was a lot she wasn’t telling me. Her eyes were brave, and yet she was afraid. When I relented, and smiled at her, she laughed. I laughed, too. ‘Is it enough for now?’ ‘Sure,’ I lied. ‘Sure.’ But already, like the people in the ghetto, hundreds of feet below, I was picking through the smashed houses in my heart, and rebuilding on the ruin. (Location 5050)
It’s one of the five hundred things I love about Indians: if they like you, they do it quickly, and not by half. (Location 5257)
‘The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.’ (Location 5651)
Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonisingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God. This is my first statement. Does anyone wish to discuss this point, before I proceed?’ I looked from one face to another. Some men smiled in appreciation of his point, some nodded their agreement, and some others frowned in concentration. All of them seemed eager for Khaderbhai to continue. ‘Very well, I will move on to my more detailed answer. The Holy Koran tells us that all things in the universe are related, one to another, and that even opposites are united in some way. I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain. Do you agree with this?’ He scanned the attentive, expectant faces, and found approval. ‘The difference between them is this, I think: that what we learn from pain—for example, that fire burns and is dangerous—is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God.’ (Location 5686)
Suffering is happiness, backwards.’ (Location 5709)
When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us. (Location 5747)
People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him. (Location 5851)
Ashamed of the cold selfishness that had stolen my pity, and pierced by the courage and loneliness of the little boy, I listened to his sleeping breath, and let him cling to the ache in my heart. Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have—to hold on tight until the dawn. (Location 6590)
‘Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Those are the three big questions. (Location 6659)
‘You know, Lin,’ he said softly, ‘we have a saying, in the Pashto language, and the meaning of it is that you are not a man until you give your love, truly and freely, to a child. And you are not a good man until you earn the love, truly and freely, of a child in return.’ (Location 6683)
I remembered his face peeping around the flimsy door of my hut one afternoon when I was trying to write. Yes! What is it, Tariq! I’d asked him irritably. Oh, I’m sorry, he’d replied. Do you want to be lonely? (Location 6697)
Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison solitude. (Location 6956)
When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn’t be of our making, but that wouldn’t occur without our action. (Location 6962)
He couldn’t know it, of course; but with that simple nod of his head, Joseph had answered the question that had remained with me, as a dull ache of doubt, since the prison. Joseph was saved. That was the look simmering in his eyes as he nodded his head. It was the fever of salvation. That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential—shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward. We’d saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love. What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would’ve annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive. (Location 7000)
Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths. (Location 7024)
I sat alone, on a boulder that was larger and flatter than most, and I smoked a cigarette. I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live. (Location 7027)
Clouds, heavy with their burden of monsoon rain, massed above the city, above my head, and it seemed to me in those weeks that all grey heaven was my brooding love. The very mangroves trembled with my desire. And at night, too many nights, it was my restive sleep that rolled and turned the sea in lusted dreaming, until the sun each morning rose with love for her. (Location 7047)
I’d walked that same dusty, broken road toward a faith. But every time I’d heard the story of a belief, every time I’d seen some new guru, the result was the same: the story was unconvincing in some way, and the guru was flawed. (Location 7058)
It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself. Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them—they’d taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold—I still fell into the bigot’s trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I’d judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor. (Location 7077)
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity. (Location 7173)
One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone. (Location 7210)
I knew we didn’t have her story. Not the whole of it. I knew the small daubs of colour she’d excluded from her summary were at least as important as the broad strokes she’d included. (Location 7329)
Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky. (Location 7332)
I surrendered to India, as I did every day, then, and as I still do, every day of my life, no matter where I am in the world. (Location 7428)
It was my night to be the white knight. (Location 7521)
Silence is the tortured man’s revenge. (Location 7628)
It was the taste of hatred—my hatred, theirs, the guards’, and the world’s. Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate. (Location 7654)
Fear dries a man’s mouth, and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words. (Location 7835)
The only victory that really counts in prison, an old-timer in the Australian jail once said to me, is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It’s not just the body that must survive a jail term: the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. (Location 7861)
Cruelty is a kind of cowardice. Cruel laughter is the way cowards cry when they’re not alone, and causing pain is how they grieve. (Location 7973)
Guilt is the hilt of the knife that we use on ourselves, and love is often the blade; but it’s worry that keeps the knife sharp, and worry that gets most of us, in the end. (Location 8056)
I held my silence, and they led me back to the room. I knew the drill. I’d learned the hard way that it’s wise to keep silent when prison authorities abuse their power: everything you do enrages them, and everything you say makes it worse. Despotism despises nothing so much as righteousness in its victims. (Location 8150)
‘People say that money is the root of all evil,’ Khaled told me when we met in his apartment. His English was rich with accents of New York and Arabic and the Hindi that he spoke reasonably well. ‘But it’s not true. It’s the other way round. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Evil is the root of all money. There’s no such thing as clean money. All the money in the world is dirty, in some way, because there’s no clean way to make it. If you get paid in money, somebody, somewhere, is suffering for it. (Location 8400)
We became friends in the rapid, unquestioning way of criminals, soldiers, and other survivors of disaster. (Location 8513)
There’s a little arrogance at the heart of every better self. (Location 8528)
Pumping iron is Zen for violent men. (Location 8553)
But no matter how fit I became, I knew that my mind wouldn’t heal, (Location 8554)
Evening fills the streets with strolling crowds. (Location 8734)
Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.’ (Location 8815)
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love. (Location 8919)
If the circumstances are right, bits of matter will always come together to make more complex arrangements. (Location 9078)
The universe,’ he continued, ‘this universe that we know, began in almost absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex for about fifteen billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex than it is now. In five billion, in ten billion—it is always getting more complex. It is moving toward ... something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. We might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet might not get there, to that ultimate complexity. But we are all moving towards it—everything in the universe is moving towards it. And that final complexity, that thing we are all moving to, is what I choose to call God. If you don’t like that word, God, call it the Ultimate Complexity. Whatever you call it, the whole universe is moving toward it.’ (Location 9093)
We are never perfectly objective about anything, that is true, but we can be less objective, or we can be more objective. And when we define good and evil on the basis of what we know—to the best of our knowledge at the present time—we are being as objective as possible within the imperfect limits of our understanding. Do you accept that point?’ (Location 9132)
Note: Never perfectly
‘At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. (Location 9173)
There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others.’ (Location 9176)
‘I, too, felt very sceptical when I first began along this road. But I am now convinced that there is no better way to think of good and evil, at this time. (Location 9188)
I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, she said, it’s the other way around. (Location 9218)
‘As I said, we’re having this discussion about what it is that motivates people,’ Scorpio George pressed on, his Canadian accent and professorial manner combining in the documentary voice-over style that most irritated his English friend. ‘Y’see, Freud said we’re motivated by the drive for sex. Adler disagreed, and said that it was the drive for power. Then Victor Frankl, he said sex and power were important drives, but when you can’t get either one—no sex and no power—there’s still something else that drives us on and keeps us goin’—’ ‘Yes, yes, the drive for meaning,’ Gemini added. ‘Which is really just the same thing in different words. We have a drive for power because power gives us sex, and we have a drive for meaning because that helps us to understand sex. It all comes down to sex in the end, no matter what you call it. Those other ideas, they’re just the clothes, like. And when you get the clothes off, it’s all about sex, innit?’ (Location 9364)
I felt the scent-filled seconds expand around us. We were trapped, both of us, held fast, each in our different ways. And once again, we were about to set the web of our connection trembling. ‘Relax. I’ll help you if I can,’ I said, calmly and firmly. ‘Now, tell me about Karla.’ (Location 9396)
Note: Mooie overgang
Only the anarchists trust human beings enough to let them work it out for themselves. (Location 9643)
He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn’t understand. (Location 9919)
Millions of dreams were born there, around us, every day. Millions of dreams died there, and were born again. The humid air was thick with dreams, everywhere, in my Mumbai. (Location 10064)
I liked the week before monsoon: the tension and excitement I saw in others was like the involuted, emotional disquiet that I felt almost all the time. (Location 10261)
‘There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. (Location 10297)
For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.’ (Location 10322)
The same can be said for stealing. What would happen if everyone stole things? Would that help us, or would it hinder us?’ ‘Yeah. I get the point. If everyone was stealing off everyone else we’d be so paranoid, and we’d waste so much time and money on it, that it would slow us down, and we’d never get—’ ‘To the ultimate complexity’ he completed the thought for me. ‘This is why killing and stealing are wrong—not because a book tells us they are wrong, or a law tells us they are wrong, or a spiritual guide tells us they are wrong, but because if everyone did them we would not move toward the ultimate complexity that is God, with the rest of the universe. And the opposite of these is also true. Why is love good? Well, what would happen if everyone loved everyone else? Would that help us or would it hold us back?’ ‘It would help,’ I agreed, laughing from within the trap he’d set for me. ‘Yes. In fact, such universal love would greatly accelerate the move-ment toward God. Love is good. Friendship is good. Loyalty is good. Freedom is good. Honesty is good. We knew that these things were good before—we have always known this in our hearts, and all the great teachers have always told us this—but now, with this definition of good and evil, we can see why they are good. Just as we can see why stealing and lying and killing are evil.’ ‘But sometimes ...’ I protested, ‘you know, what about self-defence? What about killing to defend yourself?’ ‘Yes, a good point, Lin. I want you to imagine a scene for me. You are standing in a room with a desk in front of you. On the other side of the room is your mother. A vicious man holds a knife to the throat of your mother. The man will kill your mother. On the table in front of you there is a button. If you press it, the man will die. If you do not, he will kill your mother. These are the only possible outcomes. If you do nothing, your mother dies. If you press the button, the man dies and your mother is saved. What would you do?’ ‘The guy’s history’ I answered without hesitation. ‘Just so,’ he sighed, perhaps wishing that I’d wrestled with the decision a little longer before pressing the button. ‘And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?’ ‘The right thing,’ I said just as swiftly. ‘No, Lin, I’m afraid not,’ he frowned. ‘We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons ...’ (Location 10421)
I didn’t really want the truth. I was sick of truth, especially my own truth, and I couldn’t face it. So the thoughts and premonitions echoed and then whipped past me into the coils of humid wind. (Location 10451)
‘This is some guy’ Kavita muttered. ‘Yeah. Well, I never liked him. He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic, you know, and not because they actually feel anything worth smiling about. Kind of like the way a chimpanzee smiles.’ (Location 10597)
Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn’t be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame. (Location 10636)
There’s probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we’d learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy. On the other hand, the criminals in Khader’s network displayed a kind of egalitarianism that would’ve filled communists and Gnostic Christians with admiring envy. They didn’t care about the colour, creed, race, or political orientation of clients, and they didn’t judge them when asking about their past. Every life, no matter how innocent or evil, reduced to only one question: How bad do you need the book? The answer established the going rate, and every customer who had the money to pay it was born again, with no history and no sin, in the moment of the deal. No client was better than any other, and none was worse. (Location 10702)
Every passport bought by one of the war-lords or their apparatchiks bought fifty more books, identity cards, or travel documents for Iranian and Afghan refugees. Thus, in one of those psychic labyrinths that fate likes to build around greed and fear, the high prices paid by tyrants rescued many of those made wretched by tyranny. (Location 10716)
The effect, no matter how skilfully achieved, is always born in the artist’s intuition. And intuition can’t be taught. (Location 10723)
Like me, they were all running from something: they were all afraid of something that they couldn’t really forget or confront. (Location 10778)
His son, Satish, had grown in a rapid burst since his mother’s death. When I shook hands with him, I passed a hundred-rupee note in the press of hands. He accepted it just as secretively, and slid it into the pocket of his shorts. The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother’s death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression. I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that’s trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss. (Location 10798)
I wasn’t awed by the movie world, but I wasn’t immune to it either. (Location 10850)
I didn’t answer her. Of course I missed him. He was a good kid. I missed my daughter. I missed my mother and all of my family. I missed my friends: I missed them all and I was sure, in those desperate years, that I would never see them again. Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that—so far as I knew—they weren’t dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. And when I was alone in my apartment, night after night, that grieving and missing choked me. (Location 10966)
The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die. (Location 10973)
And from the pink and purple palette of the perished evening, a blue-black night rose up around us as we rode. We plunged with the sea-wind into tunnels of light. The robe of sunset slipped from the shoulders of the city. (Location 10977)
Red-lining a motorcycle means opening the throttle so hard, with every change of gears, that the needle on the rev-counter is twisted all the way round to the red zone of maximum revolutions. And that’s what we were doing, all of us, in our different ways, Karla and Didier and Abdullah and I: we were red-lining our lives. And Lisa. And Maurizio. Twisting the needle to the red zone. A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all. I wished he hadn’t said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace. (Location 11004)
I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men. And I was tough enough. I’d grown up in a rough, working-class neighbourhood, and I’d been fighting all my life. No-one in the prison system knew that then because I wasn’t a career criminal, and I had no history. I began my prison experience as a first offender. What’s more, I was an intellectual, and I sounded and acted like one. Some men respected that and some ridiculed it, but none of them feared it. Nevertheless, the long prison sentence that I was serving—twenty years at hard labour for armed robberies—gave most of them pause. I was a dark horse. No-one knew how I would respond to a real test, and more than a few were curious about it. (Location 11020)
That was one lesson he should’ve learned the first time. We don’t, of course. It’s okay, Karla once said, because if we all learned what we should learn, the first time round, we wouldn’t need love at all. (Location 11085)
I should’ve pitied him. Even if we never pity them at any other time, and in any other way, we should pity the dead when we look at them, and touch them. Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return and, because of that, every act of pity is a kind of prayer. (Location 11215)
I didn’t know then that good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict. (Location 11248)
I never admitted anything. I held her love in the vault of my heart while they tried to reach it through my skin and my bones. (Location 11270)
You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time. And somehow, in the weeks after Maurizio’s death, Modena’s face, or my mind’s picture of his gagged and bloody and staring face, became confused with my own memories of that love I’d lost in prison. I wasn’t sure why: there didn’t seem to be any special reason why Modena’s fate would twist itself into the strands of my own. But it did, and I felt a darkness growing within me that was too numb for sorrow and too cold for rage. (Location 11279)
They claim a hidden corner of our hearts, all those moments that stay with us unscreamed. That’s where loves, like elephants, drag themselves to die. It’s the place where pride allows itself to cry. (Location 11288)
I gave him time. (Location 11322)
The night that walked me, long after he left, was lonelier than most. (Location 11339)
Walking through the night, alone with the city for hours, I loved her with my wandering, just as I’d done when I lived in the slum. (Location 11357)
Write about the ladies. The sisters. Yes! But let me have the peace of my fate. (Location 11399)
‘All right! All right! I swear it. For God’s sake, I swear ... I won’t try to help you.’ His face relaxed, and the smile returned, burning my eyes with the beauty of it. (Location 11405)
I took a cab to my apartment and stood under a hot shower, scorching the slither and itch of memory from my skin. (Location 11419)
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and they change your life forever. (Location 11438)
Khaderbhai once said that if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom. (Location 11446)
It was black money, and black money runs through the fingers faster than legal, hard-earned money. If we can’t respect the way we earn it, money has no value. If we can’t use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose. (Location 11495)
‘Lin, a man has to find a good woman, and when he finds her he has to win her love. Then he has to earn her respect. Then he has to cherish her trust. And then he has to, like, go on doing that for as long as they live. Until they both die. That’s what it’s all about. That’s the most important thing in the world. That’s what a man is, yaar. A man is truly a man when he wins the love of a good woman, earns her respect, and keeps her trust. Until you can do that, you’re not a man.’ (Location 11525)
‘Fanaticism is the opposite of love,’ I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai’s lectures. A wise man once told me—he’s a Muslim, by the way—that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.’ (Location 11696)
Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city. I’d lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I’d lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. (Location 11899)
A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them. (Location 11913)
After the meeting, Lisa walked me to my bike parked at the sea wall on Marine Drive. We sat together at the precise spot where Abdullah had put his hand on my shoulder, years before, when my mind was filled with the drowning sea. We were lonely, Lisa and I, and at first we talked to one another as lonely people do—in fragments of complaint, and corners clipped from conversations that we’d already had with ourselves, alone. (Location 11922)
The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They’re wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, than they are by boots and batons. Tears begin in the heart, but some of us deny the heart so often, and for so long, that when it speaks we hear not one but a hundred sorrows in the heartbreak. We know that crying is a good and natural thing. We know that crying isn’t a weakness, but a kind of strength. Still, the weeping rips us root by tangled root from the earth, and (Location 12063)
We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain. Chief among them is the endorphin group. The endorphins are peptide neurotransmitters that have pain-relieving properties. Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natural coping mechanism. When we take any of the opiates—morphine or opium or heroin, in particular—the body stops producing endorphins. When we stop taking opiates, there’s a lag of between five and fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle. In the meanwhile, in that black, tortured crawlspace of one to two weeks without heroin and without endorphins, we learn what anxiety and stress and pain really are. (Location 12249)
A friend of mine has a strange, antimagnetic effect on machines: watches stop on her wrist, radio receivers crackle, and photocopy machines glitch whenever she’s near. My relationship with horses is something like that. (Location 12309)
One of the worst of my many failings, in those exile years, was my blindness to the good in people: I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or a woman until I owed them more than I could repay. People like Karla saw goodness with a glance, while I stared, and stared, and too often saw nothing past the scowl or bittering eye. (Location 12391)
have you ever had the feeling—about anything at all—that your whole life is kind of a prelude, or something—like everything you’ve ever done has been leading you up to this one point, and you knew, somehow, that one day you’d get there? (Location 12414)
‘I know, I know. It’s not the money thing,’ I frowned, searching for the words, rather than the emotion that had prompted them. (Location 12536)
I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow, in my solitary, unconnected mind. (Location 12645)
‘Did you arrange to have the Blind Singers here?’ I asked him, staring straight ahead and leaving the razor’s edge in my tone. ‘You know, just like you arranged everything else the first time we met?’ He remained silent until at last I turned to face him. When my eyes met his I felt the sting of impulsive tears, and I mastered them by grinding my jaws together. It worked, and my burning eyes remained dry, but my mind was in turmoil. The man with the cinnamon-brown skin and the trim, white beard had used and manipulated me and everyone else he knew as if we were his chained slaves. Yet there was such love in his golden eyes that it was, for me, the full measure of something I’d always craved from the innermost coils of my heart. The love in his softly smiling, deeply worried eyes was a father’s love: the only father-love I’d ever known. (Location 12697)
From the room next door, Khaled Ansari’s room, I heard the unmistakable clikka-k’chuck of a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle being (Location 12827)
There were thirty of us, all men, and for a moment I was reminded of the men who gathered in similar groups in prison yards. The fighters seemed tough and determined and, although many of them were lean to the point of being thin, they looked healthy and fit. (Location 12937)
You don’t ride a horse over a mountain, of course. You push and drag and sometimes help to carry a horse over a mountain. (Location 13070)
We travelled so often at night that we sometimes seemed to be feeling our way to Kandahar like blind men, with our fingertips. (Location 13124)
‘Do you know the English philosopher Bertrand Russell? Have you read any of his books?’ ‘Yeah. I read some of his stuff—at university, and in prison.’ ‘He was a favourite of my dear Mr. Mackenzie Esquire,’ Khader smiled. ‘I do not often agree with Bertrand Russell’s conclusions, but I do like the way he arrives at them. Anyway, he once said, Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there. And I do agree with him about that. But now, the answer to your question is this: life is a feature of all things. We could call it a characteristic, which is one of my favourite English words. If you do not speak English as your first language, the word “characteristic” has an amazing sound—like rapping on a drum, or breaking kindling wood for a fire. To continue, every atom in the universe has the characteristic of life. The more complex way that atoms get put together, the more complex is the expression of the characteristic of life. A rock is a very simple arrangement of atoms, so the life in a rock is so simple that we cannot see it. A cat is a very complex arrangement of atoms, so the life in a cat is very obvious. But life is there, in everything, even in a rock, and even when we cannot see it.’ ‘Where did you get this idea? Is it in the Koran?’ ‘Actually, it is a concept that appears in one way or another in most of the great religions. I have changed it slightly to suit what we have learned about the world in the last few hundred years. But the Holy Koran gives me my inspiration for this kind of study, because the Koran commands me to study everything, and learn everything, in order to serve Allah.’ ‘But where does this life characteristic come from?’ I insisted, sure that I had him trapped in a reductionist dead-end at last. ‘Life, and all the other characteristics of all the things in the universe, such as consciousness, and free will, and the tendency toward complexity, and even love, was given to the universe by light, at the beginning of time as we know it.’ ‘At the Big Bang? Is that what you’re talking about?’ ‘Yes. The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity—another of my favourite five-syllable English words—that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies no space and no time, as we know those things. (Location 13320)
He paused, watching my face as I struggled with the concepts and questions and emotions that looped in my mind. He got away from me again, I thought, suddenly furious with him for having an answer to my question, and yet struck with admiring respect for the same reason. There was always something eerily incongruous in the wise lectures—sometimes they were like sermons—of the mafia don Abdel Khader Khan. Sitting there against a stone wall in an all-but-Stone Age village in Afghanistan, with a cargo of smuggled guns and antibiotics nearby, the dissonance created by his calm, profound discourse about good and evil, and light and life and consciousness, was enough to fill me with exasperated irritation. ‘What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter,’ Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. ‘This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions, as I have done, you know that he has not passed the test.’ (Location 13342)
‘Remember,’ Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. ‘Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong—that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.’ (Location 13378)
A gloomy mood enwrapped me. It was a sullen, doubting temper that I couldn’t shake off, and as we rode into the winter I thought often of Anand Rao, my neighbour from the slum. I remembered Anand’s face smiling at me through the metal grille of the visitor’s room at Arthur Road Prison: that gentle, handsome face, so serene, and softened with the peace that had suffused his heart. He’d done the wrong thing for the right reasons, as he saw it. He’d calmly accepted the punishment that he’d earned, as he said to me, as if it was a privilege or a right. And at last, after too many thinking days and nights, I cursed Anand. I cursed him to drive him from my mind because a voice kept telling me—my own voice, or maybe it was my father’s—that I would never know that peace. I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart. (Location 13385)
It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved. (Location 13909)
They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. (Location 13957)
You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die. (Location 13959)
I accepted my fate, and even welcomed it. At last, I thought, I’m gonna get what I deserve. Somehow, that thought left me clean and clear. (Location 13968)
MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. (Location 13975)
I COULDN’T FACE the loss of Khaderbhai, my father-dream. I’d helped to bury him, for God’s sake, with my own hands. But I didn’t grieve, and I didn’t mourn him. There wasn’t enough truth in me for that kind of sorrowing because my heart wouldn’t believe him dead. I’d loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn’t believe that. I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. I didn’t know then, as I do now, that love’s a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn’t something you get; it’s something you give. (Location 14301)
All the cleverness in all the world couldn’t stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. (Location 14440)
And that was the elated moment I’d called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn’t any glory in it. There never is. There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun. (Location 14845)
Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. (Location 14940)
But reason didn’t play a big part in the guilt I’d felt, deep in my heart, since the moment I’d seen his dead face beneath its shroud of snow. Once I’d faced it, I couldn’t shake the shame. And somehow, the blame and repining sorrow changed me. (Location 15196)