Paris Spleen - Opening

1

THE STRANGER

"Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?"

"I have neither father, nor mother,  nor sister, nor brother."

"Your friends?"

"There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me unknown."

"Your fatherland?"

"I am unaware in what latitude it lies."

"Beauty?"

"I would willingly love her, goddess and immortal."

"Gold?"

"I hate it as you hate God."

"So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?"

"I love clouds... drifting clouds... there... over there... marvelous clouds!"

I want to thank Arudnhati Banerjee, Wllace Fowlie, Stephen Gendzier,

Richard Howard, and Harry Zohn for their generous readins and 

suggestions. To Janna, Jeremy, Aaron, and Sima Kaplan I express my love. 

This second edition has benefitted from the criticism and support of

Ryszard Engelking, Rosemary Lloyd, Laurence M. Porter,

Graham Robb, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, and my students.

Publisehd by the University of Georgia Press

Athens,  Georgia 30602

1989, 1997 by Edward K. Kaplan

All rights reserved.

Designed by Louis  OFarrell

Set in 11/13 Bodoni Book

The paper in this book meets  the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

A Sport And A Pastime - Closing

But of course, in one sense, Dean never died -- his existence is superior to such accidents. One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not laast forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten -- one hears of them no more.

As for Anne-Marie, she lives in Troyes now, or did. She is married. I suppose there are children. They walk together on Sundays, the sunlight falling upon them. They visit friends, talk, go home in the evening, deep in the life we all agree is so greatly to be desired.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 187

Before he boarded, the sun was already low at Orly. Almost no wind. A vast, malicious calm. In the distance, blue as winter, the dim roofs of the city. Smoke. The east growing dark. Aboard the plane all is brilliance. Dean sits at the window as they move, in the stillness of evening, towards the runway, the great tires bumping over the concrete joints. The seat-belts signs are lighted. The NO SMOKING is on. All of a sudden my imagination begins to panic, to rush from one thing to another. I have followed him so long I am sensitive to dangers. They turn smoothly into the direction for takeoff. All the perfect machinery of flight is beginning its motion. The huge, graceful wings are quivering. The engines roar. And now, at the  last moment, it begins to move, slowly, with a majesty I cannot bear,  for a long time seeming to go no faster until suddenly it is racing past, raising, clearing the ground. It climbs steeply. The soft darkness of the summer sky receives it. The lights grow fainter,, the sound, and finally all of France, invisible now, silent, the France of all seasons deep in the silence of night, is left behind.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 183

After they lie a long time in silence. There is nothing. Their poem is scattered about them. The days have fallen everywhere,  the have  collapsed  like cards. The air has a chill in it. He pulls the covers up. She is so perfectly still she seems asleep. He touches her face. It is wet with tears.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 175

He pulls his shirt out to show me the line. He grins. He is invincible. It's like a game of chess in which his pieces continually overpower me, but we have long ceased to contest. 

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 164

The sight of her fresh nakedness frightens him even more. Suddenly it is quite clear how acrobatic, how dangerous everything is. It seems not to be his own life he is living, but another, the life of some victim. It will all collapse. He wil have to find work, pay rent, walk home every day for lunch. He is weak suddenly, he doesn't believe in himself. She slips into the bed. A virtual panic comes over him. He lies motionless, his eyes  closed.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 119

A feast of love is beginning. Everything that has gone before is only a sort of introduction. Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 101

I have not gone deep enough, that's the thing. In solitude one must penetrate, one must endure. The icy beginning is where it is worst. One must pass all that. One must go forward all the way, through bitterness, through righteous feelings, adavncing upon it like a holy city, sensing the true joy. I try to summon it to me, to make it appear. I am certain it is there, but it does not come easily. Of  course not. One must waver. One must struggle. Beliefs are meant to cleave us to the bone. 

To Do List

• presentation
• proof-read
• conclusion recap.
• email.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 80

She has her moments. Still, it's dangerous to believe in what she seems to be. One often has the impression there is another, desperate woman underneath, but this is the extent of her power, this imtimation of sexual wealth. Billy always talks about how beautiful she is. It's almost as if he's protesting: but she is beautiful. And she is. Their life is arranged to exhibit this beauty. They treat it like the possession of a fine house.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 58

I am the pursuer. The essence of that is I am the one who knows while Dean does not, but still it is far from even. To begin with, no matter what I do, I can never uncover everything. That alone is enough to make him triumph. I can never anticipate; it is he who moves first. I am only the servant of life. He is an inhabitant. And above all, I cannot confront him, I cannot even imagine such a thing. The reason is simple: I am afraid of him, of all men who are successful in love. That is the sourse of his power.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 30

"Let's go somewhere for a drink," Cristina says.

He is silent.

"Billy?"

"Do you really want to?"

"Where can we go?"

"The Calvados," he says.

"Yes," she says, "let's go there."

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 22

She has been a famous actress, I recognize her. The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence -- she is made out of yesterdays. He is pointing out Evan Smith, whose wife is a Whitney. There are girls who work in the fashion houses, publishing. One meets a certain kind of people here, people with money and taste. 

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 17

None of this is true. I've said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre. I'm sure you'll come to realize that. I am only putting details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh. It's a story of things that never existed although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness. I only want whoever reads this to be as resigned as I am. There's enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn't exist, no, no, but this is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 15

This blue, indolent town. Its cats. Its pale sky. The empty sky of morning, drained and pure. Its deep, cloven streets. Its narrow courts, the faint, rotten odor within, orange peels  lying in the corners. The uneven curbstones, their edges worn away. A town of doctors, all with large houses. Cousson, Proby, Gilot. Even the streets are named for them. Passageways through the Roman wall. The Porte de Breuil, its iron railings sunk into the  stone like climber's spikes. The women come up the steep grade out of breath, their lungs creaking. A town still rich with bicycles. In the mornings they flow softly past. In the streets there's the smell of bread.

A Sport And A Pastime - pg. 10

Soon we are rushing along an alley of departure, the houses of the suburbs flashing by, ordinary streets, apartments, gardens, walls. The secret life of France, into which one cannot penetrate, the life of photograph albums, uncles, names of dogs that have died. And in ten minutes, Paris is gone. The horizon, dense with buildings, vanishes. Already I feel free.

A Sport And A Pastime - Opening

September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again.  It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. 

"Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime ..."

-Koran, LVII 19

Copyright 1967 by James Salter

Originally published by Doubleday & Co., Inc.,;

reprinted by arrangement

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Design by David Bullen

Cover art: "Grand  Hotel-Vittel,"

copyright David Hockney, 1970

All of the characters  in this book are fictitious,

and any resemblance to actual persons, living

or dead, is purely coincidental.

North Point Press

850 Talbot Avenue

Berkeley, California

94706

Wolf Solent - pg. 455

"There must be," he thought, "some deep race-memory in which these things are stored up, to be drawn upon by those who seek for them through the world -- a memory that has the power of obliterating infinite debris, while it retains all these frail essences, these emanations from plants and trees, roadsides and gardens as if such things actually possessed immortal souls!" He turned from the gate and pursued his road, swinging his stick from side to side like a madman,  and repeating aloud, as he strode  along, the words "immortal souls."

Wolf Solent - pg. 453

Roads and lanes! Lanes and roads! What a part these tracks for the feet of men and beasts, dusty in Summer, muddy in Winter, had played in his mental consciousness! The thrill that this idea of roadways gave him was a proof to him that his mind was returning to its independent orbit, after its plunge into that maternal hypnosis. His spirit felt indeed deliciously free just then, and expanded its wings to its heart's content, like a great flapping rook. Every object of the way took on an especial glamour; and never had he enoyed so deeply one peculiar trick of his mind. This was a certain queer, sensuous sympathy he could fell sometimes for completely unknown people's lives, as he passed by their dwellings. He enjoyed it now with especial satisfaction, thinking of the people in each cottage he came to, and gathering their experiences together as one might gather a bunch of ragwort  or hemp-agrimony out of the dusty hedges. 

Wolf Solent - pg. 431

Airy and light as it now was, his soul seemed to have been liberated in some secret way from all that clogged and burdened it. The slave-galleon of his manias rocked and tossed on a smooth tide; but his soul, like a careless  albatross, rode on the masthead. There was a strange humming and singing from the galleon itself, as if the immense peace of that summer night had turned it into a trireme of deliverance, carrying liberated pilgrims to the harbour where they would be. Something unutterable, some clue, some signal, had touched the dark bulkheads of this night-voyager; so that hereafter all might be different. What was this clue? All he knew about it now was that it meant the acceptance of something monstrously comic in his inmost being, something comic and stupid, together with something as grotesquely non-human as the sensations of an ichthysaurus! But once having accepted all this, everything was magically well. "Christie! Christie!" he cried in his heart, longing to tell her about it.

Wolf Solent - pg. 425

He left the Lovelace after drinking a pint of Dorchester ale. The night was cool and fragrant. The sky was covered now by a grey film of feathery clouds, through which neither moon nor stars were visible except as a faint diffused luminosity, which lifted the weight of darkness from the earth, but turned the world into a place of phantoms and shadows.

Wolf Solent - pg. 408

... and during the lingered-out and shameless caresses which he enjoyed before he would let her approach the stove, Wolf was compelled to come to the conclusion that erotic delight has in itself the power of becoming a kind of absolute. He felt as if it became a sort of ultimate essence into which the merely relative emotions of the two preoccupied ones sank -- indeed were so utterly lost that a new identity dominated the field of their united consciousness, the admirable identity of amorousness in itself, the  actual spiritual form, or "psychic being," of the god Eros!

2666 - Closing

Suddenly the park lights came on, although  there was a second total darkness, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg.

The genetleman sighed, he must have been about seventy, and then he said:

"A mysterious legacy, don't you think?"

"You're right, I do," said Archimboldi as he got up and took his leave of the descendant of Furst Puckler.

Soon afterward he left the park and the next morning he was on his way to Mexico.

2666 - pg. 887

The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere: all that was left were the children, their parents, the animals, some neighbors, and in the end, all that was really left was nature, a nature that dissolved little by little in a boiling cauldron until it vanished completely.

2666 - pg. 880

At night there were many televangelist shows. The Mexican televangelists were easy to identify: they were dark-skinned and sweated a lot and their suits and ties looked as if they'd been bought secondhand, although they were probably new. Also: their sermons were more dramatic, more showy, with more audience participation, though the audiences seemed drugged and utterly destitute, unlike the audiences  of the American televangelists, who were just as poorly dressed but at least seemed to have steady jobs.

2666 - pg. 879

That night Lotte dreamed for the first time in a long time about her brother. She saw Archimboldi walking in the desert, dressed in shorts and a little straw hat, and everything around him was sand, one dune after another all the way to the horizon. She shouted something to him, she said stop, there's nowhere to go, but Archimboldi kept moving farther away, as if he wanted to lose himself forever in that unfathomable and hostile land.

"It's unfathomable and hostile," she told him, and only then did she realize that she was a girl again,, a girl who lived in a Prussian village  between the forest and the sea.

"No," said Archimboldi, and he seemed to whisper in her ear, "it's just boring, boring, boring ..."

2666 - pg. 862

Occasionally they talked about saints, because the baroness, like some women with intense sex lives, had a mystical streak, although hers was relatively benign ad was satisfied aesthetically or through her collector's enthusiasm for medieval altarpieces and carvings.

To Do List

• Meeting
• plot revisions
• slide outlines

2666 - pg. 858

"That apple has a scent at night," said the essayist. "When I turn out the light. It smells as strongly as Rimbaud's 'Voyelles.' But everything collapses in the end," said the essayist. "Everything collapses in pain. All eloquence springs from pain."

2666 - pg. 848

 When he had finished reading, Archimboldi read the whole story again and then a third time and then he got up shaking and went for a walk around Missolonghi, which was full of memorials to Byron, as if Byron had done nothing in Missolonghi but stroll about, from inn to tavern, from backstreet to little square, when it was common knowledge that he had been too ill tomove and it was Thanatos who walked and looked and took note. Thanatos who visited not just in search of Byron but also as a tourist, because Thanatos is the biggest tourist on Earth.

2666 - pg. 831

"An old book is the past, too," said Archimboldi, "a book written and published in 1789 is the past, its author no longer exists, neither does its printer or the ones who read it first or the time when it was written, but the book, the first edition of that book, is still here. Like the pyramids of the Aztecs," said Archimboldi.

Wolf Solent - 394

But never again can God look down

As He did of old upon country and town!

In His huge heart, hidden all Space beyond,

There bides the curse of Lenty Pond;

The curse of the Slow-Worm, by Lenty willow,

Who pitied the elf on her tear-wet pillow,

Her pillow woven of pond-weeds green

Where the willow's twigs made a leafy screen;

And the purple loosestrife and watercress

Whisper above her sorrowfulness.

2666 - pg. 802

Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.

2666 - pg. 800

That night, as he was working the door at the bar, he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movemment of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi's only wish was never to inhabite either.

2666 - pg. 785

... one day I understood that I might go so far as to publish excellent articles in magazines and newspapers, and even books that weren't unworthy of the paper on which they were printed. But I also understood that I would never manage to create anything like a masterpiece. You may say that literature doesn't consist solely of masterpieces, but rather is populated by so-called minor works I believed that, too. Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, pddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wild-flowers.  I was wrong. There's actually no such thing as a minor work. I mean: the author of the minor work isn't Mr. X or Mr. Y Mr. X and Mr. Y do exist, there's no question about that, and they struggle and toil and publish in newspapers and magazines and sometimes they even come out with a book that isn't unworthy of the paper it's printed on, but those books or articles, if you pay close attention, are not written by them.

2666 - pg. 768

They only fucked whores, as far as Reiter could tell from what he saw on the job. There were some women who dated the occupying forces, but even for them desire was really the mask of something else: a theater of innocence, a frozen slaughterhouse, a lonely street, a movie theater. The women he saw were like girls who've just woken from a terrible nightmare.

2666 - pg. 767

"Anyone else in my place," said Sammer to Reiter,  "would have killed all those Jews with his own hands. I didn't. It isn't in my nature."

2666 - pg. 763

I had them brought into the town hall and I headed there myself with my secretaries and driver. When I saw them, so terribly pale, so terribly thin, so terribly in need of soccer and alcohol, I felt sorry for them. Standing motionless there, they seemed less  like children than like the skeletons of children, abandoned sketches, pure will and bone.

2666 - pg. 741

And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules (in uprisings that could be bloody, but didn't therefore cease to be semblance), it set new rules.

National Socialism was te ultimate realism of semblance. As a general rule, he reflected, love was also a semblance. My love for Lotte isn't semblance. Lotte is my sister and she's little and she thinks I'm a giant. But love, ordinary love, the love of a man and a woman, with breakfasts and dinners, with jealousy and money and sadness, is playacting, or semblance. Youth is the semblance of strength, love is the  semblance of peace. Neither youth nor strength nor love nor peace can be granted to me, he said to himself with a sigh, nor can I accept such a gift. Only Ansky's wandering isn't semblance, he thought, only Ansky at fourteen isn't semblance. Ansky lived his whole life in rabid immmature becasue the revolution, the one true revolution, is also immature. 

2666 - pg. 721

The Chinese leader sings. How were the stars created? Who are we in the middle of the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain?

2666 - pg. 720

They talk. Often, their conversation is unintelligible. The subjects they address are varied: foreign languages, national monuments, the last days of Karl Marx, worker solidarity, the time of the change measured in Earth years and stellar years, the discovery of America as a stage setting, an unfathomable void -- as painted by Dore -- of masks. Then the boy follows the extraterrestrial away from the road and they walk through a wheat field, cross a stream, climb a hill, cross another field, until they reach a smoldering pasture. 

Wolf Solent - pg. 387

The extraordinary thing was that all that poetry  of his first encounter with Gerda seemed like something that had happened to some external portion of his nature, whereas this strange new understanding with Christie sank so deep into his being that it invaded regions of which he himself had hardly been aware.

Wolf Solent - pg. 333

Happiness, such as he had rarely rexperienced, flooded his being; and the fantastic idea came into his head that if he were to die now he would in some subtle way cheat death. 

"I must remember this moment," he said to himself. "Whatever happens to me henceforth, I must remember this moment, and be grateful to the gods!"

Wolf Solent - pg. 261

"I'll live in my own world to the end," he said to himself. "Nothing shall make me yield."

Wolf Solent - pg. 217

The face upon Waterloo steps gave you your happiness. It was the only gift it could give. Between your happiness and that face there was an umbilical cord. All suffering was a martyr's suffering,  all happiness was a martyr's happiness, when once you got a glimpse of that cord! It was the existence in the world of those two gross vulgar parodies of life,  ennui and pleasure, that confused the issues, that blighted the distinctions.

Wolf Solent - pg. 214

There were filmy clouds floating there that seemed to be drifting like the scattered feathers of enormous albatrosses in a pearl-white sea; annd behind these feathery travellers was the milky ocean on which they floated. But even that was not all; for the very ocean seemed broken here annd there into hollow spaces, ethereal gulfs in the fleecy whiteness; and through these gulfs was visible a pale yellowish mist, as if the universal air were reflecting millions of primrose-buds! Nor was even this vaporous luminosity the final revelation of those veiled heavens. Like the entrance to some great highway of the ether, whose air-spun pavement was not the colour of dust, but the colour of torquoise, there, at one single point above the  horizon, the vast blue sky showed through. Transcending both the filmy whiteness and the vaporous  yellowness, hovering there above the marshes of Sedgemoor, this celestial Toll-Pike of the Infinite seemed to Wolf, as he walked towards it, like some entrance into an unknown dimension, into which it was not impossible to pass! Though in reality it was the background of all the clouds that surrounded it, it seemed in some mysterious way nearer than they were. It seemed like a harbour into which the very waters of the Lunt might flow. That incredible patch of blue seemed something into which he could plunge his hands and draw them forth again, filled like overflowing cups with the very ichor of happiness. Ah! that was  the word. It was pure happiness, that blue patch!

 

Wolf Solent - pg. 204

The whole house looked as though its owner had long since relinquished every kind of effort to get that personal happiness out of life which is the inheritance of the meanest. Its shabby desolation seemed to project, in opposition to every human instinct, a forlorn emptiness that was worse than squalor. Its effect upon Wolf's senses was  ghastly. No one could conceive a return to such a house as a return "home"! What it meant was simply that this wretched little priest had no home. The basic human necessity for some degree of cheerfulness in one's lair was outraged and violated.

Wolf Solent - pg. 201

She had come prepared to avenge herself in her own magnificent way -- not basically, but still with formidable success. She had not come to Ramsgard to efface herself. And now, being here, being encamped, as Miss Gault said, on the very edge of his burying-ground, she could not refrain, just out of pure, suppressed high spirits, from sitting up the mud of the ambiguous past. Well! The event must work itself out. In no sense was he responsible ...

Wolf Solent - pg. 191

Wolf slid with a jerk into the normal world as he heard this sound, like a man falling plumb-down from a sky-light upon a creaking floor.

To Do List

• Future Work Revision
• Meetings 
• Conclusion Revision

2666 - pg. 714

For Ivanov, a real writer, a real artist and creator, was basically a responsible person with a certain level of maturity. A real writer had to know when to listen and when to act. He had to be reasonably enterprising and reasonably learned. Excessive learning aroused jealousy and resentment. Excessive enterprise aroused suspicion. A real writer had to be someone relatively cool-headed, a man with common sense. Someone who didn't talk too loud or start polemics. He had to be reasonably pleasant and he had to know how not to make gratuitous enemies. Above all, he had to keep his voice down, unless everyone else was raising his. A real writer had to be aware that behind him he had the Writer Workers, Poet House. What's the first thing a man does when he comes into a church? Efraim Ivanov asked himself. He takes off his hat. Maybe he doesn't cross himself All right, that's allowed. We're modern. But the least he can do is bare his head! Adolescent writers, meanwhile, come into a church and don't take off their hats even when they're beaten with sticks, which is, regrettably, what happens in the end. And not only do they not take off their hats: they laugh, yawn, play the fool, pass gas. Some even applaud.

2666 - pg. 689

The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were  left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles  until he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his  horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear.

2666 - pg. 683

Hoensch said that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. The young scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy. The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry.The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg said culture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officers said  culture was Wagner and that was enoguh for him  too. The other general staff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that was enough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man.

2666 - pg. 673

One night someone told  them that Denmark and Norway had surrendered. That night Hans dreamed of his father. He saw the one-legged man, wrapped in his old military cloak, staring out at the Baltic and wondering where the island of Prussia had hidden itself. 

2666 - pg. 642

"The Welsh are swine," said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son. "Absolute swine, The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh. Though really they're the same, but  they make an effort not to seem it, and since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The Scots are bigger swine than the English and only a little better than the Welsh. The French are as bad as the Scots. The Italians are little swine. Little swine ready and wiling to gobble up their own swine mother. The same can be said of the Austrians: swine, swine, swine. Never trust a Hungarian. Never trust a Bohemian. They'll lick your hand while they devour your little finger. Never trust a Jew: he'll eat your thumb and leave your hand covered in slobber. The Bavarians are also swine. When you talk to a Bavarian, son, make sure you keep your belt fastened tight. Better not to talk to Rhinelanders at all: before the cock crows they'll try to saw off your leg. The Poles look like chickens, but pluck four feathers and you'll see they've got the skin of swine. Same with the Russians. They look like starving dogs but they're really starving swine, swine that'll eat anyone, without a second thought, without the slightest remorse. The Serbs are the same as the Russians, but miniature. They're like swine disguised as  Chihuhuas. Chihuahuas are tiny dogs, the size of a sparrow, that live in the north of Mexico and are seen in some American movies. Americans are swine, of course. And Canadians are big  ruthless swine, although the worst swine from Canada are the French-Canadians, just as the worst swine from America are the Irish-America swine. The Turks are no better. They're sodomite swine, like the Saxons and the Westphalians. All I can say about te Greeks is that they're the same as the Turks: bald, sodomite swine. The only people who aren't swine are the Prussians. But Prussia no longer exists. Where is Prussia? Do you see it? I don't. Sometimes I imagine that while I was in the hospital, that filthy swine hospital, there was a mass migration of Prussians to some faraway place. Sometimes I go out to the rocks and gaze at the Baltic and try to guess where the Prussian ships sailed.  

James Graham Ballard

he great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character; it’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years; it interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when you turn to the present [...] I feel that what one needs is a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a whole stream of random events is taking place.

2666 - pg. 639

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think -- two very different men -- said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. 

2666 - pg. 627

According to Loya, it isn't unusual for one of them to die with
no one the wiser, or simply to disappear, drawn by the simurgh, the 
mythical giant flying creature of the desert.

2666 - pg. 624

I am sick of Mexicans who talk and act as if this is all Pedro Paramo, I said.

2666 - pg. 559

Living in this desert, thought Lalo Cura as the car, with Epifaio at the wheel, left the field,  is like living at sea. The border between Sonora and Arizona is a chain of haunted or enchanted islands. The cities and towns are boats. The desert is an endless sea. This is a good place for fish, especially deep-sea fish, not men.

2666 - pg. 558

In 1976, the young Maria Exposito met two students from Mexico City in the desert who said they were lost but appeared to fleeting something and who, after a dizzying week, shhe never saw again. The students lived in their car and one of them seemed to be sick. They looked as if they were high on something and they talked a lot and didn't eat anything, although she brought them tortillas and beans that she snuck from home. They talked, for example, about a new revolution, an invisible revolution that was already brewing but wouldn't hit the streets for at least fifty years. Or five hundred. Or five thousand. The students had been to Villa viciosa but what they wanted to find the highway to Ures or Hermosillo.  Each night they made love to her, in the car or on the warm desert sand, until one morning she came to meet them and they were gone. 

2666 - pg. 550

Not reading, it might be said was the highest expression of atheism
or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. It you don't believe 
in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.

2666 - pg. 527

And if those supercops were so fucking great how come they're ex-fuckers now?

2666 - pg. 511

Every life, Epifannio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you're shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don't hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you're off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?

Destroyer: City of Daughters

Oh, City of Daughters,
is that what you wanted to be?
Oh, City of Daughters,
is that what you wanted to be?
Oh, City of Daughters,
is it not safe to say you've come when called?
A minor point of contention:
It's the pointlessness of the invention.
Trust, there's no need to remind us
we're all dying alone tonight!

In a City of Daughters.
Sister, I confess, I have forgotten just what it is that you wanted to be.
Fluffing and a-folding those clothes that you were sold in
to servicing what it is you always wanted to be.
In Vancouver, things are simple when they fit you to a "T".
Once again, you have refused the new pornographies
A minor bone of contention:
It's the soullessness of the convention.
Rock 'n' Roll sure came through for you.
Why would anybody want it to?

What is it about music that lends itself so well
To business-as-fucking-usual?
A minor source of contention:
the resourcelessness of the convention.
Rock 'n' Roll sure came through for you.
Why would anyone want it to
when we can burn the living
proof, go!

2666 - pg. 447

I'll send you some money on your daughter's behalf, said Harry Magana. God bless you, said the woman. No, senora, bless your daughter, said Harry MAgana. So be it, said the woman, God bless my daughter, and you too.

2666 - pg. 437

There were eight books, and at first, so as not to make trouble, he took three: Techniques for Police Instructors by John C. Klotter, The Informer in Law Enforcement by Malachi L. Harney and John C. Cross, and Modern Criminal Investigation by Harry Soderman and John J. O' Connell.

2666 - pg. 396

Twenty minutes later a patrol car showed up.

2666 - pg. 384

Fifteen days later they would see each other again and everything would be just as it had been the time before. Of course, there wasn't always a party at a house nearby and sometimes the director couldn't or didn't want to drink, but the dim light was always the same, the shower was always repeated, the sunsets and the mountains never changed, the stars were the same stars.

2666 - pg. 378

Sacraphobia said the inspector. And what's that? asked Gonzalez. Fear and hatred of sacred objects, said the inspector. According to him, the Penitent didn't desecrated churches with the premeditated intent to kill. The deaths were accidental. The Penitent just wanted to vent his rage on the images of the saints.

Wolf Solent - pg. 145

Advancing up this lane hand in hand with his companion, Wolf felt his soul invaded by that peculiar kind of melancholy which emanates, at the end of a spring day, from all the elements of earth and water. It is a sadness unlike all others, and has perhaps some mysterious connection with the swift, sudden recognition, by myriads and myriads of growing things, of the strange fatality that pursues all earthly life, whether clothed in flesh or clothed in vegetable fibre. It is a sadness accentuated by grey skies, grey water, and grey horizons; but it does not seem to attain its most significant meaning until the pressure of the Spring adds to these elemental wraiths the intense wistfulness of young new life.

Wolf Solent - pg. 141

His ruddy face, under its rough crop of coarse, bleached hair, resembled a red sandstone cliff on the top of which a whitish-yellow patch of whithered grass bowed before the wind.

Wolf Solent - pg. 120

"I suppose it's funny to talk in such a way," she went on. "but all these queer non-human abstractions, like Spinoza's 'substance' and Leibnitz's 'monads' and Hegel's 'idea,' don't stay hard and logical to me. They seem to melt."

Wolf Solent - pg. 113

It was quite dark now; and the north wind, whistling through the blackthorn-hedges, sighing through the tops of the trees, whimpering in the telegraph-wires, had begun to acquire that peculiar burden of impersonal sadness, which seems to combine the natural sorrows of the human generations with some strange planetary grief whose character is unrevealed.

Wolf Solent - pg. 111

The young girl turned upon Wolf her steady,, unprovocative, indulgent gaze. "Perhaps," she said quietly, after a moment in which Wolf felt as though his mind had encountered her mind like two bodiless shadows in a flowing river - "perhaps in this case it will be different. Would you marry her if it were different?" These words were added in a tone that had the sort of faint aqueous mischief in it, such as a water-nymph might have indulged in, contemplating the rather heavy earth-loves of a pair of mortals.

Wolf Solent - pg. 105

Wolf, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable, bent down and occupied himself by picking up the fallen table, glue-pot, and the folio. As he did this he began to grow aware of a sensation resembling that which he had felt in Mr. Urquhart's library -- the sensation of the presence of forms of human obliquity completely new in his experience.

2666 - pg. 301

Fate heard an accordion and some far-off shouts, not of sorrow or joy, but of pure energy, self-sufficient and self-consuming.

2666 - pg. 280

"That shithead is one of ours," said Chucho Flores.

...

"El Mariachi?" asked Fate.

"No, everybody's seen that one. An earlier one, from when Robert Rodriguez was a nobody. When he was just a piss-poor Chicano motherfucker. A fuckup who took any gig he could get." said Chucho Flores.

2666 - pg. 269

"...Sunsets in the deset seem like they'll never end, until suddenly, before you know it, theyr're done. It's like someone just turned out the lights." said the cook.

2666 - pg. 254

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. But really, there's just one star and that star isn't semblance, it isn't metaphor, it doesn't come from any dream or any nightmare. We have it right outside. It's the sun.

2666 - pg. 251

I learned to combine cooking with history. I learned to combine cooking with the thankfulness and confusion I felt at the kindness of so many people, from my late sister to countless others. And let me explain something. When I say confusion, I also mean awe. In other words, the sense of wonderment at a marvelous thing, like the lilies that bloom and die in a single day, or azaletas, or forget-me-nots. 

2666 - pg. 227

Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.

2666 - pg. 226

I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time. Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. I don't know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry -- and let me be  clear, only some of it -- is good for you, only poetry isn't shit.

2666 - pg. 172

We'll live like mendicants or child prophets while Paris trains a distant eye on fashion, movies, games of chance, French and American literature, gastronomy, the gross domestic product, arms exports, the manufacture of massive batches of anesthesia, all mere backdrop for our fetus's first few months.

Wolf Solent - pg. 87

He walked very slowly now, peering at the yards and shops on both sides of the road; and as he walked, a curious trance-like sensation came over him, the nature of which was very complicated, though no doubt it had something to do with the emptiness of his stomach. But it took the form of making him feel as if he were retracing some sequence of events through which long ago he had already passed.

 

Wolf Solent - pg. 82

It didn't worry him that it was Friday. The nature of the day, its cloudiness, its gustiness, its greyness, suited his mood completely. It seemed to carry his mind far, far back -- back beyond any definite recollections. The look of the oak palings; the look of the mud; the look of the branches, with their scarcely budded embryo leaves swaying in the wind -- all these things hit his imagination with a sudden accumulated force. He rubbed his hands; he prodded the ground with his stick; he strode forward with great strides.

Wolf Solent - pg. 68

Dressed in neat, dark-blue serge, Jason Otter had the quiet, self-composed air of a much-travelled man of the world. His clean-shaven face, framed by prematurely grey hair, was massively and yet abnormally expressive. Forehead and chin were imposing and commanding; but his effort was diminished and almost negated by the peculiar kind of restless misery displayed in the lines of the mouth. The man's eyes were large and greay; and instead of glancing aside in the way Darnley's did, they seemed to cry out for help without cessation or intermission.

Wolf Solent - pg. 61

It was as if in that slow sinking into sleep his soul had to pass all the long, previous, evolutionary stages of planetary life, and be conscious with the consciousness of vegetable things and mineral things. This is what made every material substance of such supernal importance to him -- of an importance which perhaps material substances really did possess,  if all were known.

Wolf Solent - pg. 59

As he grew sleepy, all manner of trivial occurences and objects of this adventurous day began rising up before him,  emphasizing themselves, out of all proportion to the rest, in a strange half-feverish panorama. The long, enchanted road revealed in that Gainsborough picture hovered before him and beckoned him to follow it.  The abrupt apologies of Roger Monk melted into the furtive exhortations of the old woman in the blue apron. Framed in the darkness that closed in upon him, the coarse black hairs, that had refused to be reduced to a wig, metamorphosed themselves into similar hairs, growing, as he knew that could grow, upon a long-dead human skull! The jogging grey haunches of the mare that had brought him from Ramsgard confused themselves with the grey paws of the cat upon Selena Gault's knees.

Wolf Solent - pg. 48

Uttering these words in the same low voice that made Wolf think of the unrolling of some great, rich bundle of Chinese silk, he offered his left hand to his visitor aand kept his right still leaning upon the handle of the stick that supported him

Wolf Solent - pg. 40

To his right, as they drove along, the ground sloped upwards -- cornfield after cornfield of young green shoots -- to the great main ridge between Dorset and Somerset, along which -- only a mile or so away, his companion told him -- lay the main highway, famous in West Country history, between Ramsgard and Blacksod, and also between - so Mr. Otter assured him -- Salisbury and Exeter.

2666 - pg. 112

It made them laugh it seemed so chaotic. Until then they hadn't been in good spirits. They had looked at things and listened to the people who could help them, but only as a part of a grander scheme. On the ride back to the hotel, they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn't the word, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn't make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.

2666 - pg. 90

"Coincidence is a luxury, it's the flip side of fate, and something else besides," said Johns.

2666 - pg. 73

Which led Espinoza to remark that he'd be damned if the cabbie hadn't just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrinth - unintentionally of course. To which Norton replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their descriptions of London. This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets as well as he should, that's why he'd said they were like a labyrinth, but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the same word they had for it in London as it happened, and the word was bitch or slut or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents, weren't English, also had a name in his country and that name was pimp or hustler or whoremonger.

2666 - pg. 74

When they stopped kicking him they were sunk for a few seconds in the strangest calm of their lives. It was as if they'd finally had the menage a trois they'd so often dreamed of.

2666 - pg. 69

"Do you want some advice?" he asked. Pelletier gazed at him  in alarm. "I know you don't, old man, but here it is. Be careful," said Pritchard..

"Careful of what?" Pelletier managed to ask.

"Of the Medusa," said Pritchard. "Beware of the Medusa."

And the, before he continued down the stairs, he added: "When you've got her in your hands she'll blow you to pieces."

2666 - pg. 64

In theory, it must have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a strong sense of any such virtue. Both of them paid lip service, of course. But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization.

2666 - pg. 47

Who was the person at the bottom of the pool? Morini could still see him or her, a tiny speck trying to climb the rock that had now become a mountain, and the sight of this person, so faw away, filled his eyes with tears and made him deeply and inconsolably sad, as if he were seeing his first love wandering in a labyrinth. Or himself, with legs that still worked, lost on a hopeless climb. Also, and he couldn't help it, and it was good that he didn't, he thought he looked like a painting by Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon.

2666 - pg. 43

I'd love her until the end of time, he thought. An hour later he'd already forgotten the matter completely.

2666 - pg. 10

They spent the free time they had, which was ample, strolling the paltry (in Pelletier's opinion) sites of interest in Augsburg, a city that Espinoza also found paltry, and that Morini found only mmoderately paltry, but still paltry in the final analysis, while Espinoza and Pelletier took turns pushing the Italian's wheelchair since Morini wasn't in the best of health this time, but rather in paltry health, so that his two friends and colleagues considered that a little bit of fresh air would do him no harm, and in fact night do him good.

Wolf Solent - pg. 28

But though his emotions were cold, his imagination worked freely. The few feet of Dorsetshire clay, the half-inch of brittle West Country elm-wood, that separated him from the up-turned skull of his begetter, were like so much transparent glass. He looked down into William Solent's empty eye-sockets, and the empty eye-sockets looked back at him. Steadily, patiently, indifferently they looked back; and between the head without a nose looking down there passed a sardonic wordless dialogue. "So be it," the son said to himself. "I won't forget. Whether there are plantains or whether there aren't plantains, the universe shan't fool me." "Fool me; fool me," echoed the fleshless skull from below.

Wolf Solent - pg. 27

She did not wait for him, but made er way with long, rapid strides to the extreme corner of the enclosure. Her swinging arms, her gaunt figure, her erratic gait, set the man's mind thinking once more of various non-human animals.

Wolf Solent - pg. 15

And then suddenly broke in upon the traveller, as he resumed his seat, with his coat and stick and bag spread out before him, the thought of how those particualr syllables - "Longborne Port!" - mingling with the clatter of milk-cans, would reproduce to some long-dead human skull, roused to sudden consciousness after centuries of non-existence, the very essence of the familiar life upon earth! 

Wolf Solent - pg. 11

It was, however, when staying in his grandmother's house at Weymouth, that the word had come to him which he now always used in his own mind to describe these obsessions. It was the word "mythology"; and he used it entirely in a private sense of his own. He could remember very well where he first came upon the word. It was in a curious room, called "the ante-room," which was connected by folding-doors with his grandmother's drawing-room, and which was filled with the sort of ornamental debris that middle-class people were in the habit of acquiring in the early years of Queen Victoria.

Wolf Solent - pg. 7

But the Basingstoke church-tower substituted itself for the image of the cow; and it seemed to Solent as though all the religions in the world were nothing but so many creaking and splashing barges, whereon the souls of men ferried themselves over those lakes of primal silence, disturbing the swaying water-plants that grew there and driving away the shy water-fowl!

Wolf Solent - pg. 5

In the dusty, sunlit space of that small tobacco-stained carriage, he seemed to see, floating and helpless, an image of the whole round earth! And he saw it bleeding and victimized, like a smooth-bellied, vivisected frog. He saw it hawked at out of the humming air. He saw it netted in a quivering entanglement of vibrations, heaving and shuddering under the weight of iron and stone.

Wolf Solent - Opening

THE FACE ON THE WATERLOO STEPS

FROM WATERLOO STATION TO THE SMALL COUNTRY

town of Ramsgard in Dorset is a journey of not more than three or four hours, but having by good luck found a compartment to himself, Wolf Solent was able to indugle in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

TO

FATHER HAMILTOON COWPER JOHNSON

JOHN COWPER POWYS

WOLF SOLENT

A NOVEL

1929

SIMON AND SCHUSTER

NEW YORK

Don Juan - Opening

Dedication

I

Bob Southey! You're a poet, poet laureate,

And representative of all the race.

Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at

Last, yours has lately been a common case.

And now my epic renegade, what are ye at

With all the lakers, in and out of place?

A nest o f tuneful persons, to my eye

Like 'four and twenty blackbirds  in a pye,

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth,

Middlesex, England

Penguin Books Inc, 7110 Ambassador Road,

Baltimore, Md 21207,  USA

Penguin Books Australia  Ltd,

Ringwood Victoria, Australia

First published 1973

Text, introduction and notes copyright T. G. Steffan,

E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt, 1973

Made and printed in Great Britain by

Hazell Watson & Viney ltd,

Aylesbury, Bucks

Set in Monotype Ehrhardt

This book is sold subject to the condition that

it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated  without

the publisher's prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it is

published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on

the subsequent purchaser.

Destroyer: An Actor's Revenge

An actor will seek revenge.
I don't know why and I don't know when.
There'll be talk. There'll be action.
Boys demanding satisfaction
From girls. Oh, you'd hate to play a girl!
An actor will seek revenge...

He came on too strong.
He was weird and he was wrong.
A bloodless cop at dawn
Throwing everybody out.
The kids twist and shout until the womb fucking wrecks it!

A boulevardier might say -
"Tomorrow's another day."
Alright, yes, but it's also just another mess!
Crime and Punishment - no, that's not what I meant!

An actor will seek revenge.
I don't know why and I don't know when.
There'll be talk. There'll be action.
Boys demanding satisfaction
From girls. Oh, you'd hate to be a girl!
An actor will seek revenge
Upon the ones who fed him those ridiculous lines
Saying - "What we really need now is an emotional history
Of the Lower Eastside, cause it was wild! It was wild!"
Oh no, here we go again...

(Ba da, ba da, ba da, ba da... Ba da, ba da, ba da, ba da da ba da!)

India After Gandhi - pg. 189

Some want to revive the tradition of Shivaji and to hoist the Bhagwa Jhanda in Samyukta Maharashtra; others wish to extend the economic empire of the Bombay and Ahmedabad millionaires all over Maha-Gujarat. Provincial prejudices, rivalries and jealousies are being revived on all sides and everyone seems anxious to separate from, rahter than untie with the others. The Assamese want this bit of land cut off from Bengal, the Bengalis want a slice of Bihar, the Telugus are discontented in Orissa, the Tamilian minority wants to cut itself off from Travancore.

-- The left-wing writer K. A. Abbas, in January 1951

The Obscene Bird of Night - pg. 44

The hum of their rosaries at dusk fill the Casa like the buzzing of insects busy spinning cloth for those underpants, when Don Clemente, naked, pounces on some old woman at dusk while she's thinking his thoughts are elsewhere.

The Obscene Bird of Night - pg. 18

All of them are velvety to the touch, homogeneous, motionless under the soft dust that covers everything with the silky, delicate fuzz that the slightest movement, like the flicker of an eye or someone's breathing, could scatter through the room, choking and blinding us and causing all those creatures that are resting quietly in the momentarily gentle shapes of small bundles of rags, sheves of old magazines, umbrella ribs, boxes, box tops, pieces of box tops, to spring to life and pounce on us.

India After Gandhi - pg. 149

One way of telling the story of the election campaign is through newspaper headlines. These make interesting reading, not least because the issues they express have remained at the forefront of Indian election ever since. "MINISTERS FACE STIFF OPPOSITION" read a headline in Uttar Pardesh. "CASTE RIVALRIES WEAKEN BIHAR CONGRESS" read another. From the north-eastern region came this telling line: "AUTONOMY DEMAND IN MANIPUR." From Gauhati came this one: "CONGRESS PROSPECTS IN ASSAM: IMPORTANCE OF MUSLIM AND TRIBAL VOTE." Gwalior offered "DISCONTENT AMONG CONGRESSMEN: LIST OF NOMINEES CREATES WIDER SPLIT." A headline in Calcutta ran: "W. BENGAL CONGRESS CHIEF BOOED AT MEETING" (the hecklers being refugees from East Pakistan), "NO HOPES FOR FREE AND FAIR ELECTION," started a story dateined Lucknow: this being the verdict of J. B. Kripalani, who claimed that state officials would rig the polls in favour of the ruling party. And the city of Bombay offered, at three different moments in the campaign these quite timeless headlines: "CONGRESS BANKS ON MUSLIM SUPPORT";  "CONGRESS APATHY TOWARDS SCHEDULED CASTES: CHARGES REITERAITED BY DR. AMBEDKAR"; and "FOURTEEN HURT IN CITY ELECTION CLASH." But there was also the occasional headline that was of its time but emphatically not of ours -- notably one in The Searchlight  of Patna which claimed: 'PEACEFUL VOTING HOPED [FOR] IN BHAR."

India After Gandhi - pg. 126

On his return to India, Jaipal did not, as his sponsors no doubt hoped, preach the gospels, but came to invent a kind of gospel of his own. This held that the tribals were the "original inhabitants" of the subcontinent -- hence the term adibasi or adivasi, which means precisely that. 

India After Gandhi - pg. 115

In Governance are realised all forms of renunciation; in Governance are united all sacraments; in Governance are combined all knowledge; in Governance are centred all the Worlds.

-- The Mahabharata

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a to-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.

-- B. R. Ambedkar

India After Gandhi - pg. 108

By May 1948 some 12,500 women had been found and restored to their families. Ironically, and tragically,  many of the women did not want to be rescued, for after their seizure they had made some kind of peace with their new surroundings. Now, as they were being reclaimed, these women were deeply unsure about how their original families would receive them. They had been "defiled" and, in a further complication, many were pregnant. These women knew that even if they were acepted, their children -- born out of a union with the "enemy" -- would never be. Often, the police and their accomplices had to use force to take the women away. "You could not save us then," said the women; "what right have you to comple us now?" 

India After Gandhi - pg. 91

"Through the pages of SWATANTRA I wish to send my message of frateternity to the people of the south. Far back in the annals of India the south and north met in the land of Kashmir. The great Shankaracharya came to Kashmir to spread his dynamic philosophy but here he was defeated in argument by a PAnditani. This gave rise to the peculiar philosophy of Kashmir -- Shaivism. A memorial to the great Shankaracharya in Kashmir stands prominent on the top of the Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar. It is a temple containing the Murti of Shiva. 

More recently it was given to a southerner to take the case of Kashmir to the United Nations and, as the whole of India knows, with the doggedness and  tenacity that  is  so usual to the southerner, he defended Kashmir. 

We in Kashmir expect that we shall continue to receive support and sympathy from the people of the south and that some day when we describe the extent of our country we shall use the phrase "from Kashmir to Cape Comorin.""

-- Sheikh Abdullah

writing in a Tamil Newspaper.

India After Gandhi - pg. 54

The larger native states had their own railroad, currency, and stamps, vanities allowed them by the Crown. Few had any modern industry; fewer still had modern forms of education. A British observer wrote in the early twentieth century that, taken as a whole, the states were "sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autoccratic power sometimes exercised by vicious and deranged ." This roughly, was also the view of the  main nationalist party, the Congress.

The Obscene Bird of Night - pg. 10

hey, do a little dance for us, Gina, the urge her, come on, do your stuff ... tossing her neck back like a mare, she twirls her long wavy hair, swaggering down the aisle, a look of ecstasy in her eyes half-closed like those of actresses in cheap illustrated love stories ... I don't feel lazy anymore, I'm not yawning, I want to get out and dance like Gina the actress who lived in  a convent run by bad nuns in the love story Eliana read to me ...

The Isles Of Greece

The mountains look on Marathon --
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
...
Must we but weep o'er days more blest?
Must we but blush? – Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.