Archives for the 'Lifted' Category

“I must go back briefly to a place I have loved
to tell you those you will efface I have loved.”
– Agha Shahid Ali

Cousins
Ham, the conquistador of outer space, was captured in Africa.
He became the first chimpanzee to travel far beyond the world the first chimpanout. They put him in the space capsule Mercury, hooked him up with more wires than a telephone switchboard, and blasted him off.
He came back safe and sound, and the record of his bodily functions demonstrated that humans too could survive a voyage into space.
Ham was on the cover of Life. And he spent the rest of his own caged in a zoo.

– Eduardo Galeano: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

They had talked for hours moving gradually off the edge of the social world. As Bellocq lived at the edge in any case he was at ease there and as Buddy did not he moved on past him like a naïve explorer looking for footholds. Bellocq did not expect that. Or he could have easily explained the ironies. The mystic privacy one can be so proud of has no alphabet of noise or meaning to the people outside. Bellocq knew this but never bothered applying it to himself, he did not consider himself professional. [...] Bellocq thought of this. Aware it was him who had tempted Buddy on. Buddy who had once been enviably public. And then this small almost unnecessary friendship with Bellocq.

– Michael Ondaatje: Coming Through Slaughter.

He said racists were people who refused their differences, but acted on this position only with regard to others. They were people mobilized in their error by a same past, a same religion, an identical image of themselves, their country and the world, as if, he would insist, the soul vibrated to only one single sound, as if the mind could get excited only once.

For the basic racist is the man who refuses himself as he is. Being oneself means being alone. Getting used to this solitude. Growing, working within one’s natural contradictions.

– Edmond Jabès: A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book (translator Rosmarie Waldrop)

Dear Concerned Liberals: We are humans who do not want to be props in ungenerous moral formulations. We are margin dwellers. We are the dispossessed. We are your familiar strangers. We carry silent histories on our shoulders. We have tons of behalfs that you like to speak on. We are entrapped in gruesome oxymora. We eagerly await the day when the powerless cease to be the indispensably expendable.

Steven Salaita: The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought – New Essays

“The criminal trial is not a vehicle for declarations of factual innocence [...] While we are entitled to express our reasons for the result in clear and strong terms, as we have done, we cannot make a formal legal declaration of the appellant’s factual innocence.”

– O’Connor in R. v. Mullins-Johnson, 2007

“The rain was all thick ropes at first and then, as it thinned, delicately fibrous.”

– Pankaj Mishra: The Romantics.

Seconds after we were introduced, one of Catherine’s friends – Jacques, a tall shambling man with a permanently aggrieved expression on his face – had set about interrogating me about Gandhi. It took me some time to figure out what he meant by his questions, and by then it was too late to go back to basic history.

In the vision that had come to him from books and films, every Indian was axiomatically a Gandhian, and the country on the whole an Edenic setting of self-sufficient villages and their cotton-spinning nonviolent inhabitants. His great desire was to explore the “real” India – the Gandhian India, as opposed to the “fake” India he said lazy tourists saw.

I had lived in India all my life, but I couldn’t divide it up between the tourists and the Gandhians. Jacques’s way of looking at India intrigued me. I felt, as I often did with Catherine, that was he was bringing a larger vision to something that had grown overfamiliar. I wished to enter that vision, to see things the way he would see then, and I felt oddly protective about him when I heard – from Anand – that he had had a hard time on his travels. He had left Benares with the intention of finding this Gandhian India and was ready to sacrifice all comfort and luxury to this end. He had returned a fortnight later, sick and feeble with food poisoning and dysentery. The horrors of semiurban and urban India, Anand said, had repelled him so profoundly that within the very first week he had shed those ascetic resolves and sought refuge in those very same sanctuaries of five-star hotels he had earlier derided.

– Pankaj Mishra: The Romantics.

“From time to time [...] lawyers and judges have tried to define what constitutes fairness. Like defining an elephant, it is not easy to do, although fairness in practice has the elephantine quality of being easy to recognize.”

– Lawton in Maxwell v. Department of Trade and Industry, 1974.

“It is the judges (as we have seen) that make the common law. Do you know how they make it? Just as a man makes laws for his dog. When your dog does anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it, and then beat him for it. This is the way you make laws for your dog: and this is the way the judges make law for you and me.”

– Jeremy Bentham, 1843.