Remembering Babylon

David Malouf

Is it not strange, this history of ours, in which explorers, men on the track of the unknown, fall dry-mouthed and exhausted in country where natives, moving just ahead of them, or behind, or a mile to one side, are living, as they have done for centuries, off the land? Is there not a kind of refractory pride in it, an insistence that if the land will not present itself to us in terms that we know, we would rather die than take it as it is? For there is a truth here and it is this: that no continent lies outside God's bounty and his intention to provide for his children. He is a gardener and everything he makes is a garden. This place too will one day, I believe, yield its fruits to us and to the great banquet at which we are guests, the common feast.

Loved. The word, which she had used as if there was nothing problematical in naming thus such a tumult of feelings, released a weight in him that he felt shift and fall away.

She pored over books, anything she could lay her hands on that offered some promise that the world was larger, more passionate, crueller--even that would be a comfort--than the one she was bound to.

He looked back once and saw that Gemmy too had turned, about sixty yards off, and they faced one another down teh white ribbon of track. They were too far off to be more to one another than figures whose eyes, whose real dimensions even, were lost to distance.

We expect the world to be something--the thing we are used to. We expect all of nature and life and people and civilization around us to be familiar. And when it isn't we turn mean. I don't understand why it is, in me as with all people, that we are so eager to hate. Our mean little spirits simply cannot stand that there be anything beautiful, anything good, anything noble that we have no dominant part of. Maybe humility is this: subjecting ourselves to those things which deserve to have power over us. I have heard humility called being content with who we are, knowing one's place. At it's heart, Remembering Babylon is a book about knowing one's place. Every character, as Malouf reveals the multitude of them (much more than you would think for a book of its size) becomes a character struggling with knowing their place.
Human beings glow the most when they stand where they are meant to.
The way Malouf writes about his characters shows them to you naked and without any covering for their selfish thoughts. It's a disturbing experience because we repeatedly recognize and sympathize with these characters--even when they are of the most rotten sort. Malouf is an expert in showing you the false glint of an eye that reveals in a second a whole life of wounding and hurt. Like an avalanche we are all sliding around and bashing into each other in our headlong tumble or the end--what is needed is a good deal of patience and grace to remember that most times we are giving as good as we get and the sudden conk on our heads is most always an accident.