(But optimism, like a lingering disease, refused to vanish; I continued to believe - I continue now - that what-we-had-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart. No: I will not accept the ultimate responsibility for the end of the Children's Conference; because what destroyed all possibility of renewal was the love of Ahmed and Amina Sinai.)Fate and Destiny are terrible ideas; the thought that we have an end that cannot be avoided, that we are pursuing a course already marked out, that we are worse than rats in a maze--that we might not even be able to say no to the cheese--these are thoughts heavy enough to be toxic.
Men of worth have always roamed the desert.
What is waiting to be told: the return of ticktock. But now time is counting down to an end, not a birth; there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there's nothing for it but to finish with them.
Don't fill my head with all this history, he had once told Ayooba-the-tank, I am what I am and that's all there is.
What you were is forever who you are.
It's not fair, the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, It's not fair, and again, and again.
Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken.
But worse: Doom. I have always wondered if there are people in this world who are doomed. Not in the Calvinist sense of predestination and election, but in the sense of children with Down syndrome. Have you ever wondered how it works that some people are born as physical wrecks? Where is equality there? Where is fairness? Where is justice? But it gets worse, for what of those who are born with crippled luck? What of those who are born failures? At least the child of physical ruin can be clearly seen to be in need of a little bit more help than others. But who hasn't known someone who seems to find life harder than everyone else? These sorts of people are the Midnight Children.
If Saleem's father Ahmed was doomed to take wrong turns at every fork in his life, what am I? When the currents of all the streams bubble along, having their rough times and their chattering, giggling good times, why does it seem that some streams are forced to run unnatural courses over rock and through fields? I wonder sometimes if it is simply by virtue of where the creak began. Anyhow, Midnight's Children's narrator seems convinced that there are those whose souls and minds and personalities are the broken products of faulty fetuses.
As far as technicalities go: It seems Mr Rushdie has composed a great wandering parenthetical statement. I admire the style he chose, but there are quite a few times when one wonders if he isn't carrying it a little too far. The tongue and cheek method of hinting at the future and impishly demanding the readers full credulity are taxed to their fullest by Mr Rushdie. Also, having read one of his other works before (The Ground Beneath Her Feet) I was shocked by the similarities, not only in action but also in the relationships between his characters. Mr Rushdie's mother must have been a very formidable character.
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