Germinal

Emile Zola

Raise wages--how can you? They're fixed by an iron law to the smallest possible sum, just the sum necessary to allow the workers to eat dry bread and make children. If they fall too low, the workers die, and the demand for new men makes them rise. If they rise too high more men come, and they fall. It is the balance of empty bellies, a sentence to a perpetual prison of hunger.

And Souvarine, who was listening, exhibited on his pale, girlish face a silent contempt--the crushing contempt of the man who was willing to yield his life in obscurity without even gaining the splendour of martyrdom.

Who then was the guilty one? And this question which Etienne put to himself overwhelmed him more than ever. Was it in fact his fault, this misfortune which was making him bleed, the wretchedness of some, the murder of others, these women, these children, lean and without bread? He had had that lamentable vision one evening before the catastrophe. But then a force was lifting him, he was carried away with his mates. Besides, he had never led them, it was they who led him, who obliged him to do things which he would never have done if it were not for the shock of that crowd pushing behind him. At each new violence he had been stupefied by the course of events, for he had neither foreseen nor desired any of them. Could he anticipate, for instance, that his followers in the settlement would one day stone him? These infuriated people lied when they accused him of having promised them an existence all fodder and laziness. And in this justification, in this reasoning, in which he tried to fight against his remorse, was hidden the anxiety that he had not risen to the height of his task; it was the doubt of the half-cultured man still perplexing him. But he felt himself at the end of his courage, he was no longer at heart with his mates; he feared this enormous mass of the people, blind and irresistible, moving like a force of nature, sweeping away everything, outside rules and theories. A certain repugnance was detaching him from them--the discomfort of his new tastes, the slow movement of all his being towards a superior class.

For those of proper demeanor who respect the 19th Century as the days when people had values and morals, a perusal of any of Zola's works will help to dissuade you from your delusion. But then again, he was French, and they've always been degenerate perverts. But if you like, take a closer look, especially at Germinal and you'll see that the perverts might actually not be quite what we of cleaner fingers claim. In fact, Germinal might just convince you that those with the pointing fingers are much more nearly perverts.

The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

John Steinbeck
Ed. Chase Horton

In a corner lay the giant's hoard. Gold and silver, jewels and bright cloth, crucifixes of precious things and chalices set with rubies and emeralds, and along with these colored stones and pieces of broken glass from church windows and quartz and knobby crystal and shards of blue and yellow pottery--a mighty mixture of great wealth and great nonsense. And Sir Marhalt, looking at the heap, said sadly, "Poor thing. He didn't know the difference. He coudln't learn to steal only valuable things as civilized men and women do."

Can you imagine the Tales of King Arthur told with the burnished dust of Steinbeck? If only he had finished them. But writers write in the mystery and no one more so than Steinbeck. So who's to say why he never did. But he managed to get through a good half of the King Arthur stories, and what good stories they are. In Steinbeck these stories become clear as the round stones beneath a mountain creek. Rinsed and smoothed and formed by water down to solidity. These stories are beautiful. There are weariness and joy, sadness and rage, cheer and darkness, and all the stories are sharp as Excalabur. Read these stories to your kids, throw away the trash that's peddled now days. Read these stories to your kids and you will set them on the path to becoming men and women. Read these stories to your kids while they are young and small so their imaginations can take full hold of them and swing with full might.

Death of a River Guide

Richard Flanagan

A vision should give you answers, shouldn't it? But all I see are more questions. It's not right, I tell you, it's crook and it's wrong. But i am not surprised by that either. Life has only ever been a constant puzzlement to me, so why should I expect death to suddenly make a whole lot of sense?

Nothing ever really seemed that important to me, not since Jemma's death. People worry about how their hair looks, or what other people think of the colour they've painted their house, or, as I was once asked by a woman, what size doily to put on her washing machine. But you will understand me when I say that if you are drowning none of these things seems overly important. And I am drowning. I don't care whether your hair is done or not done, whether your house is painted or not, or whether you even have a house or a washing machine to place a doily upon. Granted I ought to. I'll give you that, but then I've always been easygoing. Lazy, some might say, but I wouldn't agree. Or maybe I would. All that they say about me being lazy, about being a drifter, about having no future, about not knowing what I want out of life, maybe it is all true.

People must believe, even, if it must be so, in a lie. Without belief all is lost. And yet, like all blind faiths that seem to go so much against the evidence of reality, they in turn foster their own truths. As long as no fear is acknowledged, great things are possible and the punters are capable of feats of endurance and courage of which they never believed themselves capable.

A man who could evade death chooses against good advice to meet with it on his own terms. Is this an act of cowardice or courage? Of stupidity or wisdom? Of ignorance or enlightenment? I don't know the answer.

I could, of course, be mad. That is a possibility. That is also a form of hope. If insane, this entire horror is nothing more than a delusion, a malfunction of nerve endings and electrochemical impulses. If sane, I am in true agony. In hell. If sane, I am dying. And being humiliated by memory at the same time.

They felt consumed by the river, felt that they had allowed it to chew them up in its early gorges and were now being digested in its endlessly winding entrails that cut back and forth in crazed meanderings through vast unpeopled mountain ranges. And it frightened them, these people from far away cities whose only measure was man; it terrified them, this world in which the only measure was things that man had not made, the rocks and the mountains and the rain and the sun and the trees, and the earth.

The Cockraoch tells the stories for effect, not because he believes them but because he knows they are what the punters want, and his job is to satisfy their needs. Aljaz says nothing. Other nights on other trips he has told the same stories. They ought be honoured by their repetition and by their currency. But they are not and Aljaz dislikes them, dislikes telling them. What is there to say? It is too hard to say something different, to tell a new story that no one has told and to which he doesn't know the response of either the punters or himself. Those stories are too hard. They come from something too close.

What is evident from what I see is that while Harry knew he loved her, even if he would never understand her, Sonja knew she understood Harry and wondered therefore if he was worth loving.

Poor people are good customers, mate, that's what I say. People say, get the rich ones. I say, fuck 'em. The rich ones never give you cash, always run dodgy credit cards and always want a receipt. And if I want a smoke--no way. Bugger 'em, that's what I say. Why you reckon the rich are rich?

Maybe thought Aljaz, just maybe everybody else was also on the road--from the beats through to the hippies to the yuppies to all the arsehole careerists of today, from me to the taxi driver, all of them and all of us seeking constant flight from our pasts, our families, and our places of birth. Even if we travelled in different standards of fashion and comfort. And maybe all the rest of them were as wrong as I was, thought Aljaz, and maybe it was time to walk off the road and head back into the bush whence we came.

There are the heroic failures such as Slattery, who wins his place in the school running team with ease, and is a favorite to win the 400 metres at the Tasmanian high school championships. At the championships Slattery wins his heat in the fastest qualifying time. In the final at the 300-metre mark he is ten metres clear of his nearest rival. He suddenly halts and starts running backwards through the pack of runners behind him, emerging triumphant at the wrong end of the race waving his long arms in triumph to the crowd of the school's supporters. The teachers are outraged and perplexed as to why the children cheer and laugh until the tears run down their cheeks. But only the children understand that to win is for Slattery to participate in a lie that everyone in life has a chance of winning if they try hard enough. By losing so spectacularly, by turning his loss into a triumph, he has turned their collective fate into a celebration and a challenge to the teachers, who could not begin to comprehend what it all meant. They ask Slattery why, but Slattery can not put words to his actions, any more than the children can explain why, at that moment when his long legs began to move backwards into the melee behind him, they felt such a sense of euphoria. They only know that for one moment in their entire school lives they had posed a question about the injustice of their destiny, and the adults had not only not known the answer, they had been too ignorant to understand the question. But none of it can be put into words. And nobody tries.

This last quote, the story of Slattery, is Flanagan at his most storytelling best. Marching in step, following the rules, waiting in line, paying taxes--all of these which are participation in the plan, in the dream--are no guarantee of fairness. Though we pay for them with the bits and sometimes better portion of our freedom under the contract that fairness, equality will be attained, we find ourselves with no better commerce than a very expansive set of regulations to help us fill our time until we die. The system established under the recognition of equality and endured under the promise of perpetuation of that ideal, does not fulfill it's purpose. In fact, one begins to wonder if it does not work to attain its opposite.
Enter Slattery. Heroic failure of Slattery's kind, though seemingly dismal, depressed, and pessimistic, does make the eye skip back and those who are not too busy putting coins in parking meters and filling out forms stop to think for a second. Unfortunately, stopping to think disturbs the mind to such an extent, people will gladly fill out forms and pay the meters just to avoid thinking about it. But even these actions by which we hide from ourselves our living madness are a form of hope. And hope does not disappoint.
Hope is a dangerous attitude. A child can hope for things that are far out of his reach, and that hope can be so strong a force that the child's arms will grow and his reach stretch, and eventually he'll grasp all that he hopes for, even unto the moon. But a child can hope for things that are far out of his reach, and that hope can be so strong a force that the child's arms will grow and his reach stretch until he misses everything good around him for the grasping. It's the same hope in both cases. Hope that drives a lover to feats of fidelity is hope that shackles a lover to a sinking ship. Hope that fires the furnaces of an artist for a lifetime is hope that burns down his house and family and life around him. Unlike trust, which misplaced is the failing of another, misplaced hope is only the sign of your own foolishness. And yet hope is glorious. Hope is the quiet, hope is the loudest song, hope is the incredible power of tree roots, hope is the growing of all living things, hope is the water, hope is the feeling in your stomach, hope is the blindness, hope is the salt tears, hope is the mounting stack of books, hope is the warmth of accomplishment, hope is the longing and the patience, hope is the thought behind heartbeats, hope is the reflex of breathing, hope is the only power stronger than fate, hope is me, hope is the death of a river guide.

Memoirs of a Midget

Walter de la Mare

It is Moscow survives, not the artless traveller.

You'd be astonished, I assured him, how slight the differences really are. A few inches or ounces; red or black or fawn: and age, and sex, of course; that's all. Now, isn't it true, Dr. Phelps, that almost any twenty women--unselected, you know--would weigh about a ton? And surely there's no particular reason why just human shells should weigh as much as that. We are not lobsters. And yet, do you know, I have watched, and they really seem to enjoy being the same as one another. One would think they tried to be--manners and habits, knowledge and victuals, hats and boots, everything. And if on the outside, I suppose on the inside, too. What a mysterious thing it seems. All of them thinking pretty much the same: Norm-Thoughts, you know; just five-foot-fivers. After all, one wouldn't so much mind the monotonous packages, if the contents were different. Forty feeding like one--who said that? Now, truly, Dr. Phelps, don't you feel--It would, of course, be very serious at first for their mothers and fathers if all teh little human babies here came midgets, but it would be amusing, too, wouldn't it?...And it isn't quite my own idea, either.

I should not like to go to Hell in the snow.

Whomsoever we love becomes unique in that love, and I suppose we are responsible for what we give as well as what we accept. The very memory of her beauty, when I was alone, haunted me as intensely as if she were present. Yet in her actual company, it made her in a sense unreal. So, often. it was only the ghost of her with whom I sat and talked. How sharply it would have incensed her to know it.

But then, I remarked with a sigh, Fanny seems to make friends wherever she goes.
It isn't the making, replied her mother, but the keeping.

Quite a little reception for you, she beamed at me, after a particularly respectable carriage had cast its occupants' scarcely modulated glances in my direction. How strange is human character! To an intelligent onlooker, my other little reception must have been infinitely more inspiring; and yet she had almost wantonly refused to take any part in it. Now, supposing I had been Royalty or a corpse run over in the street....But we were come to our journey's end.

What was wrong with me just then, what I had sallied out in hope to be delivered from, was the unhappy conviction that my life was worthless, and I of no use in the world. I had taught myself to make knots in string, but actual experience seemed to have proved that most human fumblings resulted only in 'grannies' and not in the true lover's variety. They secured nothing, only tangled and jammed. I was young then, and yet as heavily burdened with other people's responsibilities as was poor Christian with the bundle of his sins. But my bundle, too, in that lovely, desolate loneliness at last fell off my shoulders.

Oh, and never say it again. Please, please, if you care for me the least bit in the world, never, never say what you did again. I poured out the heedless words in the sweet-scented quiet of midnight. Now--now go, I entreated. And indeed, indeed, I am your friend.

Oh, Mrs. Bowater, I turned at last, here I am. You and the quiet sky--I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one's self if one is always changing?

But think. There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts--my imagination, with you; isn't that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking , and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like--oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you. No, no; it's only a story--why even all this green loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr. Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone.

Oh, but you see--haven't I told you?--I can't love you. Perhaps; I don't know....What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose, I went on, I like myself that much, and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!--and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. Now do you understand?

The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go rooting and rummaging in Mrs. Monnerie's library, like a little pig after truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted--old plays, and street ballads; Johnson's enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book on Melman in love; Bel and the Dragon, the Newgate Calendar. I even nibbled at Debrett--and clean through all its 'M's'. The more I read, the more ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off.

I seemed to have lost the secret of daydreaming.

However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them--certainly not 'out of their power and love'--but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about 'beauty' , too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than--well, its 'meaning'. As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's way.

His face grew solemn. Lord have mercy upon me, he said, to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.

Have you ever had a beggar come up to you and begin a story of misery sounding like an excuse and a little like a trade. Yeah I'm begging you for money, but it's because my mother had cancer when I was two and since then I've been struggling and now my son just committed suicide and I don't know how to go on, but life's hard you know? And then you give or do not give the money, but you can see in their eyes that the story doesn't hold any emotion for them any more. It's what they're resigned to. The telling is the price they pay for your donation. There's a solidity in the eyes, a monotony in the tone that tells of the degradation. To be so broken that we no longer expect the world to treat us as human...I had to have surgery. They got most of it, but now the medicine costs alot and I lost my housing because I couldn't work while I was in the hospital and all I need is a few dollars for some food so I can think straight and maybe then I'll get back on my feet. It's that their tragedy has to be told as an excuse for why they haven't got what you've got. And you need to hear it so that you can give them money and not feel like you're tossing a bone to a dog. Because it takes away someones dignity to accept charity. You may not think it and the audacity with which some beggars beg may refute it, but that's a wound, too, isn't it? To have to beg? When did we forget that begging isn't pleasant? That to beg you have sell that which made you human, your dignity? Look closely into the eyes of the next person who begs from you. When they tell you their market-speech, their packaged tale of woe to get your money, look at their eyes and sure enough you'll see, it's not the eyes of a human anymore.

I suppose the mastery of this book comes in the speaking of injustice and inhumanity with the frankness of one who daily experiences it. To be misused, mistreated, and misunderstood from birth to grave and to know with resignation that this is how it is. We all know this feeling, though we may deny it. But whether we are the homeless who have marshaled our sob-story in rote monotone, as if it were the commodity purchased by others' charity, or if we are the mother who does dishes after everyone in her family has left them in the sink or on the table, or if we are the employee who bows to the whims of a manager, it's all the same. What is in truth something worth screaming about, we narrate calmly as the facts of our lives. Only most authors become so outraged they forget that the resignation is part of our story, de la Mare does not.

A Serious Way of Wondering

Reynolds Price

Jesus of Nazareth was, above all, what he insisted he was in the last words of which we have any record--a watchful shepherd. We are meant to do no less than he asked with each live man and woman and child in our reach--to tend them as Jesus tended the souls he met in the hamlets and towns and cities of Palestine, with patient healing and close attention to their all but endless needs (not our sense of their needs).

What God left to attentive creatures, when the risen Jesus vanished at the end of forty days, was an enormous but remarkably trim inheritance--the three sayings examined above (Love your neighbor as yourself, Feed my sheep, Do not resist an evil person: the command to Love God is implicit in each of those three).

Though Paul, and perhaps a few other New Testament authors, wrote down their arguments and exhortations earlier than the evangelists, surely the memory of Jesus would have survived only as a footnote in the history of the Mediterranean religions if the Gospel stories had not been recorded, as stories, and kept intact for our attention (a man went here and did that; then he went there and did another thing). Valuable as the quantity of sayings preserved in Matthew, Luke and John continues to be, it's Mark--with his utter faith in story and the narrative faith he taught to others--who lit the hearts of the later Jesus sect and spread its initially quiet flame beyond the eastern Roman empire and onward, for good and evil, into the world.

Reynolds Price, in typical form, has startled me once again, by reducing Christianity to this: love your neighbor as yourself; feed my sheep; do not resist an evil person.
I have a friend who would quickly jump up to say, "Hey! Watch out! There's no Jesus here. Where is Jesus? Come on. I mean it. If you don't have Jesus, then you don't have this faith." But I think such statements are missing the Son of God by making him a name brand or a patent ingredient. First of all, inherent in all three of Price's sayings is the order: Love God. It's not hidden, it's right there: the only reason you would do any of these seemingly unsafe things is out of love for god. But we must continue: another important note is that it was Jesus, himself, who gave us these orders. I don't know exactly how much that brings Him into the conversation, but I believe it is not a little. And of course there is also this: to whom does the "my" in feed my sheep refer? To say that there is no Jesus in these statements because they don't use five English letters like an incantation is ridiculous. That my, is the "I" of Jesus which is to say, it's Him. Right there.
And so it comes down to this: Love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12). That we must respect ourselves as much as we respect others and be as considerate of others as we are of ourselves. Love your neighbor as yourself means that no one has a corner on the market of pain. As much as we are scared and hurt, we must never forget that others are just as, if not more, scared and hurt: especially others who scare and hurt us. Our neighbors are not only the Samaritans along the way, but also the poor, beaten and robbed in the ditch. These are those who we must love as ourselves.
Next then is this: Feed my sheep (John 21). Now, this also concerns the recognition of ugliness in everyone, even those who refuse to recognize it in themselves (by the way, these are usually those who appear beautiful on the outside). Feed my sheep means that God isn't going to do it; he may give us everything we need to do it, but he wants us to "give them some bread yourselves." He wants our faith that the few loaves and fish we have really are enough to be spread the whole world round. It's the act of feeding that makes them so. And also, we should not forget that it is His flock. They are His sheep. He is still the shepherd.
And finally this: Do not resist the evil person (Matthew 5). This truly is a hard teaching and I do not know what it means. Am I to not fight evil? Am I not to stand courageously against the darkness? Is the fire that burns in my heart an evil fire because it would strive against evil?

With These Hands

Daniel Rothenberg

Rothenberg compiles an impressive set of interviews, narratives, and data from all aspects of the immigrant worker issue. Fairly even-handed in his analysis and not given to emotionality in an issue that can easily become emotional, Rothenberg will at least expand your understanding of the players and stakeholders of the current immigration debate.

Joe Gould's Secret

Joseph Mitchell

Sometimes I go in a place and order a cup of tea, he said confidingly, and I drink it and pay for it, and then I ask for a cup of hot water. The counterman thinks I'm going to make a second cup of tea with the same tea bag, which he doesn't mind: that's all right. Instead of which, I pour some ketchup in, and I have a very good cup of tomato bouillon free of charge. Try it sometime.

There was the way the principal of the school in Norwood had seen him--a disgusting little bastard. There was the way Ezra Pound had seen him--a native hickory. There was the way the know-it-all Village radical had seen him--a reactionary parasite. There were a great many of these aspects, and I began to go over them in my mind. He was the catarrhal child, he was the son who knows that he has disappointed his father, he was the runt, the shrimp, the peanut, the half-pint, the tadpole, he was Joe Gould the poet, he was Joe Gould the historian, he was Joe Gould the wild Chippewa Indian dancer, he was Joe Gould the greatest authority in the world on the language of the sea gull, he was the banished man, he was the perfect example of the solitary nocturnal wanderer, he was the little rat, he was the one and only member of the Joe Gould Party, he was the house bohemian of the Minetta Tavern, he was the Professor, he was the Sea Gull, he was Professor Sea Gull, he was the Mongoose, he was Professor Mongoose, he was the Bellevue Boy.

Yes, you're right, he once said to a detractor of the Oral History. It's only things I heard people say, but maybe I have a peculiar ability-maybe I can understand the significance of what people say, maybe I can read its inner meaning. You might listen to a conversation between two old men in a barroom or two old women on a park bench and think that it was the worst kind of bushwa, and I might listen to the same conversation and find deep historical meaning in it.

I decided right then and there that I couldn't possibly continue to hold my job, because it would take up time that I should devote to the Oral History, and I resolved that I would never again accept regular employment unless I absolutely had to or starve but would cut my wants down to the bare bones and depend on friends and well-wishers to see me through. The idea of the Oral History occurred to me around half past ten. Around a quarter to eleven, I stood up and went to a telephone and quit my job.
A throbbing quality had come into Gould's voice.
Since that fateful morning, he continued, squaring his shoulders and dilating his nostrils and lifting his chin, as if in heroic defiance, the Oral History has been my rope and my scaffold, my bed and my board, my wife and my floozy, my wound and the salt on it, my whiskey and my aspirin, and my rock and my salvation. It is the only thing that matters a damn to me. All else is dross.

I really do feel a strong kinship with the abysmal Joe Gould. Not something to which one should aspire, I know; not something that one should admit to one's friends, I am learning. But Gould will always break past the walls I put up for most others to encounter. His outlook on tomato bouillon alone would have endeared him to me. But the sad truth behind his great and majestic work, Joe Gould's Oral History, is the sadness, I think, in which millions and millions of people in this world dwell. Gould just couldn't (or didn't) hide his sadness.
I think that more than the truth that everyone is an artist, I have been witnessing the truth that most people are artists who stopped thinking of themselves that way. Whether from exhaustion, business, pressure, disbelief, worry, ambition, or pride--all things that might be labeled with the heading "reality"--the general trend is that artists falter, cry, and peering about to see if anyone noticed, quickly disavow their artistic claims. This means there is a whole lot of bastard art out there.
Haven't we all met the person who used to draw or used to write or used to play or used to paint or used to dance or used to be working on that great project? Most artists are too afraid to even tell others their dream products, except of course as silly conjectures or knowing jokes. So time goes by, life lives on, and artists make bastards out of their art.
This is where Joe Gould comes in. He was crazy enough to keep on taking himself serious, even though he had no "real" right to claim artistry. The Oral History, unreal as it may or may not have been, at least wasn't abandoned, orphaned. So the lesson goes out to all the people who used to be artists out there: don't stop.

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.

Realising that, understanding it, made me see the hard edges of the way I’d treated the boy, Tariq, himself a stranger in my raw and ragged fragment of the city. 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 dawn.

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. I understood that, perfectly, standing the white wilderness of snow. 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 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 part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

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.

The tears, when they come to some men, are worse than beatings. They’re wounded worse by sobbing, men like that, then 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 we crash like fallen trees when we cry.

No-one but Karla called it rape. He said that Karla had led him on, and Karla’s aunt took his part. The fifteen-year-old orphan from Switzerland left her aunt’s home, and never contacted her again. She moved to Los Angeles, where she found a job, shared an apartment with another girl and began to make her own way. But after the rape, Karla lost the part of loving that grows in trust. Other kinds of love remained in her—friendship, compassion, sexuality—but the love that believes and trusts in the constancy of another human heart, romantic love, was lost.

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.

I let the raining silence close her eyes for the last time. She slept. 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. The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I’d learned more about her in the exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. 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.

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.

This social work seems to suit you, Didier commented through an arch smile. You look so well and so fit—underneath the bruises and scratches, that is. I think you must be a very bad man, in your heart of hearts, Lin. Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered.

Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and Mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She’d confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she give it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.

No problem, waiting, Lin, Prabaker replied, airily. The people are waiting more than one hour already. If you are not with us, they would still be waiting, but waiting for nothing only. Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it? Now the people are waiting for something. Waiting for you, they are. And you are a really something, Lin-Shantaram, if you don’t mind I’m saying it to your smoky face and sticking-up hairs. But firs you must make it motions, and then washing and then breakfast. And we have to get going—some young fellows are waiting down there on the jetty, and wanting to see you make your motions.

I mean that you are making things to be more difficult than they are, or need to be. The facts of life are very simple. In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate. And now you have it.

What characterizes 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 characterizes 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.

I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way, Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai,. Encouraged by the older man’s nod of interest, he continued, I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, much happiness. The—how do you say it, bhari vazan?
The burden, Khaderbhai translated for him. Farid spoke a phrase rapidly in Hindi, and Khader gave it to us in such an elegantly poetic English that I realized, through the haze of the stone, how much better his English was than he’d led me to believe at our first meeting. ‘The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.’
Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down.

It’s easy—suffering is hungry isn’t it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering. But everybody knows that.

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.

If you have skipped the quotes listed above, go back and read them. If you think there are too many, read some now, come back another day and read more and do this until you've read them all. I put them up there for a reason; they are a better review of this book than anything I could write.

That being said, Shantaram is a great read. The author was a bank robber in Australia who escaped from prison in broad daylight over the front wall and landed on Australia's most wanted list. He fled to Bombay where he became a foot-soldier for the mafia and ended up living in a slum running a free health clinic. His life alone warrants reading his book.