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I Want The Marginality To Come Into The Center. This Is The Thing I Was Conscious Of Growing Up, When I Later Lived In England. I Saw All These War Movies That Came Out Shortly After The War, And They Were All About The War Being Fought By Englishmen Or Americans, There Were No Other "allies" In It - From India Or Australia, Etc.

-Michael Ondaatje

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I Want The Marginality

Michael Ondaatje

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I Want The Marginality To Come Into The Center. This Is The Thing I Was Conscious Of Growing Up, When I Later Lived In England. I Saw All These War Movies That Came Out Shortly After The War, And They Were All About The War Being Fought By Englishmen Or Americans, There Were No Other "allies" In It - From India Or Australia, Etc.

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A Writer Uses A Pen Instead Of A Scalpel Or Blow Torch.

In The Desert You Celebrate Nothing But Water.

The Trouble With All Of Us Is We Are Where We Shouldn't Be.

A Blind Lover, Don't Know What I Love Till I Write It Out

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Here. Where I Am Anonymous And Alone In A White Room With No History And No Parading. So I Can Make Something Unknown In The Shape Of This Room. Where I Am King Of Corners.

The Past Is Still, For Us, A Place That Is Not Safely Settled.

That's Anil's Path. She Grows Up In Sri Lanka, Goes And Gets Educated Abroad, And Through Fate Or Chance Gets Brought Back By The Human Rights Commission To Investigate War Crimes.

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He Will Hear The Rain Before He Feels It, A Clicking On The Dry Grass, On The Olive Leaves.

What Began It All Was The Bright Bone Of A Dream I Could Hardly Hold Onto.

She Entered The Story Knowing She Would Emerge From It Feeling She Had Been Immersed In The Lives Of Others, In Plots That Stretched Back Twenty Years, Her Body Full Of Sentences And Moments, As If Awaking From Sleep With A Heaviness Caused By Unremembered Dreams.

Could You Fall In Love With Her If She Wasn't Smarter Than You? I Mean, She May Not Be Smarter Than You. But Isn't It Important For You To Think She Is Smarter Than You In Order To Fall In Love? Think Now.

Falling In Love

The Desert Could Not Be Claimed Or Owned — It Was A Piece Of Cloth Carried By Winds, Never Held Down By Stones, And Given A Hundred Shifting Names Before Canterbury Existed, Long Before Battles And Treaties Quilted Europe And The East ... All Of Us, Even Those With European Homes And Children In The Distance, Wished To Remove The Clothing Of Our Countries. It Was A Place Of Faith. We Disappeared Into Landscape.

The First Sentence Of Every Novel Should Be: Trust Me, This Will Take Time But There Is Order Here, Very Faint, Very Human.

There's More Danger In The Violence You Don't Face.

So Many Nurses Had Turned Into Emotionally Disturbed Handmaidens Of The War, In Their Yellow-and-crimson Uniforms With Bone Buttons.

She Lights A Match In The Dark Hall And Moves It Onto The Wick Of The Candle. Light Lifts Itself Onto Her Shoulders. She Is On Her Knees. She Puts Her Hands On Her Thighs And Breathes In The Smell Of The Sulphur. She Imagines She Slap Breathes In Light.

When You're Writing, It's As If You're Within A Kind Of Closed World.

When Someone Speaks He Looks At A Mouth, Not Eyes And Their Colors, Which, It Seems To Him, Will Always Alter Depending On The Light Of A Room, The Minute Of The Day. Mouths Reveal Insecurity Or Smugness Or Any Other Point On The Spectrum Of Character. For Him They Are The Most Intricate Aspect Of Faces. He's Never Sure What An Eye Reveals. But He Can Read How Mouths Darken Into Callousness, Suggest Tenderness. One Can Often Misjudge An Eye From Its Reaction To A Simple Beam Of Sunlight.

The Last Three Books Are Much More A Case Of A Moment Of History, What Happened Almost By Accident Or Coincidence, Like Being In The Same Elevator Or Lifeboat.

I Am Someone Who Has A Cold Heart. If I Am Beside A Great Grief I Throw Barriers Up So The Loss Cannot Go Too Deep Or Too Far. There Is A Wall Instantly In Place, And It Will Not Fall.

You Want To Suggest Something New, But At The Same Time, Resolve The Drama Of The Action In The Novel.

Fathers Die.you Keep On Loving Them In Any Way You Can.you Can't Hide Him Away In Your Heart.

I Promised To Tell You How One Falls In Love.

Falling In Love

Snap. Lady With Dog. Lady On Sofa Half-naked. Snap. Naked Lady. Lady Next To Dresser. Lady At Window. Snap. Lady On Balcony Sunlight. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

He Turns His Back To The Far Shore And Rows Toward It. He Can In This Way Travel Away From, Yet Still See, His House....he Feels He Is Riding A Floating Skeleton...some Birds In The Almost-dark Are Flying As Close To Their Reflections As Possible.

When We Are Young We Do Not Look Into Mirrors. It Is When We Are Old, Concerned With Our Name, Our Legend, What Our Lives Will Mean To The Future. We Become Vain With The Names We Own, Our Claims To Have Been The First Eyes, The Strongest Army, The Cleverest Merchant. It Is When He Is Old That Narcissus Wants A Graven Image Of Himself.

Politically I Don't Believe Anymore That We Can Only Have One Voice To A Story, It's Like Having One Radio Station To Represent A Country.

Do You Understand The Sadness Of Geography?

We Are Expanded By Tears, We Are Told, Not Reduced By Them.

When I Read Biographies, I Skip The First Thirty Pages About The Childhood Because It Doesn't Seem Interesting To Me.

The Rulers Of The Country Generally Believed That Betting Eliminates Strikes. Men Had To Work In Order To Gamble.

To Write About Someone Like Myself Would Be Very Limiting.

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For We Live With Those Retrievals From Childhood That Coalesce And Echo Throughout Our Lives, The Way Shattered Pieces Of Glass In A Kaleidoscope Reappear In New Forms And Are Songlike In Their Refrains And Rhymes, Making Up A Single Monologue. We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories, Whatever Story We Tell.

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power. Nothing Much Of Lasting Value Ever Happens At The Head Table, Held Together By A Familiar Rhetoric. Those Who Already Have Power Continue To Glide Along The Familiar Rut They Have Made For Themselves.

I Want The Marginality To Come Into The Center. This Is The Thing I Was Conscious Of Growing Up, When I Later Lived In England. I Saw All These War Movies That Came Out Shortly After The War, And They Were All About The War Being Fought By Englishmen Or Americans, There Were No Other "allies" In It - From India Or Australia, Etc.

What He Would Say, He Cannot Say To This Woman Whose Openness Is Like A Wound, Whose Youth Is Not Mortal Yet. He Cannot Alter What He Loves Most In Her, Her Lack Of Compromise, Where The Romance Of The Poems She Loves Still Sits With Ease In The Real World. Outside These Qualities He Knows There Is No Order In The World.

You're Getting Everyone's Point Of View At The Same Time, Which For Me, Is The Perfect State For A Novel: A Cubist State, The Cubist Novel.

Sleep Is A Prison For A Boy Who Has Friends To Meet.

There Always Should Be Something Hanging Unfinished Before A Scene Ends So That There's A Reason For Going To The Next Scene.

...the Heart Is An Organ Of Fire.

Her Father Had Taught Her About Hands. About A Dog's Paws. Whenever Her Father Was Alone With A Dog In A House He Would Lean Over And Smell The Skin At The Base Of Its Paw. This, He Would Say, As If Coming Away From A Brandy Snifter, Is The Greatest Smell In The World! A Bouquet! Great Rumours Of Travel! She Would Pretend Disgust, But The Dog's Paw Was A Wonder: The Smell Of It Never Suggested Dirt. It's A Cathedral! Her Father Had Said, So-and-so's Garden, That Field Of Grasses, A Walk Through Cyclamen--a Concentration Of Hints Of All The Paths The Animal Had Taken During The Day.

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power.

Right Now, I Have No Idea What I Will Write Or If I Will Write Again.

From This Point On, She Whispered, We Will Either Find Or Lose Our Souls.

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Geoffrey Boycott

Henry Anatole Grunwald

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