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Some People You Just Had To Embrace, In Some Way Or Another, Had To Bite Into The Muscle, To Remain Sane In Their Company. You Needed To Grab Their Hair And Clutch It Like A Drowner So They Would Pull You Into Their Midst. Otherwise They, Walking Casually Down The Street Towards You, Almost About To Wave, Would Leap Over A Wall And Be Gone For Months.

-Michael Ondaatje

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Some People You Just

Michael Ondaatje

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Some People You Just Had To Embrace, In Some Way Or Another, Had To Bite Into The Muscle, To Remain Sane In Their Company. You Needed To Grab Their Hair And Clutch It Like A Drowner So They Would Pull You Into Their Midst. Otherwise They, Walking Casually Down The Street Towards You, Almost About To Wave, Would Leap Over A Wall And Be Gone For Months.

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Some People You Just Had To Embrace, In Some Way Or Another, Had To Bite Into The Muscle, To Remain Sane In Their Company. You Needed To Grab Their Hair And Clutch It Like A Drowner So They Would Pull You Into Their Midst. Otherwise They, Walking Casually Down The Street Towards You, Almost About To Wave, Would Leap Over A Wall And Be Gone For Months.

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I See The Poem Or The Novel Ending With An Open Door.

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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.

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We Own The Country We Grow Up In, Or We Are Aliens And Invaders.

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That's One Of The Great Sadnesses Of Any Life - Knowing What You Know Now And Then Remembering What You Did Not Know Then.

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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.

She Had Grown Older. And He Loved Her More Now Than He Had Loved Her When He Understood Her Better, When She Was The Product Of Her Parents. What She Was Now Was What She Herself Had Decided To Become.

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

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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.

I Want To Die On Your Chest But Not Yet She Wrote Sometime In The 13th Century Of Our Love

Nowadays He Doesn't Think Of His Wife, Though He Knows He Can Turn Around And Evoke Every Move Of Her, Describe Any Aspect Of Her, The Weigh Of Her Wrist On His Heart During The Night.

Sometimes When She Is Able To Spend The Night With Him They Are Wakened By The Three Minarets Of The City Beginning Their Prayers Before Dawn. He Walks With Her Through The Indigo Markets That Lie Between South Cairo And Her Home. The Beautiful Songs Of Faith Enter The Air Like Arrows, One Minaret Answering Another, As If Passing On A Rumor Of The Two Of Them As They Walk Through The Cold Morning Air, The Smell Of Charcoal And Hemp Already Making The Air Profound. Sinners In A Holy City.

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You Built Your Walls Too, She Tells Him. So I Have My Wall. She Says It Glittering In A Beauty He Cannot Stand. She With Her Beautiful Clothes With Her Pale Face That Laughs At Everyone Who Smiles At Her.

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.

A Novel Is A Mirror Walking Down A Road

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

Jung Was Absolutely Right About One Thing. We Are Occupied By Gods. The Mistake Is To Identify With The God Occupying You.

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.

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

Sadness Is Very Close To Hate.

In Sri Lanka A Well-told Lie Is Worth A Thousand Facts.

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.

I Thought I Was Being Loved Because I Was Being Altered.

If Any Of You On Your Journeys See Her-shout To Me, Whistle...he Sang, And It Became A Habit For Audiences To Shout And Whistle In Response To Those Lines. There Was Nowhere He Could Hide In Such A Song That Had All Of Its Doors And Windows Open, So That He Could Walk Out Of It Artlessly, The Antiphonal Responses Blending With Him As If He Were No Longer On Stage.

Love Is So Small It Can Tear Itself Through The Eye Of A Needle

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

It's An Odd State To Be In, Blowing The Whistle On Your Home Country.

He Has Been Disassembled By Her. And If She Has Brought Him To This, What Has He Brought Her To?

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Why Are You Not Smarter? It's Only The Rich Who Can't Afford To Be Smart. They're Compromised. They Got Locked Years Ago Into Privilege. They Have To Protect Their Belongings. No One Is Meaner Than The Rich. Trust Me. But They Have To Follow The Rules Of Their Shitty Civilised World. They Declare War, They Have Honour, And They Can't Leave. But You Two. We Three. We're Free.

Water Is The Exile, Carried Back In Cans And Flasks, The Ghost Between Your Hands And Your Mouth.

I See Myself As Someone Who's Been Saved By Writing. God Knows What I Would Have Been, Become Or How I Would Have Ended Up Without It.

There's Always Been Anger In The Making Of Music Or Literature Or Dance.

The Joyful Will Stoop With Sorrow, And When You Have Gone To The Earth I Will Let My Hair Grow Long For Your Sake, I Will Wander Through The Wilderness In The Skin Of A Lion

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

If She Were A Writer She Would Collect Her Pencils And Notebooks And Favourite Cat And Write In Bed. Strangers And Lovers Would Never Get Past The Locked Door.

I Don't Have A Plan For A Story When I Sit Down To Write. I Would Get Quite Bored Carrying It Out.

It's A Responsibility Of The Writer To Get The Reader Out Of The Story Somehow.

Love Is The Use One Makes Of Another.

And It Would Be A Spare Life He Would Be Certain To Lead As A Schoolteacher In Some Urban Location. But He Had A Serenity That Came With The Choice Of The Life He Wanted To Live. And This Serenity And Certainty I Have Seen Only Among Those Who Have The Armour Of Books Close By.

Research Can Be A Big Clunker. It's Difficult To Know How You Can Make The Historical Light.

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