Odette

“Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in a supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That’s the frame in which they see themselves. Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules—what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“But it was just a paperback by Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and Profane. “Do you know this?” He held it in those big hands as though it were a butterfly he’d caught. “It’s brilliant. There’s two kinds of time, he says—sacred time and profane time. The outside, everyday world—you know, where you go to work, go to school, sort of thing—that’s profane time. “But things like Christmas or holidays, any kind of religious ritual or shared experience, like performing together, or a play—those take place in sacred time. It’s like this—” He grabbed a pen and drew on the inside cover of the paperback. A little Venn diagram: two intersecting circles. “—a circle within a circle. Do you see? This big circle is profane time. This one’s sacred time. The two coexist, but we only step into sacred time when we intentionally make space for it—like at Christmas, or the Jewish High Holy Days—or if something extraordinary happens. You know that feeling you get, that time is passing faster or slower? Well, it really is moving differently. When you step into sacred time, you’re actually moving sideways into a different space that’s inside the normal world. It’s folded in. Do you see?”
― Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall