Tej > Recent Status Updates

'The absence of spoken language did, of course, give her an occasional sense of physical inconvenience, but it never went beyond the level of "inconvenience", and in a sense it was this very inconvenience that purified the quality of the communication between the two.'

"He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate."

'Time moved backward in the dark, to be swallowed by a different kind of time.'

"This isn't IQ84 anymore. This is the world of 1984, the world I came from.
But is it? Could the world really go back so easily to what it was? Hadn't Leader, just before he died, asserted that there was no pathway back to the old world?
Could this be another, altogether different place? Did we move from one world to yet another, third world?"

Tengo sighed. "Our prospects are not very bright, I would say. But there's no turning back now, is there?"
"Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started," the professor said.

"In the depths of our crater lake, all is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remnants of some faint distant memory. At these depths there's no sign of life."

A dense, artistic imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert.If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there.But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realised through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect

All I had to do was find the one window towards the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final pulse of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching it the way Jay Gatsby watched that tiny light on the opposite shore night after night.

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That's the world of hicks and slobs."

I tried to point out to the Greeks that they were not always the wisest of peoples, and to the Jews that they were by no means the most pure...... These races who had lived side by side for centuries had never had the curiosity to get to know each other, nor the decency to accept each other.

The new catchwords were "feeling", "imagination", "experience", and "yearning". What had been an undercurrent now became the mainstream of German culture.

It was as if this language had found a crack in the emotional defence I had created. It penetrated, and it affected me painfully.

She looked at me and there was kindness and compassion in her eyes. This was not idle gossip. She genuinely wanted me to know. I listened. But I realised that I heard the sounds of her speech as much as the content. In her 'Aland' Swedish dialect the words came out soft and thoughtful and they affected me in a way the story didn't.

As it is with matters that you leave for later. I had simply become used to it as it was unfinished and neglected. I left it as I had first found it, and stopped caring.
I had not thought I would ever have reason to see it through somebody else's eyes.

Regardless, what had been created in a state of desperation had become permanent. The isolation itself had been a guarantee that nothing would ever rock my existence again. That I would be left in peace in the fragile stability it had taken me so long to establish.

The past itself might have been his Garden, I thought. Nothing can live up to the scenes that memory softens and gilds-even in a place where, in Octavio Paz's words, "Yesterday is today; the past returns; the future has already happened."

But perhaps this is the point. After all, what better way is there to demonstrate our lack of power? Yes, this is how you break a heart. With a wire fence that shows everything that cannot be touched. While the wind sweeps the expanse, while the rain clouds roam, free as ever. We get a glimpse and nothing more.

Tseten laughs, unconvinced, but he doesn't press us either. He seems to have the same patience as others here. Maybe it's the land that demands it. Things reveal themselves in their own time, or not at all.

She is so plainly Lhamo's child, so plainly mine. Even Bhim must see this. But neither he nor Dolma can know my dizzying bewilderment. It's as if the earth and sky had traded places. The woman whose body succumbed to flames, whose ashes flew above me just a moment ago, has now returned. Her mouth, her small hands, her narrow shoulders. Yes, she is here.

To the songs of a thousand frogs and goat bells, I weave through the footpaths of the camp. With a kerosene lamp, I walk like a ghost, a light floating in the hills. I am the feared and derided oracle. I am one of her lovers. No man can have what's mine. Not my new husband, not some monks.

From that moment on, I was no longer Doh-ma, a short, soft name spoken with the deepest recesses of the throat and ending with the sound we utter from our first breath: ma. Instead, I became Dol-mah, a name that lurches at each syllable and ends as if to ask: Is that really you?

Have I ever tasted anything at once so perfectly sweet, salty, and creamy before? It's a kind of torture. Shumo watches us with a smile. As the sweet nectar melts on my tongue, the words I burned your letter fill my mouth and nearly spill out. But I say nothing.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down length-wise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?

I feel my mother's warm breath on my face. Everything is cold except for my mother.

Tears pooled in my eyes as I contemplated my self-sacrifice. I secretly worried that I would be a coward. I also worried that my blood would be the colour of their flag, which now flew over every house and even our monastery. Let my blood be white, I prayed. Let it be the color of the gods, white like the khata. But I had seen that everyone's blood is the same colour. When it flows, when it merges, blood is nameless.