Tej’s Reviews > The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise > Status Update

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."

Giving up one's prerferences, I gathered, was the first step towards liberation.

I'd been rattled and unsettled by Sri Lanka as by no other place I could remember; the idea of paradise seemed to corrupt its real moments of beauty and to move people to be not kinder but more reckless.

I'd been struck, on arrival, that the Sri lankan flag was the only one I'd seen that featured a sword, brandished between the paws of a capering lion. Later, I'd learn that a group of monks had set up a political party whose emblem showed the lion thrusting its sword forwards, on the offensive.

Days, sometimes weeks, in the silence had given me a taste of what lies on the far side of our thoughts. Who we become - cease to become - when we put all ideas and theories behind us.

A pilgrim, very often, is travelling in search of the past; but Jerusalem was the center of a thousand clashing pasts, and all of them made up the nightmare from which it was longing to awaken.

The Aboriginal people might call themselves Christian, but they did not understand why Europeans needed to go into a special house to talk to God, eyes closed. For them, the promised land was nowhere but the land around them.

Sometimes, in the Lethean quiet, I thought of the phrase of the fifth-century monk John Cassian: pan perniciosa - or the peace that's pernicious because it involves turning your back on the world.

"But Kashmir, during World War II, was a place of peace for my mother--only to be violently parceled off six years later during Partition and turned, while war was subsiding elsewhere, into a place of violence. A parable, almost, about the way Paradise becomes something different in every neighbor's head, and my enchanted garden can never be yours ."

contd. "But the more we got secondhand, the farther we were from real life. Somehow it seemed easier than ever to sit in a darkened cave, backs turned to the world, hypnotized by images projected on the walls that keep reality at a distance."