----Nietzsche.
The intellectual joy of belonging.
----b.
Watched the second half of the match at G's father's apartment. An old man who had recreated a part of Delhi in this leafy suburb of London. Musty, dank corridors and a slightly decaying exterior; plush interiors. The only way to live! He talked fondly of how Lahore was much better than Delhi and Bombay-but that was sixty, seventy years ago, when he was 16. He has no friends here and no family (apart from G). The only time his eyes light up, though, are when he talks of the coffee house back in Connaught Place. His dark eyes seem glazed over, as if they were fixed on a distant object..or a far away place.
By a strange co-incidence the swami has also heard of the coffee house.
"Why, I had cold coffee for the first time in my life there when I was 13, it was 1945; it was bitter and I nearly spat it out. But my uncle, a literary man, said (with a simple but withering glance of his eyes) that it would be terribly poor form to not drink it."
Of course, there was the old coffee house (and Pak tea house) back in Lahore. A place where vagabond penniless dissidents, writers, and intellectuals read poetry to one another. Habib Jalib was a regular:
This country, this country of unsurpassed beauty.
But yes, how ugly are its people!
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At Putney station, old but busy. There's more than a hint of winter in the air tonight. For the first time the warm yellow lights in other people's houses look comforting. Life returns to the interior. For the first time one wants to look inside other people's windows and wonder about how a totally different life to your own can carry on so close and yet so oblivious. Tonight, mothers will tell their children not to stay out too late. The enfolding darkness and the bleak buildings-never have they looked so devoid of light-remind one that reality-whether petty, dramatic or profound, is indoors. The sky is blacker than ever. The station lights come on with a ping and a flicker and there is an audible sigh of relief. (It's as if this was Blackpool!).
For a moment we're all sailors on the top deck. We're shipwrecked. The old man was right. Surround yourself. Keep it out. We strain our eyes, search and search in the dimming light. Is there a human soul out there?
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I'm lost in thought for some reason and remain silent for a long time. On the district line our train pulls into a station. I look across at another train that seems to be at a greater height than ours. Between its rusty wheels I see a shimmering arch of light. For a minute it appears as if there is another world beyond those lights and I'm nearly spirited away there. Then the train pulls away, revealing a plastic white light. So, this is reality! Don't look too hard at it.
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What I did hate, though, and what finally set me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term..without turning in my grades, was that the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core,-all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these mans promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs ...Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible-time freed, existential youth forever,. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth.
...Muslims, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.
----- Richard Ford, The Sportswriter.
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