Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness – which is more than the idea of the ‘environment’ – that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness – rather than history and the past – that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover. So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries – Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia – the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a
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