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“Do you shit when you eat?” chuckled a NYU professor who I bribed with chow mein and a night of Elgar in exchange for his knowledge of criminology. “Is shit made of complex biocarbons? Is nature a wonder, is the human body understood? Is society? Are people? Are gross over-simplifications of entrenched socio-economic problems exactly what’s wrong with this polarised country? Hell yes!”
These men might be married, might beat another man to death for even looking at their wives, their sisters, their children, but when a lone Western woman walks through the streets of Oman, that’s fair game, because Western women are like that, aren’t they? They must be, to walk the way they walk, talk the way they talk.
Choices for the lonely: to seek human company in all its forms, or to be content with the fact that you have no company at all.
A bewildering tapestry of names and faces. She used to be a PA, but now she’s head of her own media firm. He used to work in the invoicing department of a stationery shop, but now he’s a management consultant, and fabulous.
I exist in this physical world as sure as stone, but in the world of men – in that world that is collective memory, in the dream-world where people find meaning, feeling, importance – I am a ghost. Only in the present tense am I real.
Alone, you can lose yourself, or you may find yourself, and most of the time you do both.
Electric life, electric key, electric footprint in a digital age. CO2 emissions I have created, things I have consumed, windows broken, surfaces scratched, I am the mark my life leaves behind, I am a number in a system, I am the smell on a drunk man’s lips when he wakes, naked, in the love hotel, which he washes off in the morning. I am destruction.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth.’”
“I designed treatments to make people better. I thought I could use it to make me brave. But people don’t want to be brave, Rafe said. People want to be perfect. That’s what they do now, the treatments. They erase your soul, and make you someone new.”
When a paper was produced suggesting, for example, that eating lemongrass was as effective a cure for cancer as chemotherapy, he ordered his editors to run the story. Naturally, the study was written by a crackpot and was instantly dismissed, but he gave it a voice. A policeman gunned down a child, cop called heroic at Pereyra’s command, the child slandered as a thief, irredeemable aged thirteen. The cop was white, the boy was black; it’s a common story. An electoral campaign based on hating the foreigner, the poor, the unknown, every lie of course destroyed by experts – but Matheus Pereyra
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The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell.
The wheel of life turns and we are elevated from animals to women, from women to men, from men to kings, from kings to gods, from gods to… perfection. And what is perfection now? Not crucifixion, not poverty endured patiently on the mountaintop. No – the perfect life is to have an annual salary of £120,000, an Aston Martin, a £1.6-million-pound home, a wife, two children and at least two foreign holidays a year. Perfection is an idol built upon oppression.
don’t know anyone who tries to work out problems for people by numbers, except generals and prime ministers. I don’t think there’s good mathematics for what war does to people.”
“It’s just money,” he replied. “It’s just paper.” “It’s time,” I said, sharper than I’d meant. “It’s the means to purchase time. It’s the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it’s a year’s salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it’s the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it’s not money. It’s what it could have been.”
and says earnestly that he used to study philosophy, but the philosophers missed the point, that it wasn’t about the rules, it was about the absences, the places where the rules broke down, that was the truth of it, the truth of the universe.
The woman, frozen like a wading bird, uncertain if death circles above, or food swims below. Do you feed and die, your back exposed to the enemy, or stand still and starve?
Modern technology makes it both easier and harder to steal cars. Harder, because electric locks and digital codes now all too often require higher levels of technology to beat. Easier, because digital codes and electric locks, once beaten, make it easier to do everything clean, a press of a button, a flick of a switch and hello those open doors,
Do I care that the only way to be free from the fear of surveillance is to be absolutely harmless? To conform to a sociological norm, and never say anything that is personal, or real, or half thought through, or challenging?
