Open City

by Teju Cole

Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities.

Our debt, though, to that light: what of it? We owe ourselves our lives.

By fifty, which is what I estimated her age to be, a woman’s appearance often requires effort.

Who asked you?

The rain kept coming down, on the battlefield of Waterloo at the outskirts of the city, the Lion’s Mound, the Ardennes, the implacable valleys full of young men’s bones grown old, on the preserved cities farther out west, on Ypres and the huddled white crosses dotting Flanders fields, the turbulent channel, the impossibly cold sea to the north, on Denmark, France, and Germany.

the image of Death hovering in the room with its cheap suit and bad manners,

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

I went inside, and greeted the risers. Five minutes later, I left.

He doesn't even talk to Moji. He takes in her story then leaves. How horrible that must have been for her -- she has the chance for a confrontation she's no doubt imagined over and over again, and her rapist doesn't give her any reaction at all. Like she's not even worth denying it, let alone trying to apologize.

Mahler’s music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question.

I'm not familiar with Mahler but I love the phrasing of "more universal vibrations."

Although it has had its symbolic value right from the beginning, until 1902, it was a working lighthouse, the biggest in the country. In those days, the flame that shone from the torch guided ships into Manhattan’s harbor; that same light, especially in bad weather, fatally disoriented birds. The birds, many of which were clever enough to dodge the cluster of skyscrapers in the city, somehow lost their bearings when faced with a single monumental flame.