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‘And as for you, it seems you’re a little loosely based yourself.’
It was the Age of Anything- Can- Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new- technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything- Can- Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an
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He knew himself to be a man with a true capacity for adoration, an area in which most of his fellow men, being uncivilised ignorant brutes, were sorely deficient. It had therefore been painful to him that almost all the women he pursued had, quite quickly after his pursuit began, done their best to run away.
Quichotte when young had been a little short, a little chubby compared to other boys his age. Then, in late adolescence, as if an invisible divine hand had grabbed him and squeezed him in the middle like a tube of toothpaste, he shot up to his present height and became as skinny as a shadow.
Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.
Childhood was just a story she could tell at dinner parties: a story about the hypocrisies and double standards of the supposedly free- thinking Indian intelligentsia.
TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humourless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.
Her support warmed his heart. He loved his wife. He wondered if it would upset her if he asked her to lose a little weight.
Other hurdles were ideological. ‘I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,’ she declaimed. ‘All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote- unquote free choices are legitimising the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the
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When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished,’ Czesław Miłosz once said.)
Had he, as a child, intuited something and then, afraid of what he had guessed, buried the intuition so deep that he retained no memory of it? And could books, some books, gain access to those hidden chambers and use what they found there?
‘What I hoped for is indeed beyond hope,’ he said. ‘I was out of my mind, looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests. And all around me America – and not only America, the whole human race! – yes, even our India! – was also losing its reason, its capacity for ethics, its goodness, its soul. And it may be, I can’t say, that this deep failure brought down upon us the deeper failure of the cosmos.

