Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

In youth we are not so much embarrassed by the reality of our situation as fearful others might discover and judge it.

Depends on the situation I suppose, but fear does often seem to rule more in youth. It’s almost as if that is the battle... overcoming fear... or we’ll be doomed to fight that battle our entire lives.

Was that future woman I imagined aligned with her wishfulness for herself?

A beautiful recognition of what we place on others.

His ancestors were generations of lightermen and thus he had a river body that showed an accent only on land.

I love this description of body “language” as an accent.

“But Not for Me.”

Look this song up.

When you are uncertain about which way to go as a youth, you end up sometimes not so much repressed, as might be expected, but illegal, you find yourself easily invisible, unrecognized in the world.

Both “repressed” and “illegal” share the feeling of not belonging, of not being worthy just by being yourself.

I started to recognize aspects of her through The Darter’s eyes.

The best teachers are those that help us look at people - or the world - in a different, more appreciative perspective.

We moved under a panoply of passing trees, which simultaneously floated in the water below us.

I like the meter of “panoply of passing trees”.

Otherwise how do we survive that forty miles of bad terrain during adolescence that we crossed without any truthful awareness of ourselves?

It does often seem like surviving a trek through a desert, or dense jungle; exhausted at the end, but not necessarily aware we survived an arduous journey.

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.

“Armed with the [knowledge of] the present.” How we turn things over in order to discover something about a situation, or about ourselves.

It was strange to consider their world being organized in such a godlike way by a woman who was remembering less and less of her own universe.

A beautiful observation of irony.

The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.

As if we could change it; we can only use it to aid us in the future. How many revisits does this take? Is there a point where it’s too many?

it was no longer possible to see who held a correct moral position.

How rampant is this? Has it improved? Will we, as humans, ever move beyond the gravitational pull of revenge and retaliation? How do we allow love and forgiveness to float to the surface instead?

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another.

It takes stepping outside of yourself to discover yourself; your life and your approach to that life and others.

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures. He tugged off a sprig from every bush of rosemary he passed, smelled it, and preserved it in his shirt pocket. Any river he came to distracted him.

To be curious, and in love with discovery - even the discovery of something known and cherished.

my sister Rachel.

So... we’re slipping from third-person narrative back to first-person? This doesn’t make sense. No amount of research or conversation can convey this level of detail. I don’t buy it. I don’t like it.

Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?

Fate? Predestination? The “destination is the journey”?