Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

“Half the life of cities occurs at night,” Olive Lawrence warned us. “There’s a more uncertain morality then. At night there are those who eat flesh by necessity—they might eat a bird, a small dog.” When Olive Lawrence spoke it was more like a private shuffling of her thoughts, a soliloquy from somewhere in the shadows of her knowledge, an idea she was still unsure about.

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

But what had we become? 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.

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.

He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures.

am attracted to these surprising liaisons, such sutras of cause and effect.