More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I am old. Time has revealed itself and shed its pretense of eternity, though it is of course contained within eternity.
What else is there to learn save that we know almost nothing?
That I am a displaced person is true enough. Yet this is true of all men, each in his way. What is to be learned of me now rests in memory, the interior, a country that contains ranges of mountains and their shadowed vales, the beds of alpine glens, the crevasse and its fall from which there is no return, and the summit from which one does not wish to return.
For in solitude the blur of safe indistinction becomes sharp and dangerous identity. Then, when identity has sealed its form, we seek union with the other islands, within the island of the world.
We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here.
“Marija, if we do not play in the dangerous surf, we will drown in puddles.”
She is so beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Until now he has held this word in disdain. It has become an indispensable word. He can’t get it out of his mind. It is a beautiful word.
He is afraid. Why is he afraid? He knows why. He understands that he is afraid to lose her, now that he has found her. He is afraid also of himself, because he knows how stupid he can be at times, the impulsive words and actions. If he says the wrong thing she might jump up and run away. Then this fearful bliss will never occur again in his entire life. It will be lost.
Time always returns. It does. You can forget it, but it never forgets you.
“Do you all want to become priests?” Fra Anto says
“The continuity of time”, Josip says, trying to get things moving along. “What did you mean by that?” “I mean they’ve erased our history and are rewriting what remains. I mean, as well, that whole zones of literature are now forbidden and are disappearing from libraries. And who knows what else is missing. The entire field of newspaper and radio is their toy. Toy? No, it’s their weapon! They fill our minds with whatever they want us to think.” “The older people remember.” “Yes, but most are frightened. Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared. And before he disappeared, a man whom I
...more
“But how can we know what is true and untrue?” “Exactly—how can we know? And we are knowing less and less with every passing day. But of this man you can be sure, he is the best, and what they say about him is untrue. He is the real Croatia. He is one of the true heroes.”
But, I tell you, guys like you are always the first to be hauled away.” “I don’t worry about that”, Antun shrugs.
Foreshadowing?
We must understand that the world is neither individualist nor collectivist.” “You’re saying there’s a third way?” asks Tatjana, the poetess from Belgrade. “What is your conception of it?” “When people of like mind and heart come together, a community is formed. This community is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a reflection of an ideal communion that exists beyond this world.”
Truth is always embedded in beauty.” “Can beauty be beauty without overt truth?”
“I don’t think that’s a good thing. History is facts, therefore historiography should be factual.” “That’s impossible to achieve! Any study of history is a culmination of particular philosophies!”
“This is what we were made for, Josip, to find each other and no longer to wander through this world in isolation.” “I mistook isolation for solitude. I loved my solitude, and now I no longer love it.” “It was the same for me. Music was my companion and my spouse. I still love it, but it can never again be enough for me.” “Do you not fear that it will be taken away from us?” “Yes, I fear it. But I believe we must cast out the fear. Then our love will be indestructible.” “So many people have lost love or never found it. So many are alone. So many.” “If we live our love fully, then we can love
...more
“A man suffers injustice. He resents it, and his resentment grows and grows and becomes anger. Anger, if it is fed, then becomes hatred. Hatred, if fed, opens the soul to evil spirits. And when they possess a man, he becomes capable of any atrocity. Afterward, he will not know how or why he became like that.”
strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of nets, and seems unstoppable.
repeated imagery of nets
“So, how does one defeat monsters?” “A man may defeat a monster and yet be defeated by his own heart.” “I do not understand.” “Odysseus must learn that he cannot win in the way that Achilles won at Troy. He must win by another method, for the monsters are too great for him. He uses his mind. He uses cunning and skill. Though he is strong in body, he knows it is not enough. To succeed in his nostos he must—” “What’s a nostos?” “The homeward journey.” “Oh”, frowns the boy, thinking. “So, how does he do it?” “He defeats the monster within himself.”
lives. Yes, even these generous Americans are like that. He spits on their divided hearts. With one hand they offer freedom to the world, and with the other hand they give half a continent away to evil men.
Winston says: “These scientists in their Harvard and Princeton laboratories are alchemists. They misunderstand practically everything.”
You grow old. The flaws gain on the pleasanter parts then overtake them, and then become the new regime, ruling everything. Well, not everything, he smiles to himself, for there is the interior country, where you are always young.
“So, you think I’m a bad apple, Joe?” “No, you are merely young. And your desire for exultation is really a damaged longing for the transcendent.”
Is he bitter about her? Yes, he supposes that he is; he cannot lie to himself about it. But why is he so bitter? Is it because she represents something he can neither fight nor run from? Yes, that must be it, because she does indeed represent the new order. What the Communists and Fascists failed to achieve through violence, materialists have accomplished without firing a shot.
Amritsar syndrome, Auschwitz syndrome, Hiroshima syndrome, Gulag syndrome, Cambodia and Ethiopia and Jonestown syndromes—yes, all the proliferating syndromes. What is a syndrome if not another name for a phenomenon that occurs when evil strikes good and hell is unleashed through the human heart—and the good who survive recoil and seek forgetfulness.
“What can I teach anyone?” Josip asks in a low moment—a rhetorical question. Unfortunately, this little groan is overheard by Caleb, and the young African-American laureate replies with a fiendishly eloquent and somewhat lugubrious rebuke. Josip is suitably chastened. Let God, then, deal with his pride. Humans are unreliable, in praise and condemnation alike.
“A man is himself and no other”, Josip says. “He is an island in the sea of being. And each island is as no other. The islands are connected because they have come forth from the sea, and the sea flows between them. It separates them yet unites them, if they learn to swim.”
neither. Logic is the province of beginners, reflection the sphere best suited for the end of years, though both should be employed by young and old.
What am I saying to you? Perhaps it is only this: man does not look deeply at the world. He lives by habit and pleasure and impulse. He does not read the poetry in things. And so I say, if he must kill a creature, that is his right, but he should see its beauty before taking its life and understand its presence as language. Moreover, he must understand that blindness to the miraculousness of existence makes it easier for him to pull a trigger and end a human life. Do I exaggerate? We both know the 170 million answers to this.
Dear Caleb, Thank you so much for sending me your latest book. It is ever encouraging for me to see a man of your generation resisting the “zeitgeist literary Nazis”, as you once called them. And it seems that you have discovered a parallel truth: zeitgeist literary Communists are an alternative danger, as are the proponents of any other collectivist ideas that present themselves to the mind as solutions to “the problem of man”. I include in this category the new globalist’s models of what is now called universal “governance”. As all ideologues do, they offer us superficial either/or choices.
...more
A quarter of a million are missing from my land of birth, Bosnia-Herzegovina, murdered by Serbs. As many have been displaced through what our enemy calls “ethnic cleansing”. In occupied Croatia, twenty-five thousand noncombatants were killed. It is rare to meet a Croat and not talk with him about the war—everyone has lost someone.
For truth without mercy is not truth, and kindness without truth is not mercy.
While it is true that atrocities endured do not bestow moral authority, safety merits even less. Still, a man may speak of what he knows and does not know because authenticity begins in the heart, always in the heart.
