Jim > Recent Status Updates

Jubiaba [the voodoo priest] always carried a bunch of herbs that rustled in the wind, and muttered words in the African Nago dialect. He would come along the street talking to himself and blessing people, his old cashmere trousers dragging, and above them, his embroidered shirt flapping like a flag according to the caprices of the wind.

A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.

I realized just how much I wanted to leave. I felt frightened. I could see what life would be like for me if I stayed. It wasn't death itself that I was afraid of. I was afraid of maddened faces, of lanterns being shone in my eyes, of blind mindless rage. I was afraid of cold, of hunger, of darkness, of rifle butts banging on parquet floors. I was afraid of screams, of weeping, of gunshots, of the deaths of others.

You are going back [to the U.S.] in three weeks. How can you bear it? Cellophane, television, the deep-freeze unit, getting and spending. The whole bag of nothing.

I wanted busthead boilermakers of Jack Daniel's and draft beer, vodka on the rocks, Beam straight up with water on the side, raw tequila that left you breathless and boiling in your own juices.

The Maya have been feeding the tree at the center of the world for 3,000 years. The details of the rituals have changed, but the differences do not belie the underlying continuity in the way they think of the world. It is alive, and all sacred things in it—including things we would call alive and things we would call inanimate—have soul.

Virtually everything important to Zinacantecos also possesses a CH'ULEL [soul], domestic animals and plants, salt, houses and household fires, crosses, the saints, musical instruments, maize, and all the other deities in the pantheon. The most important interaction in the universe is not between persons and objects, but among the innate souls of persons aqnd inanimate objects.

The great cosmic symbols of the ancient Maya aqre a map of the sky, but the sky itself is a great pageant that replays Creation in the pattern of its yearly movements.

Now everybody has his own special way of waking up the morning after. Some people wake up one way, some another, and still others prefer not to wake up at all, but just lie there turned to the wall with their eyes pressed to the wall until some friend has the good sense to bring them a pint of vodka and a pickle.

Give enough young girl an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down; the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Child marriages will be less common; child labor, too.

There are places that feel like he answer to the question of why we travel in the first place, why we bother to trespass, crossing the lines that look like fences. This place [Cairo, Egypt] is one of my few.

We were all inside a matrix of lust and erotic sadness, all turning into versions of one another, or seeing our past selves.

I knew that Bootsie was probably right about Elrod. He was one of the walking wounded, the kind for whom you always felt sympathy, but you knew eventually he'd rake a whole dustpan of broken glass into your head.

You soon find your long-ago dreams of India rising in a sort of vague and luscious moonlight above the horizon-rim of your opaque consciousness, and softly lighting up a thousand forgotten details which were parts of a vision that had once been vivid to you when you were a boy, and steeped your spirit in tales of the East.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

He told me that the first pair of rabbits imported into Australasia bred so wonderfully that within six months rabbits were so thick in the land that people had to dig trenches through them to get from town to town.

Christianity gives only the most tentative account of the life of the soul after the death of the body. The soul will be eternally in the presence of God, Christianity teaches; more than that we do not know..... There are only vague images of harps and choirs.

When I am not carrying laundry baskets I am his segretaria, part-time. Also, now and again, his house-help. At first I was just supposed to be his segretaria, his secret aria, his scary fairy, in fact not even that, just his typist, his tipitista, his clackadackia.

Six years earlier, German tanks had burst out of the Reich and fanned across the continent in formation. There was no stopping this great massed phalanx of armour, tanks to the fore and sides, as it ploughed across Europe. Everything before it was crushed and torched, and—in the tracks through the flattened corn—came the infantry and armoured cars. It's said that behind them came a stampede of riderless horses....

People have a way of disappearing suddenly from my life: I'm used to it. Life is change and movement. I stay still, doing the same thing every day, while everyone else is rushing around at a phenomenal speed.

Rain, continual rain, a level grey wet sky, a level grey wet sea, a wet and misty train winding round and round the little bays, diving through tunnels. Ghosts of the unpleasant-looking Lipari islands standing a little way out to sea, heaps of shadow deposited like rubbish heaps in the universal greyness.

Thrones wilt when they are not fed with blood, their vitality grows with the mass of wrongs committed, with life-denials, with the crushing of all that is perpetually different and that has been ousted by them. We are disclosing here secret and forbidden things; we are touching upon state secrets hidden away and secured with a thousand seals of silence.

"The gods want us to worship [Mount] Kawa Karpo," Nuoji told me gravely, "but not to touch it. Those who touch it die." Kawa Karpo remains unscaled. So dangerous are trails near its summit that some devout Buddhists attempt them in the hopes of accelerating their passage into the next life.

Sometimes travel is this elemental: the desire to replace the old molecules with new ones, familiarity with its opposite.

They keep emptying out the world. The good ones stand on trapdoors so perfectly fitted into the floor you can't see the carpentry. And they keep pulling those lousy trip cords.

A rigidly efficient monk lacking both humor and humility, [Diego de] Landa with one hand lighted the torch that destroyed Maya culture, and with the other preserved it.

I lay on my belly, the warm earth against me, and forgot the cold dew and the wolves of the night. I felt it was for this I had come; to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that had no memories for me.

At some point people thought that the potential that people had was not developed because everyone was ignorant and that education was the solution to the problem, that if all people were educated, we could perhaps all be Voltaires. But it turns out that falsehood and evil can be taught as easily as good.

When I walked down the Rue de la Citadelle arm in arm with Ingrid, it was with the certainty that for the first time in my li9fe I was under someone's protection.

Nearly everyone who has ridden a bike for any length of time will agree. The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong ever done them by man, beast, or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their own fear of death, jail and lawsuits ... which are much less likely if they can find a motorcycle to challenge....