Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"It's easier than I thought to lie to my best friends."

""Soon," my parents say. It's always "soon." But soon doesn't arrive."

"I want what The Baker's family has: everyone in the same room."

"The bad dreams, those you have to tell first thing in the morning so they don't stay in your mind. And never in the kitchen, or else they get in your stomach. That's how you get indigestion," Mom told me, and I never forgot."

""And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.""

""To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.""

""We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up.""

""And hold on to one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us.""

""We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember, every generation.""

""Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.""

""And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out of our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.""

""'Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,' he said, 'shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'""

""'I hate a Roman named Status Quo!' he said to me. 'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.'""

""My grandfather ran off the V- 2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that some day our cities would open up and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big."

""It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn- cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.""

""Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.""

"And when he died,I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all,but for the things he did.I cried because he would never do them again,he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did,or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did."

"They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes, the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers."

"Beyond that, the city has never cared so much about us to bother with an elaborate chase like this to find us. A few crackpots with verses in their heads can't touch them, and they know it and we know it; everyone knows it. So long as the vast population doesn't wander about quoting the Magna Charta and the Constitution, it's all right."

"But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing."

"And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again."

"Each man had a book he wanted to remember,and did.Then,over a period of twenty years or so,we met each other,travelling & got the loose network together&set out a plan.The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we were not important,we mustn't be pedants;we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world.We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books,of no significance otherwise."

""But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last.""

""It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world."
"Do you really think they'll listen then?"
"If not, we'll just have to wait. We'll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course.""

'"We're book-burners, too. We read the books & burnt them, afraid they'd be found. Micro-filming didn't pay off; we were always travelling,we didn't want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads,where no one can see it or suspect it.We are all bits & pieces of history & literature & international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli,or Christ, it's here.""

"He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take. Even its smell was different."

"That small motion, the white and red colour, a strange fire because it meant a different thing to him. It was not burning; it was warming."

"And he was surprised to learn how certain he suddenly was of a single fact he could not prove."

"Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people's heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silver- fish, rust and dry- rot, and men with matches. The world was full of burning of all types and sizes. Now the guild of the asbestos-weaver must open shop very soon."

"After a long time of floating on the land and a short time of floating in the river he knew why he must never burn again in his life."