The Tin Drum—Günter Grass

The Land of Lost Content—AE Housman

the Mahabharata is the longest poem in world literature, over two hundred thousand lines long, which is to say ten times as long as the Iliad and Odyssey put together, while the Ramayana runs to around fifty thousand lines, merely two and a half times as long as the combined works of Homer.

The Thousand Nights and One Night (Arabic: Alf Laylah wa Laylah). It is rather wonderful that this ancient text, this wonderful group of wonder tales, retains the power to upset the world’s fanatics more than twelve hundred years after the stories first came into the world.

Western writers I have most admired, writers such as Italo Calvino and Günter Grass, Mikhail Bulgakov and Isaac Bashevis Singer, have all feasted richly on their various wonder-tale traditions and found ways of injecting the fabulous into the real to make it more vivid and, strangely, more truthful.

We are born wanting food, shelter, love, song, and story. Our need for the last two is not less than our need for the first three.

Don’t go back where you’ve already been. Find another reason for going somewhere else.

the dybbuk-ridden villages of Isaac Bashevis Singer

So: If a novel or indeed a play is bound to have “something wrong with it,” then let it at least be a wonderful wrongness, speaking of the strangeness of the world’s beauty, a wrongness that seeks to wipe from our eyes and cleanse from our ears the dull patina and muffling wax of the everyday, which makes us see reality as monochromatic and hear it as monotonous, and to reveal the rainbow music of how things really are.

I like to argue that reality isn’t realistic, and so I prefer this other kind of literature, what one might call the protean tradition, which is more realistic than realism, because it corresponds to the unrealism of the world.

The “real” is an idea of the world, a description or picture of it, just like the “unreal.” You might even say it’s an article of faith, like money or fairies: People have to believe in it or else it doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe the greenback in your pocket is worth one dollar, then it’s just a scrap of paper, a dead fairy, unreal. “By the same token,” as we like to say in India, if you don’t believe in a given description of the world, you refuse to call it “real”; you call it, instead, a lie. The line between reality and fiction is not sharp; it’s blurry and smudged. A description of the world contains facts, certainly, and facts, as we’ve seen, are fluttery, elusive creatures, but there are armies of fact lepidopterists chasing after them, and sometimes they do get nailed to the wall, like moths. So inside any given “reality,” a given picture of the world, there will be a number of nailed-down facts—the name of the president, the age of your spouse, the place occupied by your favorite sports team in the weekly standings—but there will also, often, be nailed-down fictions—common prejudices, ignorances, mistakes, and items of state propaganda (which comes these days in a range of attractive colors)—masquerading as facts. Once, I don’t have to remind anyone, it was a fact that the world was flat.

Here’s this world we have, not flat, not anymore, we know that, but can we agree what it actually is? Round, okay, it’s roundish, but beyond that? More and more it’s a place where people argue, where they don’t agree, where one man’s liberation is another man’s imperialism, where battle lines are drawn in the sand, across glaciers, through the hearts of broken cities, where a great dispute is in progress about the nature of reality, about what is the case; there are worlds in collision, incompatible realities fighting for the same space, and the result, often, is violence.

Heraclitus was a great fan of the Word; “All things follow from the Word,” he said, and again, “For wisdom, listen / not to me but to the Word, and know that all is one.”

“Stupidity is better kept a secret than displayed.” (#109)

“People dull their wits with gibberish and cannot use their ears and eyes,” (#4)

 “The eye, the ear, the mind in action, these I value,” (#13)

And then there’s fragment #121, which has attained the status of one of the grand self-evident truths about life, fragment #121, which tells us, as it told Charlie Brown, that a man’s ethos is his daimon, or, in plainer language, that a man’s character is his fate. “Character is destiny.” The key to the art of the novel in seven syllables, or so people have long believed.

with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

James Joyce, that creator of potently destined characters, agenbitten by inwit, knew the limitations of the flesh as he knew everything else, was a master of the shifting, the mutable, and near the beginning of Ulysses invoked the metamorphic Old Father Ocean, Proteus: “beware,” as the book warns us, “of imitations.”

[Ian] McEwan accepts the power of the unforeseeable to change human lives and looks hard not for hidden causes but rather at the events’ effects on the lives they touched, which, certainly, are lived out according to the dictates of the characters of the characters, but everybody knows—we know, the author knows, and so do the characters—that because of the intervention of luck, there is an important sense in which their characters have not forged their destinies.

Kosinski, in his best book, Being There, allows his sweet idiot, “Chauncey Gardiner,” whose very name is not his name but given to him by chance, to rise from a rich man’s simpleminded servant to the consort of the grand and the adviser of the mighty.

The significance in human affairs of the unpredictable—the revolution, the avalanche, the sudden illness, the stock-market collapse, the accident—obliges us to accept that character isn’t the only determinant of our lives.

Character may be destiny, but what is character?

Poverty is destiny, war is destiny, ancient ethnic, tribal, and religious hatreds are destiny, a bomb on a bus or in a market square is destiny, and character just has to take its place in the list.

These are the four roots of the self: language, place, community, custom.

I respond so strongly to novels like The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville, with its elusive, slippery, changeable protagonist, or to other protean fictions such as Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, whose alternative history of an America in which the Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt for the presidency in the middle of World War II reminds us of what Jorge Luis Borges knew, that history is a garden of forking paths, and that although things did go one way they might have gone another and who would we be then, how differently might we have thought or acted, might not our destinies have shaped our characters rather than the other way around?

American literature is being reinvented nowadays by writers whose stories come from everywhere; many of today’s younger writers (younger, I mean, than me) are embracing and enlarging America’s protean horizons: Yaa Gyasi, Esi Edugyan, Edwidge Danticat, Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Laila Lalami, Maaza Mengiste, lots of them.

“Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men. And still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one time a sardine.” (#17)

Perhaps as a result of reading Edward Lear, I became a fan of the limerick form. My personal favorite was the meta-limerick about the old man of Japan. 

There was an old man of Japan 

Who could never get limericks to scan. 

When they asked him why 

He replied with a sigh, 

“Well, you see, it’s because I 

always try and put as many words 

into the last line as I possibly can.”

From the study of history I learned that the past is contested territory and that reality is not a given but a thing we make.

These self-glorifying prose fantasies usually embarrassed me into throwing them away moments after they appeared on the page. They offered a fleeting, onanistic comfort, usually followed by a pang of shame.

both these pieces of juvenilia were false starts in the process that would eventually lead me to Midnight’s Children.

it was during this period of savage introspection that my writing career finally began.

So I resisted the blandishments of the enemies of promise.

” I remembered the footbridge near Chowpatty Beach that bore, on one side, the advertising slogan Esso puts a tiger in your tank and, on the other side, a public-service warning, Drive like hell and you will get there.

I simply wanted to set the literary bar as high as I possibly could. “For all serious daring starts from within” is the last line of One Writer’s Beginnings, and that spirit of serious daring was what, after long years of confusion, I finally found the courage to embrace.

I confess, surprised and flattered to know that Philip [Roth] had read and liked my novel The Golden House. You don’t expect your literary heroes to read your work.

He was quite uninterested in meeting me, was curt to the point of discourtesy, and quickly went off in search of more-fashionable party guests.

Cheever’s “Swimmer” and Joseph Heller’s Yossarian

grew up in India, where people weren’t even allowed to kiss onscreen in the movies, and public displays of affection were frowned upon in real life, and where the ancient sexuality of Tantric art had long ago been replaced by an easily shocked prudery of which I too was partly guilty.

Dangling Man—Saul Bellow

The Victim—Saul.Bellow

I have long believed that there are only two kinds of really good novel. One is what I call the “everything novel,” what Henry James called the “loose baggy monster,” the novel that tries to include as much of life as possible. The other is the “almost nothing novel,” the novel that, so to speak, plucks a single thin narrative strand from the head of the goddess and turns it in the light to reveal truth. Jane Austen, W. G. Sebald, and, in his very different way, in the short-story form, Raymond Carver are writers of this kind.

Bellow started small (Dangling Man) then did the big, world-swallowing baggy monsters Augie March, Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, Humboldt’s Gift, and then in later life went small again (The Bellarosa Connection, A Theft, Ravelstein). In Roth’s case, the big, all-encompassing books came in a late, brilliant surge—Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain—which revealed him to be at least the equal of Bellow’s “grand, assertive, freewheeling conception of both the novel and the world the novel represents.”

The Facts—Roth

Operation Shylock—Roth

Sabbath’s Theater—Roth

The Human Stain—Roth

The Plot Against America—Roth

But here we stand, with a celebrity president who is a populist demagogue, an isolationist who is putting up tariff barriers against most of the world, a man whose cultural targets (LeBron James, Don Lemon, Maxine Waters) are very frequently people of color, and whose administration has unleashed, in its political base, a tide of racism; a man who has found it easy to cozy up to the murderous tyrant Vladimir Putin, and whose followers, some of them seen wearing T-shirts reading I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat, are indeed revealing to us how dark and swollen the underbelly of American prejudice (and stupidity) still is.

until I reread Slaughterhouse-Five recently, that that famous phrase, “so it goes,” is used only and always as a comment on death.

British novelist Julian Barnes was right when he wrote in his book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters that “the definition of irony is what people miss.”

Orlando—Virginia Woolf

drawn to the work not only of the crossover giants like Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin and Arthur C. Clarke—as well as Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf, whose Frankenstein and Orlando are honorary members of the canon—but also of the hardcore genre masters, James Blish, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Clifford D. Simak, Katherine MacLean, Zenna Henderson, and L. Sprague de Camp.

Vonnegut’s novel is about that, about the inevitability of human violence, and about what it does to the not-particularly-violent human beings who get caught up in it. He knows that most human beings are not particularly violent. Or not more violent than children are. Give a child a machine gun and he may well use it. Which does not mean that children are particularly violent. World War II, as Vonnegut reminds us, was a children’s crusade. Billy Pilgrim is an adult to whom Vonnegut gives the innocence of a child.

It may be impossible to stop wars, just as it’s impossible to stop glaciers, but it’s still worth finding the form and the language that reminds us what they are. It’s worth calling them by their true names. That is what realism is.

Vonnegut’s prose, even when dealing with the dreadful, whistles a happy tune.

It doesn’t tell us how to stop wars. It tells us that wars are hell, but we knew that already. It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information. It tells us that human nature is the one great constant of life on earth, and it beautifully and truthfully shows us human nature neither at its best nor at its worst but how it mostly is, most of the time, even when the times are terrible.

e. I never studied English literature but, loving books, plunged into libraries and bookshops like a starving man, gobbling up whatever came to hand. I went on long idiosyncratic reading jags, experimenting with literature’s mind-altering effects at a time when many of my contemporaries were fumbling with other, less verbal keys to perception’s doors.

at that time death and I were no better than nodding acquaintances. That is to say, I had on occasion seen death from a distance but we had not yet been properly introduced.

Samuel Beckett

texts that deal so intensely with the matter of our common ending, which Henry James had called the Distinguished Thing but which, in Beckett, is always grubbily undistinguished, a bleak pratfalling business made up of flatulence, impotence, and humiliation, I experienced the books, their ferocious hurling at death of immense slabs of undifferentiated prose, as essentially fabulous, fantastic tales told by the voices of antic ghosts. I experienced them, in sum, as comedies, and so they are, they are comedies, but not of the sort I then imagined them to be.

Death strips life down to its essence before it takes that essence away, and these books mimic death and strip away everything that is not essential. Words are essential and so a few words remain, and stories cannot entirely be dispensed with; they are begun and changed and discarded but never entirely disposed of, because in stories resides life, while it resides, until the last eviction.

My rereading of Don Quixote, in the brilliant Edith Grossman translation—so much more vivid than the old J. M. Cohen version, which I first read back in the 1970s—became the starting point, the first inspiration, for the novel that became Quichotte.

Ironweed—Ian Kennedy

García Márquez

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize

It’s fair to say that more than one religion deserves scrutiny. Christian extremists in the United States today attack women’s liberties and gay rights in language they claim comes from God.

hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today.

[English] unlike some other languages I could name, its syntactical freedom and its elasticity allow you to make of it what you will, and that this is why, as it has spread across the world, it has made so many successful local metamorphoses—into Irish English, West Indian English, Australian English, Indian English, and the many varieties of American English.

“Art of Fiction” interviews in Paris Review.

William Styron

the title page of the first volume of Tristram Shandy: “The LIFE and OPINIONS of TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN.” Then there is a quotation from Epictetus, given in Greek. “Tarassei tous Anthropous ou ta Pragmata, alla ta peri ton Pragmaton, Dogmata,” which is to say, “What upsets people is not things themselves, but their theories about things.”

The names of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne are absent from their books. Just two hundred and fifty years ago it was possible for books to become famous and celebrated, as all these books were in their day, and for the author to remain in the shadows. The personality and life story of the author was not deemed to be of any relevance to his work.

Dickens was uninterested in disguising his authorship; neither did he make any attempt to conceal the novel’s autobiographical origins, and a year before he died he called it [David Copperfield] his “favorite child.”

The Ground Beneath Her Feet—Rushdie

Seize the Day—Saul Bellow

Bellow was fascinated by what he called “reality instructors,” Deepak Chopra–like gurus, or what Alfred Kazin defined as “the very personification[s] of a kind of modern urban know-it-all, the quack analyst, the false guide to the many afflicted by their terrible uncertainty.” Bellow’s determination as an artist to portray and debunk such hollow men is the source of the power of his characterization of Valentine Gersbach. Merely being cuckolded is a far less potent fuel.

“Good Country People”—Flannery O'Connor 

Fury—Rushdi

I took pride in the fact that Pakistani readers used Midnight’s Children to “enter” India, and Indian readers used Shame to “enter” Pakistan

and I was literally dandled on his knee

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, poet. “Subh-e-Azadi” (“Freedom’s Morning”): “This trembling light, this night-bitten dawn, / This is not the dawn we were waiting for,”

kitchen-sink naturalism is only one way, and perhaps quite a limited way, of describing the world.

this is the age of the migrant

Here’s one such story. In May 1662, the Infanta Catarina of Portugal, more familiar to history as Catherine of Braganza, married King Charles II of England, the extrovert Restoration monarch well known for his carousing, philandering ways. Sad to say, Catherine was not beautiful, so, in order to make her attractive to King Charles, a man partial to a pretty face, the dowry had to be pretty damn good, and the British managed to persuade Portugal to part with their early colonial possession, the islands and harbor of Bombay. This may well have been the underlying motive for the marriage all along. At any rate, the British immediately built a fort on Bombay island, set about the immense land-reclamation project that would join the Seven Isles to one another and to the mainland as well, and a city grew that became the major port and economic powerhouse of British India. Meanwhile in America, two new boroughs were being marked out for development across the river from Manhattan Island. They were originally called the King’s Borough, after Charles II, and the Queen’s Borough, after Catherine of Braganza. Today they are called Brooklyn and Queens. You see how unexpectedly the world joins up? It turns out Bombay and New York, at or near their births, had the same queen.

Look in the windows of the bookstores. There are tales of finding oneself through breast-reduction surgery or finding happiness through colossal weight loss; accounts of sporting triumph, triumph on television reality shows, and the overcoming of dreadful disadvantages through the beauty of the body, or of the soul, or the unadulterated purity of the memoirist’s blind ambition. And there are the eternal tales of fall and redemption, of the self brought low through crime, drugs, and the intervention of evildoers and then raised back toward the light by good friends, family, Jesus, and detox clinics. Self-regard has never been so well regarded. Self-exposure has never been so popular, and the more self that is exposed the better. Amid such promiscuity of revelation, how can art compete? How can truth fail to be stranger than fiction?

the “truthiness” of the self-glorifier

Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died, perhaps from the plague, in 1596, at the age of eleven. Did Shakespeare, in Hamlet, written three or four years later, transpose his grief and rage at the death of a child into a son’s rage and grief at the death of a father?

Few English-language readers today will know Jan Potocki’s nineteenth-century Franco-Polish masterpiece The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, but I urge you to discover it for its playfulness and bizarrerie, its surreal, supernatural, gothic, picaresque world of gypsies, thieves, hallucinations, inquisitions, and a pair of unbelievably beautiful sisters who are, unfortunately for the men they seduce, only ghosts. Its qualities are perfectly captured by the Polish film director Wojciech Has in his 1965 film The Saragossa Manuscript.

John Huston seems to have been a particularly gifted adapter of good literature, and his film of Joyce’s “The Dead,” perhaps the greatest short story in the English language, brings it vividly, passionately to life

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” said Robert Frost, but Joseph Brodsky retorted, “Poetry is what is gained in translation,”

The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Tale of the Forecastle ,(The Children of the Sea in US) — Joseph Conrad

I must live until I die. No pilot performs his office by standing still. In Montaigne and Conrad, as in Dante and Catullus, slothfulness is invariably reprehensible. Action is a good, inaction an evil, and that is all.

I am grateful to the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb for introducing me to a contrary view: “George Spencer Brown,” he writes, “has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that ‘to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.’ ” Taleb goes on to endorse the value of a mental activity that he names “to glander,” or glandouiller: “to idle, but not to be in a state of idleness…

“We [the supermodels] don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day.”

In this sentence, in either version, three of the seven deadly sins, superbia, avaritia, and accidia—pride, greed, and sloth—are combined; while a normal reaction to the statement, and indeed to Miss Evangelista herself, might combine elements of luxuria, invidia, and ira, which is to say lust, envy, and anger. Only gula, gluttony, is absent. Not bad!

accidia, the sin of sloth

Oscar Wilde said he could resist anything except temptation.

Good as Gold—Joseph Heller

The Arabic equivalent of the formula “once upon a time” is kan ma kan, which translates “It was so, it was not so.”

self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts,

Truth has always been a contested idea.

the battle between progressive America and Trumpistan

“Believe nothing except me, for I am the truth”?

That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature. Let’s start from there.

We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage, the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures.

The poet Osip Mandelstam was much admired for his “Stalin Epigram” of 1933, in which he described the fearsome leader in fearless terms, turning his mustache into “the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,” and adding, “He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.”

Democracy is more than mere majoritarianism. Democracy is freedom. In a truly free society, all citizens must feel free, all the time, whether they end up on the winning or losing side in an election: free to express themselves as they choose, free to worship or not worship as they please, free from danger and fear. If freedom of expression is under attack, if religious freedom is threatened, and if substantial parts of society live in physical fear for their safety, then such a society cannot be said to be a true democracy.

Giriraj Singh, a senior leader of the BJP, one of the most senior of Modi’s Toadies, said in an election rally in the northern state of Bihar that those opposing Modi would have no place in India.

We worried about the arrival of a bullying, intolerant new regime, and here are its early outriders: menacing, nasty, bile-spewing, vengeful, substituting ad hominem attacks for any real debate. There will not be less of this after a Modi victory.

America is better than Trumpistan. America is better than these people for whom the Second Amendment is sacrosanct but the First Amendment, not so much. America is better than bullying and bigotry and hatred.

Behind the laughter was what his friend Ian McEwan called “his Rolls-Royce mind,” that organ of improbable erudition and frequently brilliant, though occasionally flawed, perception. The Hitch mind was indeed a sleek and purring machine trimmed with elegant fittings, but his was not a rarefied sensibility. He was an intellectual with the instincts of a street brawler, never happier than when engaged in moral or political fisticuffs.

I began to understand that while I had not chosen the battle, it was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offense-culture of the age).

He quoted Heine to me: “Where they burn books, they will afterward burn people.” (And reminded me, with his profound sense of irony, that Heine’s famous line, taken from his play Almansor, had referred to the burning of the Qur’an.)

In America, you can’t get elected dogcatcher if you can’t prove that you go to church every Sunday and have a close relationship with the priest there. (Just to be clear, not that close. He probably prefers younger people anyway.)

Even Donald Trump has had to pretend to be religious, which has not been easy for him, because, as video footage from the National Cathedral has demonstrated, he appears not to know the words to the Lord’s Prayer. (Parenthetically: Knowing things is not, on the whole, Trump’s strong point. As a conservative commentator pointed out, it’s not just that Trump doesn’t know things, it’s that he doesn’t know what “knowing things” is.)

In Europe, the battle for freedom of thought and expression was fought against the Church more than the state. The Church, with its apparatus of oppression—excommunication, anathema, the Index Expurgatorius, torture, the drowning of witches, the dismemberment or burning of dissidents—was in the business of placing limiting points upon what could be thought and said, and if you crossed those frontiers you might, like Giordano Bruno, like Savonarola, find yourself being burned at the stake or, at the very least, being forced, like Galileo, to recant what you knew to be true. So in European thought, “freedom” came to be understood as “freedom from religion.” The writers and philosophers of the French Enlightenment understood this very well, made it their business to erode the power of the Church to silence expression, using blasphemy as one of their weapons, and it’s their work that ended up being the cornerstone of our modern ideas about liberty. However, the early settlers who came to America from Europe were in many cases escaping from religious persecution, and America, their newfound land, was to them the place where they would be free to practice their faith as they chose, without fear. Thus “freedom” in America was from the earliest times thought of not as freedom from religion but as freedom for religion. Religion and freedom were not on opposite sides but on the same side. And when the First Amendment was framed, those two things were yoked together forever. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” You see that freedom of religion precedes freedom of speech. It is of the first importance, and free expression is of the second importance. This has something to do with why atheism has such shallow roots in America. Religion and freedom got married on the northern American continent, the First Amendment was the marriage certificate, and the United States was the result.

These [religious] stories may be attractive stories—well, except for the Scientology nonsense—but they are not true. We are no longer ignorant. We don’t need these stories. Science has better stories and many of them are verifiable. The ones that aren’t are recognized as working hypotheses. How much better it is to adhere to a system of knowledge that concedes its limitations!

“When one man is enslaved, all are not free,” President Kennedy said, and Mandela echoed him: “The chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them; the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.” This is my own view and also the view enshrined in the First Amendment. But we live in a censorious age, in which many people, especially young people, have come to feel that limitations need to be placed on freedom of expression. The idea that hurting people’s feelings, offending people’s sensibilities, is going too far now has wide credence, and when I hear good people saying such things, I feel that the religious worldview is being reborn in the secular world—that the old religious apparatus of blasphemy, Inquisition, anathematization, all of that, may be on the way back.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, as the Latin has it. “Who will guard us from the guardians?”

The Trump phenomenon has all the qualities of a religious cult, in which truth becomes what the leader says it is, and only what he says it is, and in which evil becomes everything that is outside the cult.

God is Ted—Liao Yiwu

In John Irving’s 1994 novel A Son of the Circus, there is a graphic description of what happens. “A hijra’s ‘operation’—they use the English word—is performed by other hijras.

Irving also says, “Whatever one thought or said about hijras, they were a third gender—they were simply (or not so simply) another sex.

The hijras of Bombay and the rest of India are held to be the community most at risk of HIV infection.

for many hijras their lives continue to be characterized by mockery, humiliation, stigmatization, fear, and danger.

India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s.

Bouvard and Pécuchet — Flaubert 

Flaubert attached to the main body of the story, the justly celebrated “Dictionary of Received Ideas.” Flaubert was fascinated by the general stupidity of most human beings, by their ability to absorb and parrot clichés and other nuggets of fool’s gold as if they were the wisdom of the gods. In this dictionary he offers us some fine instances of what Wyndham Lewis named the Moronic Inferno.

The real world, to which you are about to return after these years in Florida, is full of wonders and brilliance, I am happy to report, but you will also find yourself beset from every quarter by dreariness and folly.

You may come across genuinely original minds, like the Indian Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen, who argues that when we define our identities too narrowly in terms of race, or religion, or class, or nation, or tribe, we “miniaturize” ourselves and make conflict and violence more likely. On the other hand, you may encounter a rival professor, Professor Samuel P. Huntington, telling you that we face a “clash of civilizations” and encouraging you to miniaturize yourself in exactly the way Professor Sen proposes you do not.

How to distinguish the smart lesson from the dumb utterance?

In 1938, E. M. Forster wrote this, in “What I Believe”: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Which is to say that “elective affinities,” Goethe’s term for the allegiances we choose, rather than those that are foisted upon us, are the basis upon which each of us may construct a valuable, moral, and free self, if we only find in ourselves the courage to do so.

it may be more instructive to take a look at the ideas and behavior of the unorthodox, the rebels and refuseniks of the world, than to admire those who have marched along with, or even at the head of, the crowd.

In 1633 Galileo Galilei was forced by the Catholic Church to recant his heretical notion that the earth went round the sun, an idea it took the Catholic Church a mere 359 years to accept. (On October 31, 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for Galileo’s mistreatment.) Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in jail for standing up against apartheid but emerged to change his country, and the world.

If individual freedom is what you’re interested in, then heterodoxy, the ability to reject received ideas and stand against the orthodoxies of your time, may help you find your way there.

The power of orthodoxy has not diminished. Governments still routinely accuse their opponents of lacking patriotism, religious leaders are quick to anathematize their critics, corporations dislike whistleblowers and mavericks, the range of ideas available through the mass media diminishes all the time. Yet right and wrong, good and evil, are not determined by power, or by adherence to this or that interest group. The struggle to know how to act for the best is a struggle that never ceases. Don’t follow leaders. Look, instead, for the oddballs who insist on marching out of step.

Just fourteen years have passed since that warlord’s less puissant son Humayun was deposed and fled into ignominious Persian exile, abandoning his infant son to be raised by an Afghan uncle.

Certainly this is the fabulous world of what may be the greatest artistic masterpiece ever created in India, one of the landmark achievements in the entire artistic canon, the astonishing sequence of fourteen hundred paintings, of which fewer than two hundred now survive, commissioned by the Emperor Akbar soon after his accession and created between 1557 and 1572: the “Adventures of Hamza,” or the Hamzanama.

Francesco Clemente: Self-Portraits

Italians the Indians of Europe.

A Sort of Life—Graham Greene

The great journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that he survived the world’s most dangerous war zones by making himself seem small and unimportant, not worthy of the warlord’s bullet.

Trump. 

Stunning incompetence. Blizzard lies. Self-obsessed charlatan.

In Cold  Blood—Truman Capote

Voices from Chernobyl 

Lord of the Flies vs actual marooned boys found by Australian captain.

Crisis shines a bright light on human behavior.

Rushdie inspired as much by movies as books.