Shame

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.

Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked. But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he had brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be o pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly.

(...) every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales (...)

Human beings have a remarkable talent for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base.

From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.

We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school around him, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing class-fellows: the delights of the spectator.

...which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat.

How young he was when he made the surprisingly adult resolution to escape from the unpalatable reality of dreams into the slightly more acceptable illusions of his everyday, walking life!

But if a peacock dances in the jungle, there is nobody to see its tail.

This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty, equality, fraternity.

love is an emotion that recognizes itself in others.

And - as is perhaps the universal custom of aristocratically bred persons - they reacted to the news of their ruin by resolving to throw a party.

(...) unkept secrets always manage to escape, under a door, through a keyhole or an open window, until everyon knows everything and nobody knows how ... (...)

(...) but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scientific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed systems, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes.