Saturday, March 31, 2007

I began my fickle refutation…with pleasure, realizing maybe for the first time that the heavens and the secrets of the universe, that the secrets of death and existence were the most convenient region into which one could escape from the cares of this world. If they did not exist, one would need to invent them as a refuge.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Nothing would improve if things were different in our lives.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

(Or as Buckeroo Banzai once put it, no matter where you go, there you are.)

Saturday, March 24, 2007

I would often say:

Death is a change of state. The soul begins to live by itself. Until it parted from the body, it held with hands, saw with eyes, heard with ears, but it knew the heart of the matter on its own.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish
The river resembles me: sometimes turbulent and foaming, more often calm and inaudible. I was sorry when they dammed it up below the tekke and diverted it into a trench to make it obedient and useful, so it would run through a trough and drive a mill wheel. And I was happy when it swelled, destroyed the dam, and flowed free. I knew all the while that only tamed waters can mill wheat.

Mesa Selimovic, Death and the Dervish

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly--a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud.... What had he done with his life--other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do.

Alan Furst, Dark Star