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“The judgments on India were much less harsh before the...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:59:49 -0500

“The judgments on India were much less harsh before the days of European empires, when the inferiority of native peoples became an article of faith. Travelers from Europe did not deny that they had in India come up against a culture much older, and in many ways more sophisticated, than the one they belonged to. Voltaire, for instance, often invoked the virtues of India and China in order to show up the inadequacies of eighteenth-century France.

But the nineteenth century brought new attitudes. A series of scientific, economic, and political revolutions gave Western Europe a new idea of itself. India, and more generally, Asia, became a place against which the traveler from the West measured his own society, and usually found it superior; it became the gigantic but often invisible backdrop to understanding his emotional state, and the refining of his moral and philosophical vision.

The nineteenth century also saw the British complete their conquest of India and become the paramount power in the world. Unlike the Persian and Central Asian conquerors of India before them, the British never looked as if they meant to stay on in India and make it their home. They either went home or died young. India remained, despite a veneer of modernity, a profoundly foreign country; and travelers from the West continued to record its alienness and their own sense of difference and bewilderment.”

—Pankaj Mishra, “India in Mind”

I had arrived in Riga to visit a woman friend. Her house, the...

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:31:25 -0500

I had arrived in Riga to visit a woman friend. Her house, the town, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was expecting me, no one knew me. For two hours I walked the streets in solitude. Never again have I seen them so. From every gate a flame darted, each cornerstone sprayed sparks, and every streetcar came toward me like a fire engine. For she might have stepped out of the gateway, around the corner, been sitting in the streetcar. But of the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should have gone up like a magazine.

—Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”

“What would you have me say? That I think apartheid is...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 01:16:36 -0500

“What would you have me say? That I think apartheid is stupid and vicious? I do. That I’m sorry? I am, I am. That I’m not like the rest of them? If you’d met me a few years ago, in a bar in London or New York, I would have told you that. I would have told you that only I, of all my blind clan and tribe, had eyes that could truly see, and that what I saw appalled me. I would have passed myself off as a political exile, an enlightened sort who took black women into his bed and fled his country rather than carry a gun for the abominable doctrine of white supremacy. You would probably have believed me. I almost believed myself, you see, but in truth I was always one of them. I am a white man born in Africa, and all else flows from there.”

—Rian Malan, “My Traitor’s Heart”

“I had thought about this novel for over a year. Whenever...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:05:00 -0500

“I had thought about this novel for over a year. Whenever I had nothing else to do, I would automatically start writing it in my mind. Sometimes, in the course of a subway ride, I would write three or four chapters. Almost every day, I would discard a few characters and invent a few new ones. But the truth is, I never actually wrote a word of it. Time passed, and I got caught up in other matters. Even so, for several years I frequently daydreamed about it, and in those daydreams I had finished writing it and it had been published and I could see it. I could see its title page. I could see its binding, which was green with gold lettering. Those recollections filled me with almost unbearable embarrassment.”

—Joseph Mitchell

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Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:37:41 -0500

The German word for ‘uncanny’, as in Freud’s...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:18:43 -0500

The German word for ‘uncanny’, as in Freud’s famous essay on the Uncanny, is unheimlich – unhomely. The tourist thrives on the uncanny, moving happily through a phenomenal world of effects without causes. This world, in which he has no experience and no memory, is presented to him as a supernatural domain: the language of travel advertising hawks the uncanny as part of the deal. Experience the magic of Bali! The wonders of Hawaii! The enchantment of Bavaria!

But for the newly arrived immigrant, this magic stuff is like a curse. He’s faced at every turn with the unhomelikeness of things, in an uncanny realm where the familiar house sparrows have all fled, to be replaced by hummingbirds and eagles. The immigrant needs to grow a memory, and grow it fast. Somehow or other, he must learn to convert the uncanny into the homely, in order to find a stable footing in the new land.

—Jonathan Raban, “Driving Home”