“Which is nonsense, for whatever you live is Life. That is something to remember when you meet the old classmate who says, ‘Well now, on our last expedition up the Congo-’ or the one who says, ‘Gee, I got the sweetest little wife and three of the swellest kids ever-’ You must remember it when you sit in hotel lobbies or lean over bars to talk to the bartender or walk down a dark street at night, in early March, and stare into a lighted window. And remember little Susie has adenoids and the bread is probably burned, and turn up the street, for the time has come to hand me down that walking cane, for I got to catch that midnight train, for all my sin is taken away. For whatever you live is life.”
“Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, ‘What do you mean?’ You say, ‘Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?’ And he’ll look stunned and say, ‘How do you know?’ He doesn’t realize that something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believe they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people.”
“Yet this is not the world in which most Africans live. In their world of aid-dependence, governments have failed at all that tasks and failed spectacularly.”
“We all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.”
“And to me, it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch, in light of recent posts, this seemed like an appropriate sentiment. From Eliot and Downton Abbey, I think I’ve finally realized the way to interact with my bosses is to pretend like we live in aristocratic England. Except we’re not always so noble here.
“See, I write jokes for a living, man. You know, I sit in my hotel at night, and I think of something that’s funny and then, I go get a pen and write it down. Or, if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.”
“What was the best thing you ate?”
The question I got asked most often by volunteers when I got back to Benin.
“Help is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly. So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.”
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, He’s talking about his son, but he could just as well be talking about development work
“To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.”
I now wake up unsurprised that my electricity has not yet been turned back on. I spoke to the director of the school who is responsible for paying for my ability to watch episodes of the The Wire each month, and he admitted that the school had not yet paid, but feels no pressing need to rectify the situation.
So, today, because I couldn’t work on my semi-annual volunteer report and because I have an excess amount of paint in my house, I spent the day painting my walls. My friend had recently given me an audiobook version of Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great read by the man himself, and if you’re going to voluntarily let someone talk in your ear for over six hours while you slowly get high on paint fumes, Hitchens’ scratchy, yet sophisticated accented voice is not a bad one to choose.
Hitchens has one of those voices that make you believe everything he says, but it’s not just because of this that God got me thinking.
The Beninese society is a religious society. But not just that. It’s an aggressively religious society. The fourth question people always ask you (after your name, where you’re from and what you’re doing here) is where you go to church. Every Sunday my neighbors ask me where I went to mass that day. People have tried to convert my Jewish postmate more times that he can remember.
Hitchens spends most of the book outlying his argument against the institutions that religions have created. What I didn’t realize until reading (or listening) to his arguments is that I agree with most of them.
I’ve talked with other volunteers about where, if you wanted to try to create a timeline of the development of a country, you would place first the rise of religion and but then, how this would be followed by the rise of other beliefs, including those that question the necessity of religion and the decrease of the power of religion in other aspects of society (like politics).
I don’t know if it’s because when you live a life where you sometimes don’t have money to feed your children that you need to believe that there is something out there looking out for you or if it’s because these ideas came from a person who came from a different land where you perceive life is better that you believe so wholeheartedly in what comes from a book that was written 1900 years ago.
I do know that Hitchens is not going to appear on any high school reading list here anytime soon.
“We fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity”
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, on one of the things that helped him survive prison. Almost three weeks after returning from South Africa, I am still struck by the country’s history, a place that took fifty years to create and then revoke laws that took other places centuries to discover their immorality.
“I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.”
The Mountain Goats, I used to listen to this song as my mantra when I first started training. One year later, it seems so much more melodramatic than it did back then.
“Dantes descended, murmuring the supreme word of human philosophy: ‘Perhaps.’”
“…Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here’s what it has done to itself, here’s the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years: expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative.”
“The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded…The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think…The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
”
“Somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening; future perfect rather than present continuous…there is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing reality as experienced and change as imagined.”
“that no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that…that you will be way less concerned with that other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do…that it takes great personal courage to appear weak…that everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse…”