animal instincts and deep thoughts near the end

He had always presumed the Countess of Richmond, now become again the Java Star, was going to drive herself into some inner harbor and detonate what lay below her decks.
He had presumed she was going to ram something of value as she blew herself up. For thirty days, he had waited in vain for a chance to kill seven men and take over her command. No such chance had appeared.
Now, too late, he realized the Java Star was not going to deliver a bomb; she was the bomb. And with her cargo venting fast, she did not need to move an inch. The oncoming liner had to pass only within three kilometers of her to be consumed.
He had heard the interchange on the bridge between the Pakistani boy and the deck officer of the Queen Mary 2. He knew too late the Java Star would not engage engines. The escorting cruisers would never allow that, but she did not need to.
There was a third control by Ibrahim's right hand, a button to be hammered downward. Martin followed the flexes to a Very pistol, a flare gun, mounted just forward of the bridge windows. One flare, one single spark . . .
Through the windows, the city of lights was over the horizon. Fifteen miles, thirty minutes cruising, optimum time for maximum fuel-air mixture.
Martin's glance flicked to the radio speaker on the console. A last chance to shout a warning. His right hand slid down toward the slit in his robe, inside which was his knife strapped to his thigh.
The Jordanian caught the glance and the movement. He had not survived Afghanistan, a Jordanian jail and the relentless American hunt for him in Iraq without developing the instincts of a wild animal.
Something told him that despite the fraternal language, the Afghan was not his friend. The raw hatred charged the atmosphere on the tiny bridge like a silent scream.
Martin's hand slipped inside his robe for the knife. Ibrahim was first; the gun had been underneath the map on the chart table. It was pointing straight at Martin's chest. The distance to cross was twelve feet. Ten too many.
A soldier is trained to estimate chances, and do it fast. Martin had spent much of his life doing that. On the bridge of the Countess of Richmond, enveloped in her own death cloud, there were only two: go for the man, or go for the button.
There would be no surviving either.
Some words came into his mind, words from long ago, in a schoolboy's poem: "To every man upon this earth / Death cometh soon or late . . ." And he recalled Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, talking by the campfire.
"We are all sentenced to die, Angleez. But only a warrior blessed of Allah may be allowed to choose how!" Colonel Mike Martin made his choice . . .
Ibrahim saw him coming; he knew the flicker in the eyes of a man about to die. The killer screamed and fired. The charging man took the bullet in the chest, and began to die. But beyond pain and shock, there is always willpower, just enough for another second of life.
At the end of that second, both men and ship were consumed in a rose pink eternity.

The afghan - Frederick Forsyth

to rest on one´s laurels?

"Humans achieve their peak in different ways.  But whoever you are, once you´re over the summit, it´s downhill all the way.  Nothing anyone can do about it.  And the worst of it is, you never know where the peak is.  You think you´re still going strong, when suddenly you ´ve crossed the great divide.  No one can tell.  Some people peak at twelve, then live rather uneventful lives from then on.  Some carry on until they die; some die at their peak.  Poets and composers have lived like furies, pushing themselves to such a pitch  they´re gone by thirty.  Then there are those like Picasso who kept breaking ground until well past eighty.
And what about me?
My peak? Would I even have one?  I hardly had had anything you could call a life.  A few ripples.  Some rises and falls.  But that´s it.  Almost nothing.  Nothing born of nothing.  I´d loved and been loved, but I had nothing to show.  It was a singularly plain, featureless landscape.  I felt like I was in video game.  A surrogate Pacman, crunching blindly through a labyrinth of dotted lines.  The only certain was my death.
No promises you´re gonna be happy, the Sheep Man had said. So you gotta dance. Dance so it all keeps spinning.
I gave up and closed my eyes."

Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami

the name or not the name ?

"Going   back in a flash over the women I´ve known. It´s like a chain which I´ve forged out of my own misery.  Each one  bound to the other.  A fear of living separate, of staying born.  The door of the womb always on the latch.  Dread and longing.  Deep in the blood the pull of paradise.  The beyond.  Always the beyond.  It must have all started with the navel.  They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and presto!  you ´re out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder.  You look at the stars and then you look at your navel.  You grow eyes everywhere - in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet.  What is distant becomes near, what is near  becomes distant.  Inner - outer, a constant flux,  a shedding of skins,  a turning inside out.  You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed again.  Only your name remains."

Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller

we are not who we are

My name isn´t the end of the story about my name. When your name is Bob no one asks you "How do you spell that?" Not so with Piscine Molitor Patel.
Some thought it was P. Singh and that I was a Sikh , and they wondered why I wasn´t wearing a turban.
In my university days I visited Montreal once with some friends. It fell to me to order pizzas one night. I couldn´t bear to have yet another French speaker guffawing at my name, so when the man on the phone asked, "Can´t I´ave your name?" I said, "I am who I am". Half an hour later two pizzas arrived for "Ian Hoolihan"
It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names. Witness Simon who is called Peter, Matthew also known as Levi, Nathaniel who is also Bartholomew, Judas, not Iscariot, who took the name Thaddeus, Simeon who went by Niger, Saul who became Paul. 
My Roman soldier stood in the schoolyard one morning when I was twelve. I had just arrived. He saw me and a flash of evil genius lit up his dull mind. He raised his arm, pointed at me and shouted, "It's Pissing Patel!" 
In a second everyone was laughing. It fell away as we filed into the class. I walked in last, wearing my crown of thorns. 
The cruelty of children comes as news to no one. The words would waft across the yard to my ears, unprovoked, uncalled for: "Where's Pissing? I've got to go." Or: "You're facing the wall. Are you Pissing?" Or something of the sort. I would freeze or, the contrary, pursue my activity, pretending not to have heard. The sound would disappear, but the hurt would linger, like the smell of piss long after it has evaporated. 
Teachers started doing it too. It was the heat. As the day wore on, the geography lesson, which in the morning had been as compact as an oasis, started to stretch out like the Thar Desert; the history lesson, so alive when the day was young, became parched and dusty;  the mathematics lesson, so precise at first, became muddled. In their afternoon fatigue, as they wiped their foreheads and the backs of their necks with their handkerchiefs, without meaning to offend or get a laugh, even teachers forgot the fresh aquatic promise of my name and distorted it in a shameful way. By nearly imperceptible modulations I could hear the change. It was as if their tongues were charioteers driving wild horses. They could manage well enough the first syllable, the Pea, but eventually the heat was too much and they lost control of their frothy-mouthed steeds and could no longer rein them in for the climb to the second syllable, the seen. Instead they plunged hell-bent into sing, and next time round, all was lost. My hand would be Up to give an answer  and I would be acknowledged with a "Yes, Pissing." Often the teacher wouldn't realize what he had just called me. He would look at me wearily after a moment, wondering why I wasn´t coming out with the answer. And sometimes the class, as beaten down by the heat as he was, wouldn't react either. Not a snicker or a smile. But I always heard the slur. "

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

the best books

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to "keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;- and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.


Walden - Henry David Thoreau

a small view

“One of the most disgraceful features of life in the country, Father often declared, was the general inefficiency and slackness of small villages tradesmen.  He said he had originally supposed that such men were interested in business, and that that was why they had opened their shops and sunk capital in them, but no, they never used it for anything but gossip and sleep.  They took no interest in civilized ways.  Hadn´t heard of them, probably.  He said that of course if he were camping out on the veldt or the tundra, he would expect few conveniences in the neighborhood and would do his best to forego them, buy why should he be confronted with the wilds twenty miles from New York? “

Father wakes up the village -  Clarence Day

understanding is a three edge sword

“According to the Book and its servants the universe is only

six thousand years old. It is only within the last hundred

years that studious, inquiring minds have found out that it is

nearer a hundred million.

During the Six Days, God created man and the other

animals.

He made a man and a woman and placed them in a

pleasant garden, along with the other creatures. they all

lived together there in harmony and contentment and

blooming youth for some time; then trouble came. God had

warned the man and the woman that they must not eat of

the fruit of a certain tree. And he added a most strange

remark: he said that if they ate of it they should surely die.

Strange, for the reason that inasmuch as they had never

seen a sample death they could not possibly know what he

meant. Neither would he nor any other god have been

able to make those ignorant children understand what was

meant, without furnishing a sample. The mere word could

have no meaning for them, any more than it would have

for an infant of days"

Letters from the earth - Mark Twain

coincidence between the getting and the giving

"Never, after we parted, did I feel the need of his actual presence; he had given himself completely and I possessed him without being possessed. It was the first, clean, whole experience of friendship, and it was never duplicated by any other friend. He was the symbol personified and consequently entirely satisfactory, hence no longer necessary to me. He himself understood this thoroughly. Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him alone road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties."

The tropic of capricorn - Henry Miller

for the good of the order

“When I woke, I heard my mother  coughing, below in the kitchen. She had been coughing for days, but I had paid no attention.  We were living on the Old Youghal Road at the time, the old hilly coaching road into East Cork. The coughing sounded terrible. I dressed and went downstairs in my stocking feet, and in the clear morning light I saw her, unaware that she was being watched, collapsed into a little wickerwork armchair, holding her  side. She had made an attempt to light the fire, but it had gone against her.  She looked so tired and helpless that my heart turned over with compassion.  I ran to her.

“Are you all right, Mum?”  I asked.

“I ´ll be all right in a second” , she replied, trying to smile. “The old sticks were wet and the smoke started me coughing”

“Go back to bed and I´ll light the fire”, I said.

“Ah, how can I, child? She said anxiously. “Sure I have to go to work”

“You could not work like that” I said. I´ll stop at home from school and look after you”

It´s funny thing about women, the way they´ll take orders from anything in trousers, even if it´s only ten”

The man of the house – Frank O´Connor