A Quote by Romesh Gunesekera
To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.
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England's not a bad country? It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post- industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. 286
Before my parents came to England from Calcutta in the 1970s, they used to go to games at Eden Gardens.
Memories do not change, and change is the law of existence. If our dead, the closest, the most beloved, were to return to us after a long absence and instead of the old, familiar trees were to find in our souls English gardens and stone walls - that is to say, other loves, other tastes, other interests, they would gaze upon us sadly and tenderly for a moment, wiping away their tears, and then return to their tombs to rest.
Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.
I come from a town in Washington state that might not be too familiar to Clevelanders called Chelan. It's really beautiful. It's about two-and-a-half hours east of Seattle and two-and-a-half hours west of Spokane. It's right in the middle of the state.
I come from a small town, so there we have this habit of talking to rickshawallahs while you are making a trip. So when I moved to Bombay, people found it strange that I do that.
Strange when you come to think of it, that of all countless folk who have lived on this planet, not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.
It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
Seriously, we should start taxing churches and have tax-exempt places for worship and study of nature and art. Charge ten bucks for Sunday services and make the Botanic Gardens free.
The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.
Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange.
How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world.
Leeds United is one of England's greatest and most well-supported clubs with a rich history known all over the world.
Does the unmistakeable intent of Versailles to proclaim dominion over nature destroy its aesthetic appeal, as Schopenhauer thought? Does the greenness of the lawn lose its allure when we learn how much water, sorely needed elsewhere, it uses? And historical shifts in garden taste - from formal, 'French' gardens to 'Capability' Brown's landscapes, for instance, or from the elaborate gardens of imperial Kyoto to Zen 'dry' gardens - register important changes in philosophical or religious attitudes.
I really love the combination of Israel and England. They are completely different. The British are very private and keep things to themselves, while Israelis aren't that way. In England, I couldn't make friends with people in the supermarket or people who work at my bank or post office, but in Israel I can, and I like that.
London is like a dream come true. As I ramble through it I am haunted by the curious feeling of something half-forgotten, but still dimly remembered, like a reminiscence of some previous state of existence. It is at once familiar and strange.
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