the spice of life

I ordered Shantaram because it sounded like a book I might enjoy. When it arrived I hadn’t reckoned on the sheer size of it. Over 900 wordpacked pages. It weighed heavy on my shelf for a couple of years, waiting for a surge of strength in my forearms. That time came a few weeks ago - and it was well worth the wait / weight.

I like philosophy. And I like creative writing. I like the former more when it fuses with the latter. Too many philosophy books are stuffy and stale. Too many novels are empty and drifting. If a novel is a story of life - filled with living, breathing, loving, crying, sinking and dying people, then it seems the perfect place to drop the seed of philosophy. To watch it take root and grow. Some writers have achieved this - Camus and Satre to name two, and at times Gregory David Roberts comes close too.

And from those pages, these are some of the more fascinating flowers I watched grow, from which I picked a bloom to press between these screens, to peruse at my leisure.

‘At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we wont stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone.’

‘if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom’

‘The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.’

Gregory David Roberts