Brugge Blog

It barely got to zero degrees today, so it feels like time to stay indoors and do some cleaning up. From real and virtual scraps of paper, here are some excerpts from books I’ve wanted to keep around.

From Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. At one point he’s talking with a Pakistani friend about the fighting and violence
that has grown since 2001.

“People like me are America’s best friends in the region,” Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. “I’m a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?” Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. “Your President Bush had done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.”

“Osama had something to do with it, too,” Mortenson said.

“Osama, baah!” Bashir roared. “Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source or your enemy’s strength. In america’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”

From Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast. The man sent to Iraq to oversee the oil ministry, and stop the neo-cons from privatizing the Iraqi oil industry and further destabilizing the region, explains the single-mindedness of oil companies: keeping the price of oil high.

“Many neo-conservatives have certain ideological beliefs about markets and democracy and this, that and the other. International oil companies, ” [Phillip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil] explained coolly, “without exception, don’t have a theology, they don’t have a doctrine.”

There’s a certain attractiveness to amoral avarice: In war zones, the greedy are the peacemakers.

From The Power and The Glory, by Graham Greene, are a handful of ideas, beautifully expressed. These are from the Penguin Paperback edition.

“He had an immense self-importance; he was unable to picture a world in which he was only a typical part - a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant…. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization - it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.” (p. 97)

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity - that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair gres, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” (p. 131)

“What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days - and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins - impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity - cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt…” (p. 139)

From Words I Wish I Wrote, by Robert Fulghum, there are plenty of pages I’ve bookmarked, but here are a couple. Quoting Franz Kafka’s Diaries,

If we knew we were on the right road, having to leave it would mean endless despair. But we are on a road that only leads to a second one, and a third one and so forth. And the real highway will not be sighted for a long, long time, perhaps never. So we drift in doubt. But also in an unbelievable beautiful diversity. Thus the accomplishment of hope remains an always unexpected miracle. But in compensation, the miracle remains forever possible.

Quoting Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

These aren’t the essence of the books, just nuggets to chew on.