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Michael Ondaatje -
Desert
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The desert could not be claimed or owned — it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
Michael Ondaatje
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You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.
Michael Ondaatje
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In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.
Michael Ondaatje
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The desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.
Michael Ondaatje
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A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something more than water. There is a plant whose heart, if one cuts it out is replaced with fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid amount of the missing heart.
Michael Ondaatje
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I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
Michael Ondaatje
Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Michael Ondaatje
Creative Commons
Born:
September 12, 1943
(age 80)
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