Babel

In return, you will take courses in a curriculum of my design. It will be language work – Latin, Greek, and of course, Mandarin. You will enjoy an easy, comfortable life, and the best education that one can afford.

which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception.

But such fantasies did not comfort him so much as the idea that all death meant was nothingness, that everything would just stop: the pain, the anguish, the awful, suffocating grief. If nothing else, surely, death meant peace.

They’d chosen a good day for revolution

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

PLATO, Apology

Why’s he the only one with a table?’ Ramy asked. ‘Why are the Brahmins on the floor?’

‘Well, I suppose Hindus preferred it that way,’ said Billings. ‘They like sitting cross-legged, you see, for they find it more comfortable.’

‘Very illuminating,’ said Ramy. ‘I never knew.’

To Bennett,

who is all the light and laughter in the world

larger picture, that those parcels must have come from the professor.

Miss Betty, and who had lived with his household for as long as he could remember. He never quite understood what she was doing there – his family was certainly not wealthy enough to employ any servants, especially not a foreigner

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.