...'Displacement is my home'
I cherish his [Greene's] interest in what he can't explain, and the irrational forces that sometimes define our lives much more than do the things we can explain. I love the way his books are all a dialogue, in effect, between innocence and experience, our wish to surrender and our longing to remain on guard. And I've always been drawn by his fascination with the complexities of faith. Greene was too rigorous to accept too unquestioning a sense of religious belief, yet he was too honest to write religion off entirely. So he and his characters are always trembling in the balance.
Thanks. This is a great article, which I intend to keep and reread. I feel very much the same way he describes. Growing up in India as I did, this meant a lot to me:
ReplyDelete"It really does. I am entirely Indian by birth, of course, and although I have never been lucky enough to live in India, I carry it around with me, at some invisible level, wherever I go. I grew up with the Ramayana, and with stories of Krishna and Vishnu, and with my parents' memories of Bombay, and in a vegetarian household filled with words that would be strange and exotic to my schoolfriends. And, as with most of us, the longer I live, the more I see how much I owe to my inheritance. Many readers of the books in the West would see a lot of India in me, in my love of words (and of reading), some of the Eastern spiritual ideas that seem to intrigue me and even to creep into my writing, perhaps in the colouration or energy of some sentences that seem to speak for an Indian aesthetic. "
Nice to hear Art. Which part of India did you grow up in?
ReplyDeleteAndhra Pradesh, near Hyderabad. I knew Madras well, too, as we would vacation along the coast there. We also spent part of the year in the southern hills, at Kodai Kanal.
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