#the shadow lines

[now-that-i-saw-you]

The way Amitav Ghosh plays with memories, time and imagination in The Shadow Lines is so fucking amazing I'm obsessed with this but then there are 2 things that really ruin the book for me 😭😭

[fruitarchive]

the shadow lines, amitav ghosh

[incarnadinea]

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. [. . .] In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

[yellowollec]

The shadow lines Amitav Ghosh

[yellowollec]

The shadow lines Amitav Ghosh

[yellowollec]

The Shadow Lines Amitav Ghosh

[gracebythegun]

Every word I write about those events of 1964 is the product of a struggle with silence. It is a struggle I am destined to lose - have already lost - for even after all these years, I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. All I know of it is what it is not. It is not, for example, the silence of an imperfect memory. Nor is it a silence enforced by a ruthless state - nothing like that, no barbed wire, no checkpoints to tell me where its boundaries lie. I know nothing of this silence except that it lies outside the reach of my intelligence, beyond words - that is why this silence must win, must inevitably defeat me, because it is not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words. The enemy of silence is speech, but there can be no speech without words, and there can be no words without meanings - so it follows, inexorably, in the manner of syllogisms, that when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the gap between words and the world. This is a silence that is proof against any conceivable act of scorn or courage; it lies beyond defiance - for what means have we to defy the mere absence of meaning? Where there is meaning, there is banality, and that is what the silence consists in, that is why it cannot be defeated - because it is the silence of an absolute, impenetrable banality. So complete is this silence that is actually took me fifteen years to discover that there was a connection between my nightmare bus ride back from school, and the events that befell Tridib and the others in Dhaka. And then too, my discovery was the result of the merest accident, a chance remark. For a long time after I had made that discovery it was difficult for me to forgive my own stupidity. But of course, in a sense, there was nothing to forgive, I was a child, and like all the children around me, I grew up believing in the truth of the precepts that were available to me: I believed in the reality of space; I believed that distance separates, that it is a corporeal substance; I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war or friendship. There was no room in it for this other thing. And things which did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edge into the chasm of that silence.

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

[soponhara]

Adult truth: that need is not transitive, that one may need without oneself being needed.

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines