two more quotes, one for the world within this forum, one for the world outside it:
For most of 1994 and 1995 he lived exclusively in the world of the tour, an ersatz underworld environment tiered like the circles of Hell and enclosed in a giant arc by the largest Vidiwall ever built, from which the audience was nightly bombarded by incessant images of heaven and hell, both conceived of as places on earth, nuptial motels and flame-grilled-burger bars, video arcades and ballet schools, football crowds and war zones, ice deserts and political rallies, surf beaches and libraries, and it was up to each individual to decide which images were celestial, which infernal. ...Having created this fiction he plunged into it and did not come out for two years....
It was as if the show was staying put while the world rushed past outside the stadium, as if the show were the permanence and human life the transient thing, as if the stadium was always the same stadium, and the limo was always the same car, always driven by Will Singh with Clea Singh by Ormus's side, but the cities outside its windows came and went like the lands at the top of the Faraway Tree.
But I remember only silence, the silence of great horror. The silence, to be more exact, of photography, because that was my profession, so naturally it was what I turned to the moment the earthquake began....Here was the eternal silence of faces and bodies and animals and even nature itself, caught -- yes -- by my camera, but caught also in the grip of the fear of the unforeseeable and the anguish of loss, in the clutches of this hated metamorphosis, the appalling silence of a way of life at the moment of its annihilation, its transformation into a golden past that could never wholly be rebuilt...
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one-sixteenth, or one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot's faster. Halfway between voyeur and witness, high art and low scum, that's where I've made my life.
But Rushdie's real gift is his sparkling spiral of a narrative. Thrilling, challenging stuff.
blessings,
Deb D
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***Grace makes beauty out of ugly things***
