Preparation for the Next Life Kindle Notes

Below are the highlights from my 2014 Reading List selection:

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

You have 11 highlighted passages

The steppe is filled with cheering. You have to imagine that great sound coming from thousands of us at one time, how it echoes out around the world. It makes the red and yellow poppies bloom everywhere on the green mountainsides and the rivers melt with admiration and flow from the snowcaps.

Read more at location 429

Zou Lei sees a woman in a conical straw hat with her hair divided into three black rivers, one down her back and one over either shoulder, hanging down to her waist. She is pushing a laundry cart with her bottles laid up pointing in opposite directions, the necks interlocking. The forked hair hangs like a ragged black shawl. A thin woman whose age is hard to tell without seeing her face, just the romance of her hair, as if she has prepared herself for a lover and was waiting years for him, a lifetime.

Read more at location 1546

Really, all the people must thank them or we would not be able to exist. When a farmer drives a truck filled with vegetables, the oil to run the motor is coming from the pipeline. I think if you are a woman in the market and you buy vegetables, you must thank my father. I don’t think anyone remembers this. Even I forget, but I shouldn’t. Everything comes from somewhere.

Read more at location 2225

No one said anything to her. She poured a full-sized Coca-Cola, no ice, and drank it straight down, gasping. Now that was good. The sugar flashed inside her like sunshine in the desert.

Read more at location 2586

Even high, they did not smile. Jimmy had not smiled for a year. The closest thing to smiling was a kind of short-term tolerance granted to the person talking to you. Then he lay down and covered himself with his sheet and lay like a sack of laundry.

Read more at location 3217

you? He finished his cigarette and went back to the mall. The mall was an office building that had been taken over by the Chinese. In its present state, everything had the half-finished, jerry-built appearance of transition from one thing to something else. There were cardboard shipping containers littered around the floor. Some units had bare concrete floors and raw cinder block walls, others had carpets and wall coverings and fluorescent lights. One room was being used to warehouse thousands of dried medicinal herbs, which were stored in a chaos of buckets, tubs, bins, bowls, cups, wooden drawers—containers of every description—anything that could be used to hold something else, even paper envelopes—none of it organized, all of it just lying there, while a twenty-year-old guy with a gold chain chewed wontons with his mouth open and watched a DVD. The sign over his head said Cohen’s Fashion Optical. You couldn’t tell what was old and what was new. You couldn’t tell whether something was coming or going. Things were in the middle of being built and destroyed at the same time. It was an environment he might have recognized.

Read more at location 3430

He blinked at her like somebody waking up and seeing the sun.

Read more at location 3485

He neared the Irish bar, where a guy in black urban combat gear—loose-fit denim, Timberlands, vest, and SWAT-style ball cap—had a chain wrapped around his knuckles, holding a tiger-striped pit bull on a leash. A big guy came striding around the corner with the energy of a man about to chop down an entire forest singlehandedly. He bounced up and down as if on springs, his long hair swinging back and forth, the plane of his face lifted displaying the short lines of his mouth and eyes. He was over six feet tall, weighed two-twenty. The beard on his face made him look like a 70s biker. Skinner was struck by an unusual detail: he was wearing a red bandana tied around his thigh. He entered the bar, handing off his lit cigarette to the pit bull’s owner, who took it without a word, presumably to hold for him until he returned.

Read more at location 4545

My mother was Muslim people, she said, chewing. I know about God, but it’s too many rules. No, no, no. You are wrong, he said. No, no, no. You make a big mistake to say that. Let me tell you something about God. He is like the shade of a tree on a hot day. How can I say? It is like you are burning in the sun and you feel very uncomfortable. You are thirsty and you would like some good things to drink. All you have to do is open this door and go in where it is cool and refreshing. That is God.

Read more at location 6016

But, he said, you cannot have these beautiful things if you lead a bad life, if you are sinning, doing what you want. Of course you must live properly and obey the law. He pointed at the bilingual Arabic and English sign over the mosque’s doorway, which he read aloud for her. It said Preparation For The Next Life.

Read more at location 6020

West With the Night: My Kindle Highlights

Below are the highlights from the following selection of my 2014 Reading List: (additionally, I wrote more about the incomparable writing of Markham here--she's easily one of the top 5 writers of the 20th century).  

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
You have 25 highlighted passages
Last annotated on January 31, 2013

apologized with a bow from the waist and said he had thought it was spinach.
Read more at location 505


There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
Read more at location 603


‘Lions are more intelligent than some men,’ he said, ‘and more courageous than most. A lion will fight for what he has and for what he needs; he is contemptuous of cowards and wary of his equals. But he is not afraid. You can always trust a lion to be exactly what he is — and never anything else.’
Read more at location 705


whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.’
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was an immense roar that encompassed the world and dissolved me into
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He bought the land because it was cheap and fertile, and because East Africa was new and you could feel the future of it under your feet.
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reasonably innocent in the matter of a signed contract.
Read more at location 1621


never hope more than you work.’ A Spartan thread held through
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Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen — jabbing, jabbing.
Read more at location 1764


I had always believed that the important, the exciting changes in one’s life took place at some crossroad of the world where people met and built high buildings and traded the things they made and laughed and laboured and clung to their whirling civilization like beads on the skirts of a dervish. Everybody was breathless in the world I imagined; everybody moved to hurried music that I never expected to hear. I never yearned for it much. It had a literary and unattainable quality like my childhood remembrance of Scheherazade’s Baghdad.
Read more at location 1822


In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favours that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned. In any country almost empty of men, ‘love thy neighbour’ is less a pious injunction than a rule for survival. If you meet one in trouble, you stop — another time he may stop for you.
Read more at location 1832


‘When you fly,’ the young man said, ‘you get a feeling of possession that you couldn’t have if you owned all of Africa. You feel that everything you see belongs to you — all the pieces are put together, and the whole is yours; not that you want it, but because, when you’re alone in a plane, there’s no one to share it. It’s there and it’s yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are — closer
Read more at location 1857


closer to being something you’ve sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.’
Read more at location 1860


formless. When the low stars shone
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But memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will, and my father knows it.
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had slipped into the cabin a moment before. I have it still — a travelling clock bound in imitation leather,
Read more at location 3041


Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless. 
Read more at location 3351


Today Africa may seem to be that ever-promised land, almost achieved; but tomorrow it may be a dark land again, drawn into itself, contemptuous, and impatient with the futility of eager men who have scrambled over it since the experiment of Eden. In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires — rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.
Read more at location 3354


Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice. Barbarism, however bright its trappings, is still alien to her heart.
Read more at location 3362


‘We’ll be back,’ said Blix. And of course we would be, but, as we flew out over the Mediterranean toward the island of Sardinia with the coast of Tunisia still under our wings, there was no sign that Africa was aware that we were leaving, or cared. 
Read more at location 3363

Seeing it again could not be living it again. You can always rediscover an old path and wander over it, but the best you can do then is to say, ‘Ah, yes, I know this turning!’ — or remind yourself that, while you remember that unforgettable valley, the valley no longer remembers you.
Read more at location 3412


You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents — each man to see what the other looked like.
Read more at location 3498


Flight is but momentary escape from the eternal custody of earth.
Read more at location 3520

Kruse's Keys: Read "Light Years" to Witness the Danger of Untended Love

My 2015 Reading List is here.  Here's my 2014 Reading List as well.

This is a heart-breaking novel about love, marriage and the danger ignoring the slow cracks that seep into relationships.  This novel is chocked full of beautiful lines, so I will just leave you with a couple of my favorites:

• What confidence, what success there is in a man’s face at thirty.
• Her laugh was gorgeous, it was like applause.
• “The only thing I’m afraid of are the words ‘ordinary life,’ ” Nedra said.
• “You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
• “Nice. Didn’t that once belong to Italy?” “Everything did once,” she said.
• It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore. Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.

Light Years (Vintage International) by James Salter
You have 68 highlighted passages

Nedra was working in the kitchen, her rings set aside. She was tall, preoccupied; her neck was bare. When she paused to read a recipe, her head bent, she was stunning in her concentration, her air of obedience. She wore her wrist watch, her best shoes. Beneath the apron, she was dressed for the evening. People were coming for dinner. She had trimmed the stems of flowers spread on the wood of the counter and begun to arrange them. Before her were scissors, paper-thin boxes of cheese, French knives. On her shoulders there was perfume. I am going to describe her life from the inside outward, from its core, the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs that had been her mother-in-law’s, apricot, rouge and tan, rugs which though worn seemed to drink the sun, to collect its warmth; books, potpourris, cushions in colors of Matisse, objects glistening like evidence, many of which might, had they been possessed by ancient peoples, have been placed in tombs for another life: clear crystal dice, pieces of staghorn, amber beads, boxes, sculptures, wooden balls, magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself. Who cleans this large house, who scrubs the floors? She does everything, this woman, she does nothing. She is dressed in her oat-colored sweater, slim as a pike, her long hair fastened, the fire crackling. Her real concern is the heart of existence: meals, bed linen, clothing. The rest means nothing; it is managed somehow. She has a wide mouth, the mouth of an actress, thrilling, bright. Dark smudges in her armpits, mint on her breath. Her nature is extravagant. She buys on impulse, she visits Bendel’s as she would a friend’s, gathering up five or six dresses and entering a booth, not bothering to draw the curtain fully, a glimpse of her undressing, lean arms, lean trunk, bikini underpants. Yes, she scrubs floors, collects dirty clothes. She is twenty-eight. Her dreams still cling to her, adorn her; she is confident, composed, she is 
related to long-necked creatures, ruminants, abandoned saints. She is careful, hard to approach. Her life is concealed. It is through the smoke and conversation of many dinners that one sees her: country dinners, dinners at the Russian Tea Room, the Café Chauveron with Viri’s clients, the St. Regis, the Minotaur.
Read more at location 168


What confidence, what success there is in a man’s face at thirty.
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She had a rich, naked laugh.
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Their life is special, devout, they prefer to spend time with their children, they have only a few friends.
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He tried to imagine scenes that went on in this house, but was hindered by her laughter. It was a disclaimer, a garment she could leave behind, like empty stockings, like a bather’s robe on the beach.
Read more at location 257


“She’s a very generous woman, that’s all.” “Generous?” “I’m using it in the sense of abundant, rich.” “She’s the most selfish woman on earth.
Read more at location 267


A Jew without money is like a dog without teeth.
Read more at location 273


“A bad shirt is like the story of a pretty girl who is single and one day she finds herself pregnant. It’s not the end of life, but it’s serious.
Read more at location 314


she was motionless, like an old woman who has lived too long.
Read more at location 398


“We saw that little girl with one leg.” “Monica.” “Yes.” “That’s so sad.” “I can’t bear to look at her. It takes away my courage.
Read more at location 412


LIFE IS WEATHER. LIFE IS MEALS. Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.
Read more at location 439


She made her way slowly across the room, her face less animated than other women’s faces. She passed behind people, around them, nodded, smiled. She was that woman the first glimpse of whom changes everything.
Read more at location 488


“This is Faye Massey.” The bad complexion of a girl of good family.
Read more at location 524


In the morning I will have forgotten it, he thought; in the morning everything is different, things are real.
Read more at location 577


But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.
Read more at location 611


“It wasn’t only what she said. She ate, that was the thing I liked about her, she ate as much as I did. We were like two peasants striking a bargain. Bread, fish, wine, everything. I began looking at her as something that was going to be served next.Read more at location 629


She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.
Read more at location 677


One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love. Soon after they were married, perhaps an hour after, even Viri longed for this. His possession of her became sanctified; at the same time something in her changed. She became his closest relative. She committed herself to his interests and embarked on her own. The desperate, unbearable affection vanished, and in its place was a young woman of twenty condemned to live with him. He could not define it. She had escaped. Perhaps it was more; the mistake she knew she would have to make was made at last. Her face radiated knowledge. A colorless vein like a scar ran vertically down the center of her forehead. She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.
Read more at location 691


Summer is the noontime of devoted families. It is the hour of silence when the only sound is sea birds. The shutters are closed, the voices quiet. Occasionally the ring of a fork.
Read more at location 695


Viri watches, sitting on the sand. She waves at him, her shouts carried off by the wind. He understands suddenly what love of a child is. It overwhelms him like the line from a song.
Read more at location 725


And he reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour, and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, he cannot recognize it. It is more precious, he knows, than anything else they might own, but he does not have it. Instead, in his even, sensuous voice he laves them in the petty myths of Europe, of snowy Russia, the East. The best education comes from knowing only one book, he tells Nedra. Purity comes from that, and proportion, and the comfort of always having an example close at hand. “Which book?” she says. “There are a number of them.” “Viri,” she says, “it’s a charming idea.
Read more at location 765


Nedra took her place beside him. He lay there silent; he could not close his eyes. Her presence was the final pledge of sanctity and order, like those great commanders who were the last to sleep.
Read more at location 907


His wife—people found her strange—was in the last years of her youth. She was like a beautiful dinner left out overnight.
Read more at location 922


have to think about that,” he said. “Never getting what you want, that could be unhappiness, but as long as there’s a chance of getting it
Read more at location 1170


“When you do it,” she said, “I sometimes have the feeling I’m going so far I won’t be able to come back. I feel as if I
Read more at location 1232


He was as empty as one who has committed a crime of passion. He was his own corpse. One could see in him both the murderer and the half-nude woman crumpled on the floor.
Read more at location 1283


She was terrific, Eve; that was what he said. She was generous in every way. She gave books, dresses, friends, she graced rooms with her hard, dissolute body, her wanton mouth. The kind of woman seen on the arm of a boxing champion, the kind who is not married, who appears one morning with blackened eyes.
Read more at location 1513


She received a letter from her father written on small sheets of lined paper. It thanked her for the three days he had spent there. He had caught a cold on the way home. He had made good time, though, even better than on the trip up. She was a good poker player; she must have inherited it. There are no real friends, he warned.
Read more at location 1697


“You have a wonderful sense of humor.” “Unfortunately,” he said. “Humor comes largely from not caring.” “Oh, I don’t think so.” “Detachment is what brings forth humor. It’s a paradox. We’re the only creatures
Read more at location 1807


that laugh, they say, and the more we laugh, the less we care.
Read more at location 1810


“You’re a lucky fellow,” Arnaud was saying. From the house they seemed immobile, as if posed. The sheets of foliage drifted above them. The corner of the tablecloth blew gently back. “You’ve reached shore.” Viri did not reply. The vast, mild sway of summer moved the canopy of leaves, sifted through them, made them shimmer. “You’re responding to a greater reality than other men, Viri. I mean, I could give examples, but it’s manifest. This is a kind of heaven.” “Yes, well, it isn’t all me,” Viri said. “It’s largely you.” “No, you brought the cigars.” He paused. “The fact is, it’s not what it appears. I’m too easy-going.” “What do you mean?” “Women should be kept in cages. Otherwise …” He didn’t finish. Finally he said, “Otherwise, I don’t know.
Read more at location 1825


My eye and ear criticize every move and every intonation. I listen to the “commas” of the play as if they were drops falling from a fountain.
Read more at location 1849


Her laugh was gorgeous, it was like applause.
Read more at location 1940


as he poured the wine how foolish his statement had been, how wistful. Reinhart was right: fame was not only part of greatness, it was more. It was the evidence, the only proof. All the rest was nothing, in vain. He who is famous cannot fail; he has already succeeded.
Read more at location 1974


He was asleep, she could tell without looking. He slept like a child, soundlessly, deep. His thinning hair was disheveled, his hand lay extended and soft. If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them, she would have loved them, even—they were so miserable.
Read more at location 2001


Her nature showed itself in the generosity of her table.
Read more at location 2039


Goodbye Altoona, roofs, churches, trees. The watershed where they had gone on many summer afternoons, the cool, ferny ground, the abandoned ovens filled with butterflies and leaves. Broad Avenue with its houses, the neighborhoods of the unknown. In every dark parlor, it seemed, was a woman with swollen legs, or an old man, used, empty, stained. A town almost European in appearance, steep and spacious, shining in the sun of late afternoon. Like all such junctions it was a penal colony, pinned in the provinces by its rails.
Read more at location 2366


There is warmth in families but not often companionship. She loved talking to Franca, and about her as well. She felt that this was the woman that she herself had become, in the sense that the present represents the past. She wanted to discover life through her, to savor it for the second time.
Read more at location 2551


The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are
Read more at location 2561


slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers.
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“You always insist on my being different,” Franca burst out. “I always wear different clothes, I can’t go here or I can’t go there. I don’t want any more of that. I want to be like everyone else!” The tears were streaming down her face. “I don’t want to be like you.” In one stroke she had established her own world.
Read more at location 2576


“The only thing I’m afraid of are the words ‘ordinary life,’ ” Nedra said.
Read more at location 2762


Viri arrived and sat down. He was urbane; in that room, at that hour, he seemed the age one longs to be, the age of accomplishments, of acceptance, the age we never achieve. He saw before him his wife and a young couple. Franca was surely a woman, he knew it suddenly. He had somehow missed the moment it had happened, but the fact was clear to him. Her real face had emerged from the young, sympathetic face it had been and in an hour become more passionate, mortal. It was a face he was in awe of. He heard her voice saying, “Yeah, yeah,” eagerly in response to Mark, the years of her girlhood vanished before his eyes. She would take off her clothes, live in Mexico, find life.
Read more at location 2798


Beneath their brilliance women have a power as stars have gravity.
Read more at location 2907


“You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.
Read more at location 2914


They were talking about the day ahead as if they had only happiness in common.
Read more at location 2979


DANNY FELL BY CHANCE, AS A BIRD to a cat. It was winter. She was with a friend. They met Juan Prisant on the street near the Filmore. He wore a rough white sweater, nothing more. It was cold. The teeth in his bearded mouth were perfect; they were like the soft hands that betray fleeing aristocrats. He was twenty-three. From the first instant she was ready to forget her studies, her dog, her home. He paid no attention to her in that tribute which the stricken have learned to expect. She was too young, she knew, too middle-class; she was not interesting enough for him. She was wearing a coat she hated. She stared at the sidewalk and from time to time dared a glance to reaffirm a face that dazed her with its power. No matter what she did, she could not seem to remember it, she could not stare at it long, like the sun. He radiated an energy which terrified her and drove all other thoughts from her mind.
Read more at location 2998


Love must wait; it must break one’s bones.
Read more at location 3009


THEY WERE DIVORCED IN THE fall. I wish it could have been otherwise.
Read more at location 3210


Viri was left in the house. Every object, even those which had been hers, which he never touched, seemed to share his loss. He was suddenly parted from his life. That presence, loving or not, which fills the emptiness of rooms, mildens them, makes them light—that presence was gone. The simple greed that makes one cling to a woman left him suddenly desperate, stunned. A fatal space had opened, like that between a liner and the dock which is suddenly too wide to leap; everything is still present, visible, but it cannot be regained.
Read more at location 3235


There were beads of saliva in the corners of his mouth. His movements were loose, his hands waved freely. Solid, generous, practical, he was all hull; he had no keel. The rudder was small, the compass drifting.
Read more at location 3327


He was clever, he was helpless. At that time they were publishing his stories in the Transatlantic Review. He was the son of a woman who worked as a psychologist and who had been divorced since he was three. She had no illusions about her son: the thing he was most afraid of was succeeding, but one would have to know him very well to understand that. The impression he gave was of weakness, a voluntary weakness like certain vague illnesses. But after a time these illnesses cry out to be legitimatized, they insist on being treated as a natural condition, they become one with their host. He knew everything; his knowledge was vast. He was like the irreverent student who passes any examination. His eyes were dark, the muddy brown of a Negro. His cuffs were soiled. Many of his sentences began with a proper noun.
Read more at location 3392


breakfast of chocolate and oranges. Reading, falling again into sleep. He said very little. They were deep in contentment; it was full, beyond words. It was like a day of rain.
Read more at location 3764


“With your life. You must become free.” She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her own case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.
Read more at location 4153


When it came to stories, though, he was like a man who knew railroad schedules, he was exact, assured. He would begin in wonderful, faintly witty sentences. His stories were light but not frivolous; they had a strange clarity, they were like a part of the ocean where one could see the bottom.
Read more at location 4167


Beneath the gleaming black hair burning in the sun, behind the intense eyes, for a moment Nedra saw something which touched her deeply—that rare thing, the idea of a friend one makes when the heart has already begun to close.
Read more at location 4203


Time had spoiled for Viri. It reeked in his pockets. He had projects, somewhat vague, appointments, but nothing to do. His eye would not fix on things, it slipped off them like a dying insect. He was staggering, swaying between those times when he had no strength at all, no reason, no urge to struggle, when he felt, ah, if only he could run to death like a fanatic, a believer, delirious, dazed, on those quickened feet that run to love—and then, in the quiet of the early afternoon, seated somewhere, opening the newspaper, he was completely different.
Read more at location 4258


“Nice. Didn’t that once belong to Italy?” “Everything did once,” she said.
Read more at location 4303


A warmth flooded through him, a dizziness as if he had fought an enemy. With a word, a glance she embraced him; she had opened the dull sky, the light poured down. It is always an accident that saves us. It is someone we have never seen.
Read more at location 4314


habits, I know your thoughts. You have married me for my sake, but not for your own—not yet. That will come. Oh, yes. It will come because I will wait. I am a cornucopia, I am overflowing. I am not sweet—no, not in the way one tastes at first. But sweet things are forgotten quickly, sweet things are weak. I have the patience to wait, yes, as long as necessary. I will wait a month, a year, five years, I will sit like a widow, playing a kind of napoleone, because slowly, slowly I will enslave you. I will do it when the moment comes, when I know it is time, that I can succeed. Until then I will sit at your table, I will lie beside you like a concubine—yes, I will give myself to you in whatever way you like, I will raid your fantasies, I will pillage them and keep the pieces to hypnotize you with. I will say, ‘Those things you are dreaming of, I will make them real.’ I will be your Arab girl, I will serve you naked, yes, I will hold food between my teeth for you, I will be your daughter, I will be your whore. You cannot believe what I know—no, never—what I have imagined. Amore, the secret is to have the courage to live. If you have that, everything will sooner or later change.
Read more at location 4556


“Assunta, don’t cry.” How touching old people are, she thought. How honest they are, how emptied of deception and pride.
Read more at location 4664


“It’s just that it’s hard to believe in greatness,” she said. “Especially in friends.
Read more at location 4700


Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.
Read more at location 4711


Her lean fingers and long hands were like a woman’s on a foreclosed farm.
Read more at location 4768


It happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore. Yes, he thought, I am ready, I have always been ready, I am ready at last.
Read more at location 4824

Le Carre--the Art of the Impossible--Adventures in VAT battles--or For Your Convenience

This is not a restaurant review.  If it were I would say that Le Carre is stylish but missed the mark with fishy tuna sushi.  I would add what I call the #madacaveat: we have plenty of friends that have had great sushi at Le Carre (even salmon sashimi on occasion--although there were out of it the night we were there), indeed, great meals there but like nearly every restaurant in town--it's hit or miss.

But again, this is not a restaurant review.  This is about getting a receipt with your VAT.  Now if there's one thing that the French influence has left imprinted on the 'hospitality' industry here (aside from some truly great cuisine) it is a 'no can do' attitude:

Willing to pay extra for a plate of salmon sashimi instead of the mixed sashimi plate on the menu? Sorry sir, that is impossible.
For your convenience, we don't allow any changes to the menu

Happily--Le Carre proved an exception.  The facture that we were presented with did not break out the Value Added Tax (VAT) which, for the uninitiated, is a 20% tax that diplomats are eventually refunded by the host nation (contrary to popular belief it is NOT part of Vienna Convention but rather is an international reciprocal courtesy).   Anyway, while the server was dumbfounded when I tried to explain to him that I would like a receipt that showed the 20% VAT, he complied when I asked him to check with the manager to see what they could do.  As you can see in the second picture--they figured it out.

Bravo Le Carre--we will return!

This is what they can give at Le Carre:

The Profession Kindle Notes

Below are the highlights from my 2014 Reading List selection: 

The Profession by Steven Pressfield

You have 10 highlighted passages

You have to lead men sometimes. As unit commander, you have to put words to the bonds of love they feel but may be too embarrassed to speak of—and to the secret aspirations of their hearts, which are invariably selfless and noble. More important, you have to take those actions yourself, first and alone, that they themselves know they should take, but they just haven’t figured it out yet.

Read more at location 366

What Westerners call corruption is just life in 75 percent of the world. Americans still don’t understand this. We think the rest of the planet is like us, or would be if it had the same advantages. We live in a bubble in the States. We make decisions and establish policy based on dream conceptions of the wider universe. We think everyone is the same as we are. We think they want the same things we want. They don’t. They’re not like us at all.

Read more at location 394

As with most technical revolutions, the rise of mercenary forces came about with virtually no legislative or regulatory oversight. The world woke up one day and merc armies were everywhere. Force Insertion quelled one revolt in Nigeria, then another in Mali. The company did it with half-brigade-sized forces that were in and out in ninety days. By August of 2023, I myself had signed up for a tour. My first check was $92,500 for 110 days in the Pankisi gorge in Georgia, protecting the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. The employer was a consortium of energy companies, including BP, ChevronTexaco, and ConocoPhillips, as well as the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan, but the actual check came from Force Insertion, drawn on the National Bank of Capetown. You signed a contract two pages long that said you had never been a Communist, Fascist, or Islamist; you waived all rights to compensation for death or dismemberment and repatriation of remains to your country of origin, and you indemnified and held blameless Force Insertion for any acts committed by you or contractors serving beneath you, which might render Force Insertion liable to prosecution before a state-founded or transnational court of law. You had to buy your own clothing, gear, and weapons and provide your own transportation to and from the front. In-theater you received the same medical care as Force Insertion’s highest operatives (which was outstanding), but once you got home you were on your own. It worked. The pipeline stayed safe; the gas went through. Legal and ethical objections were raised, as they should have been. But the shit worked. No one could argue with it. When the crisis in Guinea broke out in ’26, the solution was a no-brainer. U.S. DoD, with the approval of the president and Congress, contracted with Force Insertion for a one-year fee of $11.7 billion to “secure, stabilize, and pacify” the northern four provinces and to “dismantle and disarm” the Amal tribal and AQWA, al-Qaeda in West Africa, and related militias operating with them. Aerial, satellite, and drone

Read more at location 1388

battlespaces were owned by the appropriate arms of the conventional military. The dirt belonged to the mercs.

Read more at location 1403

Salter commanded. What made these merc forces so effective? In the conventional military, three of the four most dysfunctional operational elements are OPCON, OPFUND, and ROE—Operational Concept, Operational Funding, and Rules of Engagement. The fourth element, OPTEMPO—meaning the speed with which a field unit can execute an operation once it conceives it—is a product of the other three. Force Insertion streamlined all four and made them work. Gone were the eleven levels of clearance that a captain or lieutenant on the ground had to negotiate before he could pull the trigger. One phone call brought the green light—and brought close air support and drone or ground-based fires. Better yet, the definition of an engageable target expanded dramatically. If a suspected enemy stuck his head up, you were cleared to blow it off—man, woman, or child; armed or unarmed. In the realm of funding, Force Insertion operators were supplied with bags of cash and given the latitude to spread it around. Commanders had Lexuses and Range Rovers to pass out as gifts of honor; we could send tribal chieftains’ sons to Atlanta and Houston for surgical operations, get their daughters into Florida State, or set their wives up in condos in Dubai or Miami Beach. On the home front, the single most powerful attraction tool for Force Insertion was the lump-sum million-dollar payout for CDD, Combat Death and Dismemberment. At one stroke, this grant eradicated 99 percent of all family-based risk aversion—and it cut out the weeping widow shot on the evening news. When the conventional military used nukes on Natanz, Kashan, and Anarak in Iran in 2019 in retaliation for the 11/11 dirty-bombing of Long Beach (for which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard supposedly supplied the radioactive bomb-wrapping material), casualty aversion made it impossible to send regular U.S. troops tramping through the contaminated dust of the No-Go Zone. Force Insertion put two centuries on the ground in forty-eight hours. The mercs didn’t care if their nutsacks glowed in the dark; they lined up by the hundreds for the bonuses and incentive pay. Long Beach and the nuclear counterstrike against Iran were what finally made mercenary forces preeminent. After that horror show (and the massive anti-American riots and demonstrations that were ignited in response around

Read more at location 1404

the globe), the conventional U.S. military withdrew all but token forces from the Middle East and Central Asia. Homeland defense became the new Core Mission. A hybrid strategy of counterterrorism (much of it outsourced) and “stand-off containment” replaced counterinsurgency, nation building, and all expeditionary or occupational adventures. The American public had had a bellyful. From now on, power would be projected by naval, air, satellite, and drone technology. The troops would stay home. Into this vacuum flowed mercenary forces. Ground occupation became outsourced, funded at first by DoD in the interest of national security but before long by corporations or consortiums seeking to secure their investments, exploit contracted-for resources, or protect their personnel and infrastructure. Rates of pay became market driven; overnight, salaries shot to double and triple those of the conventional military. Incentives and bonuses made the sign-up packages even more attractive. The exodus from the army, navy, and Marines was spectacular. Applicants queued by the thousands. And these were quality troops—Airborne, Special Forces, SEALs, Rangers, the cream. Average age was thirty-two. Majors were competing for postings as O-2s. Nor was this groundswell limited to grunts and trigger pullers; staff officers, planners, intelligence, tech, and logistics specialists were throwing elbows, greedy to get in the door. Merc had ceased to be a four-letter word. In those most overextended, underresourced, and grimly anti-American times, the president and Congress had at last found a means of projecting U.S. power that was (a) mission-effective, (b) cost-effective, and (c) did not run afoul of the extreme risk aversion of the American people. Were these new for-hire forces alien, treacherous, or unreliable? Hell, no—they were just our same guys, in upgraded uniforms, finally getting paid what they deserved. The final stroke that made the idea of mercenary forces acceptable to the American public was the inclusion of foreign volunteers. The Probst-Avenal Act of 2021, which provided a path to U.S. citizenship for overseas nationals who had served thirty-six months in for-hire combat billets, brought in the cream of veteran warriors from every army on the globe and meant that homegrown U.S. casualties would remain low low low. How good were these contracted forces? Could a mercenary army hold its

Read more at location 1421

own in a straight-up fight with the conventional U.S. military? Never. Force Insertion, for all its quality of personnel and latitude of maneuver, couldn’t begin to match the technology and transport; the aerial, naval, satellite, and drone capabilities; the intelligence apparatus or the heavy (read, nuclear) weapons systems that could only be funded by entities on the scale of nation-states. Head to head, a private versus national army clash was a no-go. But in certain arenas, in failed-state warfare, in tribal and ethnic conflicts, in contests where restrictive rules of engagement hamstrung conventional operations … in these areas, a merc force could shine. And since these were the areas an empire needed, pay-to-play forces came to be seen in a fresh, new light. The idea of mercs achieved respectability.

Read more at location 1440

Fourteen hours a day become sixteen and eighteen for me. It is no easy chore to mold a unit, even of mature, proven professionals. I do it the only way I know how: by working twice as hard as everyone else. I’m awake before the first team member opens his eyes, and I don’t knock off till the last one gets his head down. I know every man’s weapons, IADs, SOPs, and TTPs more thoroughly than he does; I can do every job as well as or better than the man assigned to it—and he knows it. Every operator except the Englishman Coombs, Chris Candelaria, and the UAE Special Forces guys has served with me on multiple deployments. They know I will eat my own liver before I will let them down, and they know I will eat their livers if they give me or the team any less than their high-end max. I love them and I tell them. I tell them over and over.

Read more at location 1462

What enterprise exists is either subsistence farming or narcotics. Cash comes in from outside, not as capital investment—because no First World bank or corporation is reckless enough to take such a risk—but in the form of humanitarian aid, military support, or poison-pill loans from the IMF and the World Bank to fund well-intentioned but artificial projects such as infrastructure construction and rehabilitation—roads and wells, power stations and water purification plants that look great on paper but on the ground are nothing but sinkholes of corruption, with the outside cash flowing into the pockets of whatever tribal or criminal despot lords it over the region. The infrastructure project itself is abandoned halfway through, when the foreign workers bolt because they can’t stand conditions any longer, with only the shell left standing after every item of value has been looted by the locals.

Read more at location 1991

These countries are often called “failed states,” but the truth is they’re not states at all. There’s no source of revenue sufficient for the central government to pay for police or security forces (if these could even be created, which they can’t) to protect the simple, hardworking villagers in the provinces. So the warlords do it, as they have for the last ten thousand years, by extorting money from the locals and shaking down any outside entity via tolls or road or river taxes (and nowadays pipelines), either in the form of institutionalized patronage from whatever Western or Asian buccaneering entity is ripping off the natural resources, or informally by checkpoints and roadblocks at the muzzle end of AK-47s. The regional lords extract protection money from the narco traffickers (most in fact are indistinguishable from narco traffickers) and use this revenue to recruit and fund their militias. The real currency of the nation is hopelessness. If a young man of courage and vision arises, he has two choices: join the gangs or bolt the country. The rare honest man, the stand-up politician, the crusading editor gets his few column inches in the Western press and then is shot, hanged, poisoned, or “detained for his own protection” and never heard from again.

Read more at location 1998