Eleven Minutes

For I am the first and the last
I am the venerated and the despised
I am the prostitute and the saint
I am the wife and the virgin
I am the mother and the daughter
I am the arms of my mother
I am barren and my children are many
I am the married woman and the spinster
I am the woman who gives birth and she
who never procreated
I am the consolation for the pain of birth
I am the wife and the husband
And it was my man who created me
I am the mother of my father
I am the sister of my husband
And he is my rejected son
Always respect me
For I am the shameful and the magnificent one

Hymn to Isis, 3rd or 4th century B.C. discovered in Nag Hammadi

[passage]
When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. I saw this happen today as the sun went down. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! No herons, no distant music, not even the taste of lips. How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?
Life moves very fast. IT rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
p 9


[passage]
I've realized that sometimes you get no second chance and that its best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course its risky, but is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took 48 hours to bring me here having an accident? If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I'm looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I've had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough to me already) finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.
And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine; its best to live as if today were the first or last day of my life.
pg 26

[passage]
And all for eleven minutes a day? It wasn't possible. After her experiences at the Copacabana she knew that she wasn't the only person who felt lonely. Human beings can withstand a week without water, two week without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings. Like her, these men, and the many others who sought her company, were all tormented by that same destructive feeling, the sense that no one else on the planet cared about them.
pg 88

[passage]
That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.
pg 90

[passage]
"I had a happy childhood, I studied at one of the best schools in Berne, then I came to work in Geneva, where i met and married the man I loved. I did everything for him and he did everything for me; time passed and he retired. When he was free to do exactly what he wanted with his time, his eyes grew sadder, because he had probably never really thought about himself all his life. We never had any serious arguments or any great excitements, he was never unfaithful to me and was never rude to me in public. We lived a very ordinary life, so much so that, without a job to do, he felt useless, unimportant, and, a year later he died of cancer."
pg 93

[passage]
But in order to do that, we need the other person,. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.
pg 116

[passage]
Egypt, Rome, and Persia all shared the notion that a man can save his country and his world by sacrificing himself. Whenever there was a great natural disaster in CHina, the emperor was punished, because he was the divinity's Earthly representative. In ancient Greece, the finest Spartan warriors were whipped once a year, from morning till night, in homage to the goddess Artemis, while the crowd urged them on, calling on them to withstand the pain with dignity, for it was preparing them for world of war. At the end of the day, the priests would examine the wounds on the warriors' backs and use them to predict the city's future.
pg 187

[passage]
The pain seemed about to invade her soul now and undermine her spiritually, because its one thing to put on a bit of theater in a 5 star hotel, naked with vodka and caviar inside you and a whip between your legs, but its quite another to be cold and barefoot, with stones lacerating your feet. She was disoriented she couldn't think of a single thing to say to Ralf Hart; all that existed in her universe were those small, sharp stones that formed the path between the trees.
Then just when she thought she was about to give up, she was filled by a strange feeling: she had reached her limit and beyond it was an empty space, in which she seemed to float above herself, unaware of what she was feeling. Was this what the penitents had experienced? At the far extremity of pain, she had discovered a door into a different level of consciousness, and there was no room now for anything but implacable nature and her own invincible self.
Everything around her became a dream: ill-lit garden, the dark lake, the man walking beside her, saying nothing, the occasional couple out for a stroll, who failed to notice that she was barefoot and having difficulty walking. She didn't know if it was the cold or the pain, but she suddenly lost all sense of her own body and entered a state in which there was no desire and no fear, only a mysterious - how could describe it? a mysterious peace. The pain barrier was not a barrier for her; she could go beyond it.
She thought of all the people enduring unasked-for suffering and there she was, bringing suffering upon hersef, but that didn't matter anymore, she had crossed the frontiers of the body, and now there was only soul, "light", a kind of void, which someone, some day, called Paradise. There are certain sufferings which can only be forgotten once we have succeeded in floating above our own pain.
197

[passage]
"Does a solider go to war in order to kill the enemy? No, he goes in order to die for his country. Does a wife, want to show her husband how happy she is? No, she wants him to see how devoted she is, how she suffers in order to make him happy. Does the husband go to work thinking he will find personal fulfillment there? No, he is giving his sweat and tears for the good of the family. And so it goes on: sons give up their dreams to please their parents, parents give up their lives in order to please their children; pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only joy: love."
201

[passage]
One day, a women saw this bird and fell in love with him. She watched his flight, her mouth wide in amazement, her heart pounding, her eyes shining with excitement. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.
But then she thought: He might want to visit far off mountains! ANd she was afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she felt envy, envy for the bird's ability to fly.
And she felt alone.
And she thought: "I'm going to set a trap. THe next time the bird appears, he will never leave again."
The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage.
She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: "Now you have everything you could possibly want." However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.
One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.
IF she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings tin motion, not his physical body.
Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. "Why have you come?" she asked Death. "So that you can fly once more with him across the sky," Death replied. "If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again."
214

[passage]
I don't remember exactly when, but one Sunday recently, I decided to go to church to attend mass. After some time, I realized that i was in the wrong church - it was a Protestant church.
I was about to leave, but the vicar was just beginning his sermon, and I thought it would be rude to get up at that point, and it was a real blessing, because that day I heard things I very much needed to hear.
HE said something like:
"In all the languages of the world, there is the same proverb: 'What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.' Well, I say that there isn't an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we're in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we're far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.
"The gospels and all the sacred texts of all religions were written in exile, in search of God's understanding, of the faith that moves whole peoples, of the pilgrimage of souls wandering the face of the Earth. Our ancestors did not know as we do not know what the Divinity expects from our lives - and it is out of that doubt that books are written, pictures painted, because we don't want to forget who we are - nor can we."
231

[passage]
"Do you find it normal that there are daily demonstrations by Kurds? THat women in love run away from their Prince Charming? That people dream about farms rather than love? That men and women sell their time, but can never buy it back again? ANd yet, all these things happen , so it really doesn't matter what I believe or don't believe; all these things are normal. Everything that goes against Nature, against our most intimate desires, is normal in our eyes, even though it's an aberration in God's eyes. We seek out our own inferno, we spend millennia building it, and after all that effort we are now able to live in the worst possible way."
239

[passage]
IN the beginning, everything was love and surrender. But then the serpent appeared and said to Eve: what you surrendered, you will lose. That is how it was with me - I was driven out of paradise when I was still at school, and ever since then, I have been trying to find a way of telling the serpent he was wrong, that living was more important than keeping things to yourself. But the serpent was right right and I was wrong.
pg 259