“You know, these guys clearly went through hell, but they were also told what to say to get political refugee status. There’s a standard narrative, and in that standard narrative the baby being force-fed opium and then left to the vultures in the mountains is a required episode.

And they’re still laughing later on, now a couple, when they tell their friends the story of how they met at the Vipassana session. Everyone knows it, everyone wants to hear it again and again. It’s their showpiece, their grand exploit, their golden legend. So unexpected, so unthinkable, and for that reason all the more glorious:

what we take to be flaws when they’re under our noses often turn out with hindsight to be what makes a book unique and inimitable.

Atiq: “You know the difference between like and love? If you like a flower, you pick it. If you love it, you water it. Whoever has understood that has understood life.”

speed record is easy to measure. But a slowness record?

The fairy garden This very slight improvement didn’t last, and was soon followed by “feelings of distress and incurability, numerous bouts of tears, invasive suicidal thoughts involving a hanging scenario without any immediate plans to follow through.”

In the words of one Buddhist sutra I love to the point of having quoted it twice already in my books: “A man who judges himself superior, inferior, or even equal to another does not understand reality.”

Martha Black and white, wide shot: filmed from the wings of a concert hall, the image shows a woman from behind, sitting at a piano in a black dress with white polka dots. She puts her fingers on the keys and starts to play.

The body has three hundred joints. The blood circulates through more than sixty thousand miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries. There are forty-six miles of nerves. Unfolded, the surface of the lungs would cover a soccer field. Little by little, yoga aims to become acquainted with all of this.