Sublime

The night was full of life and motion; leaves and branches touched, making tiny sighs. Singing insects droned in the trees overhead; everywhere the bright beetles flashed.

What Paul Bowles reminds us of, what he won’t let us forget, is that all of us, regardless of nationality or religion, are capable of acting from highly suspect, compromised, “primitive” motives—and of behaving in ways that, we would like to think, we could never even imagine.

The building had the kind of intense and pure shabbiness attained only by cheap new constructions.

You get used to the quiet. And then you find it’s not quiet at all.

For Bowles’s obsessive subject, to which he returned again and again, and which he wrote about brilliantly, was the tragic and even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided and often presumptuous encounters with the mysteries of a foreign culture.

It was typical: a victim always gave himself up if he had dared to dream of changing his status.

He had never met anyone like her; she gave the impression of remaining uninvolved in whatever she said or did. It was as if she were playing an intricate game whose rules she had devised herself.