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;void(0)) . . . see: "PLACES" for related links Most tourist attractions ... have some kind of lookout point at the top that you, the tourist, are encouraged to climb to via a dark and scary medieval stone staircase containing at least 5,789 steps and the skeletons of previous tourists (you can tell which skeletons are American, because they're wearing sneakers). If you make it to the top, you are rewarded with a sweeping panoramic view of dark spots before your eyes caused by lack of oxygen. Meanwhile, down at street level, the Parisians are smoking cigarettes and remarking, in French, "Some of them are still alive! We must build more medieval steps!" --Dave Barry (b. 1947) American humorist. _Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down_ [2002] By eight-thirty Paris is a terrible place for walking. There's too much traffic. A blue haze of uncombusted diesel hangs over every boulevard. I know Baron Haussmann made Paris a grand place to look at, but the man had no concept of traffic flow. At the Arc de Triomphe alone, thirteen roads come together. Can you imagine? I mean to say, here you have a city with the world's most pathologically aggressive drivers drivers who in other circumstances would be given injections of Valium from syringes the sizes of bicycle pumps and confined to their beds with leather straps and you give them an open space where they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or what? --Bill Bryson (b. 1951) American writer of humorous travel books. _Neither Here Nor There_ [1991] "Paris" If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. --Ernest Hemingway (18891961) American novelist. _A Moveable Feast_ [1964] (epigraph) - . . . The [Eiffel] tower is so beloved that few today remember the storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits provoked by its selection as the startling centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. (One of the losing entries was a gigantic working guillotine!) Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France's greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the "odious column of bolted metal." What person of good taste, this flock of intellectuals asked, could endure the thought of this "dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass"? The revered painters Ernest Meissonier and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, composer Charles Gounod and architect Charles Garnier all signed this epistolary call to arms, stating that "the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris." [...] Not until 1929 (six years after Eiffel's death) did another structure surpass the Eiffel Tower in height. It was the Chrysler Building at 1,046 feet. Two years later, the Empire State Building wrested away that title by reaching 1,250 feet. Moreover, while Gustave Eiffel's original contract called for him to disassemble his tower after 20 years, he ensured the survival of his magnum opus by making it an indispensable part of the French military's radio network. Megaskyscrapers have long since overshadowed the Eiffel Tower's status as the world's tallest structure. And yet, the Eiffel Tower still speaks uniquely to the human fascination with science and technology and to the human desire for pleasure and joie de vivre. In 1889, Jules Simon, the republican politician and philosopher, declared, "We are all citizens of the Eiffel Tower," a sentiment as true today as it was then. --Jill Jonnes "'Odious Column' of Metal The Eiffel Tower wasn't always a beloved icon" _The Wall Street Journal_ [9 May 2009] - How you Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree? --Sam M. Lewis (18851959) and Joe Young (18891939). Referring to American soldiers in France during WWI, song title [1919]. When Paris sneezes, the rest of Europe catches a cold. --Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (17731859) Austrian politician and statesman. 1830 remark quoted in "Journal of Politics" [August 1949]. [Of Paris:] She has had my heart since my childhood. ... I love her tenderly, even to her warts and her spots. I am French only by this great city: the glory of France, and one of the noblest ornaments of the world. --attributed to Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (15331592) French moralist and essayist. - In the meantime, I was stuck in Paris. A lot of people get all moist and runny at the mention of this place. I don't get it. It's just a big city, no dirtier than most. It does have nice architecture because the French chickened out of World War II. But it's surrounded by the most depressing ring of lower-middle-class suburbs this side of Smolensk. In fact, one of these suburbs is actually named Stalingrad, which goes to show that the French have learned nothing about politics since they guillotined all the smart people in 1793. --P.J. O'Rourke (b. 1947) American political satirist. _Holidays in Hell_ [1989] "Among the Euro-Weenies" The next night I called my girlfriend who was back in the States and, no doubt, happily contemplating the sterling silver Elsa Peretti refrigerator magnet I'd bought her to make up for Christmas. She's spent a lot of time in Paris. "Where's a good place for dinner?" I asked. "There's the Brasserie Lipp on the Avenue St. Germaine." she said, "or La Coupole in Montmartre." "Not La Coupole," I said. "I've been there before. That's the place that's crowded and noisy and smells bad and everybody's rude as hell, isn't it?" "I think you just described France," she said. --P.J. O'Rourke (b. 1947) American political satirist. _Holidays in Hell_ [1989] "Among the Euro-Weenies" - My dad took me to Paris for the weekend. We had the most amazing time. On the plane back to London, he asked me, "Do you know why I took you to Paris only you and me?" And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who would always love you." --Gwyneth Paltrow (b. 1971) American film actress. _Parade Magazine_ [January 1999], "It Was a Real Awakening for Me" Paris is the middle-aged woman's paradise. --Arthur Wing Pinero (18551934) British playwright. _The Princess and the Butterfly_ [1896] I love Paris in the springtime. --Cole Porter (18921964) American songwriter. "I Love Paris" [1953 song], in the musical _Can Can_. In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. --attributed to Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot.   PARTIES . . see: "COMPANY (HAVING)" see: "GUESTS" see: "HOSPITALITY" see: "WELCOME" see: "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for other related links see: "HOME & FAMILY" for other related links There's an awfully revealing anecdote about T.S. Eliot. A woman who was seated next to him at a table said, "Isn't the party wonderful?" He said, "Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all." --W.H. [Wystan Hugh] Auden (19071973) English-born poet and man of letters. [15 January 1947], in _The Table Talk of W. H. Auden_ [1990]. Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry. --Bible "Ecclesiastes" 8:15 Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda water the day after. --Lord Byron [George Gordon Byron] (17881824) English Romantic poet and satirist. _Don Juan_ [1819], canto II, st. 178 [Referring to a witty rejoinder remembered after one has left a party:] Staircase wit. --Denis Diderot (17131784) French writer and philosopher. _Paradoxe sur le Comediιn_ [1773-78] ^ Most of the rich have liked partying, and since the less rich like being the admiring guests of their financial betters, there is a never-ending stream of party fodder. Though perhaps not always with the happiest of results as the slightly down-market guests of the Emperor Heliogabalus discoved when one of them remarked how pleasant it would be to be smothered in the scent of roses that adorned the imperial table, and the rest agreed. Taking them at their word, the next time the same guests came to dinner the emperor had several tons of petals dumped over the dinner table. The guests' reaction on this occasion passed unrecorded. They had suffocated. --David Frost and Michael Deakin _David Frost's Book of Millionaires, Multimillionaires, and Really Rich People_ [1984] ^ The best number for a dinner party is two myself and a dam' good head waiter. --Nubar Gulbenkian (18961972) British industrialist and philanthropist. In "Daily Telegraph" [14 January 1965]. At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely. --W. Somerset Maugham (18741965) English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. _A Writer's Notebook_ [1949], [entry from 1896] - [Of a cocktail party she had attended:] One more drink and I'd have been under the host! --Dorothy Parker (18931967) American critic and humorist. Quoted in Bennett Cerf _Try and Stop Me_ [1944]. [On being told at a party that people were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life. --Dorothy Parker (18931967) American critic and humorist. Quoted in _The Algonquin Wits_ (ed.) Robert E. Drennan [1968]. - Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features: the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy. --Anthony Powell (19052000) English novelist. _The Acceptance World_ [1955] - At this moment in the fiesta, when the dance was loveliest and when song was linked to song, the Spaniards were seized with an urge to kill the celebrants. They all ran forward, armed as if for battle. They closed the entrances and passageways, all the gates of the patio ... They posted guards so that no one could escape, and then they rushed into the sacred patio to slaughter the celebrants. --Bernardino de Sahagun (c. 15001590) Franciscan missionary. _The General History of the Things of New Spain_ [c.1555] in M.J. Cohan and John Major (eds.) p. 328 _History in Quotations_ [2004]. Cohan & Major explain: Sahagun, a Franciscan missionary, immersed himself in the life, culture and history of the Aztecs. The three-volume Codex, written in two columns, one in Nahuati and the other in Spanish, provides an illustrated encyclopedia of Mexican civilization. This action was the immediate cause of the revolt that drove the Spaniards out of the city. - An office party is not, as is sometimes supposed, the Managing Director's chance to kiss the tea- girl. It is the tea-girl's chance to kiss the Managing Director. --Katherine Whitehorn (b. 1928) English journalist. _Roundabout_ [1962] "The Office Party" ----- bacchanalia [bak-uh-NAIL-yuh], noun: 1. (plural, capitalized) The ancient Roman festival in honor of Bacchus, celebrated with dancing, song, and revelry. 2. A riotous, boisterous, or drunken festivity; a revel. convivial [kuhn-VIV-ee-uhl], adjective: Relating to, occupied with, or fond of feasting, drinking, and good company; merry; festive. fκte (noun) [fet or feyt] A small festival or large party. gregarious (adj.) [grκ-'gζr-ee-κs] Seeking out and enjoying the company of others; aggressively sociable. potlatch (noun) ['pat-lζch] A social event, especially one given to express the wealth and generosity of the host in expectation of something in return. The word is used mainly in the Northwestern U.S.. regale [rih-GAY(uh)L], transitive verb: 1. To entertain with something that delights. 2. To entertain sumptuously with fine food and drink. 3. To feast. 4. A sumptuous feast. roister [ROY-stur], intransitive verb: 1. To engage in boisterous merrymaking; to revel; to carouse. 2. To bluster; to swagger. shindig (noun) A noisy and festive party or celebration. soiree [swah-RAY], noun: An evening party or social gathering. ;void(0)) PARTING . . see: "BREAKING UP" see: "GOODBYE" see: "LEAVING" see: "REJECTION" see: "LOVE & MARRIAGE (OR NOT)" for other related links - ... What'll I do When you Are far away And I am blue, What'll I do? What'll I do When I Am wond'ring who Is kissing you, What'll I do? What'll I do With just A photograph To tell my troubles to? When I'm alone With only Dreams of you That won't come true, What'll I do? ... --Irving Berlin (18881989) American songwriter. "What'll I Do?" [1924 song] - Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. --Robert Burns (17591796) Scottish poet and songwriter. "Ae Fond Kiss" st. 2 - What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now. --Lord Byron [George Gordon Byron] (17881824) English Romantic poet and satirist. _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, canto II, st. 98 [1812] But still her lips refused to send 'Farewell!' For in that word, that fatal word howe'er We promise, hope, believe there breathes despair. --Lord Byron [George Gordon Byron] (17881824) English Romantic poet and satirist. _The Corsair, A Tale_, canto I, st. 15 [1814] Fare thee well! and if forever, Still forever, fare thee well. --Lord Byron [George Gordon Byron] (17881824) English Romantic poet and satirist. "Fare Thee Well", st. 1 [1816] - I'll be back. --James Cameron (b. 1954) Canadian-born American film director. "The Terminator" [1984 film], spoken by Arnold Schwarznegger. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell. --Emily Dickinson (18301886) American poet. "My life closed twice before its close", l. 7 [unknown date] Parting is worse than death; it is death of love! --John Dryden (16311700) English poet, critic, and dramatist. Attributed in Maturin M. Ballou _Treasury of Thought_, p. 379 [10th ed. 1884]. [Referring to her estranged brother:] His years with others must the sweeter be For those brief days he spent in loving me. --George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] (18191880) English novelist. "Brother and Sister", st. IX There is not so much comfort in the having of children as there is sorrow in parting with them. --Thomas Fuller (16541734) English writer and physician. _Gnomologia_ [1732] To leave is to die a little; To die to what we love. We leave behind a bit of ourselves Wherever we have been. --Edmond Haraucourt (18571941) French poet. _Choix de Poιsies_ [1891] "Rondel de l'Adieu" The friendship that can cease has never been real. --Saint Jerome (c. 340420?) Translator of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. _Letter 3_ - Cathedral bells were tolling And our hearts sang on, Was it the spell of Paris Or the April dawn? Who knows if we shall meet again? But when the morning chimes ring sweet again: I'll be seeing you In all the old familiar places That this heart of mine embraces all day through. In that small cafι, The park across the way, The children's carousel, The chestnut trees, the wishing well. I'll be seeing you in ev'ry lovely summer's day, In ev'rything that's light and gay, I'll always think of you that way. I'll find you in the morning sun, And when the night is new I'll be looking at the moon, But I'll be seeing you. --Irving Kahal (19031942) American lyricist who parterned with Sammy Fain (19021989) American composer of popular music. "I'll Be Seeing You" [1938 song] - [Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx):] If you can't leave in a taxi you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff. --"Duck Soup" [1933 film] Screenplay by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. She said she always believed in the old adage, 'Leave them while you're looking good.' --Anita Loos (18931981) American novelist and Hollywood screenwriter. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" [1925] It's no good trying to keep up old friendships. It's painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it. --W. Somerset Maugham (18741965) English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. _Cakes and Ale_ [1930] We're drinking my friend, To the end of a brief episode, Make it one for my baby And one more for the road. --Johnny Mercer (19091976) American songwriter. "One For My Baby" [1943 song] Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. --Anaοs Nin (19031977) French-born American writer. _Winter of Artifice_ [1939] - We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, But I know we'll meet again, some sunny day. Keep smiling through, just like you always do, 'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away. So will you please say hello to the folks that I know, Tell them I won't be long. They'll be happy to know that as you saw me go, I was singing this song, We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, But I know we'll meet again, some sunny day. --Ross Parker (19141974) & Hughie Charles (19071995) British songwriters. "We'll Meet Again" [1939 song] (Made famous by British singer Vera Lynn and gave its name to the 1943 musical film in which she played the lead role.) - Ev're time we say goodbye I die a little, Ev'ry time we say goodbye I wonder why a little. --Cole Porter (18921964) American songwriter. _Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye_ [1944 song] - Good-night, good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow That I shall say good-night till it be morrow. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _Romeo and Juliet_, II, ii [15951596] I do desire we may be better strangers. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _As You Like It_, III, ii [1599] Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _Hamlet_, V, ii [1601] Come, my coach. Good night ladies, good night. Sweet ladies, good night, good night. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _Hamlet_, IV, v [1601] Sweets to the sweet. Farewell. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _Hamlet_, V, i [1601] - Parting and forgetting! What faithful heart can do these? Our great thoughts, our great affections, the Truths of our life, never leave us. Surely, they cannot separate from our consciousness; shall follow it whithersoever that shall go; and are of their nature divine and immortal. --William Makepeace Thackeray (18111863) English novelist. _The History of Henry Esmond_, ch. VI [1852] ----- sunder [SUN-dur], transitive verb: 1. To break apart; to separate; to divide; to sever. 2. To become parted, disunited, or severed. valediction (noun) A speech or statement made as a farewell. Synonyms: valedictory, valedictory address . . see: "POLITICS" for related links There can not a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations. --Joseph Addison (16721719) English essayist, poet, and dramatist. _The Spectator_ [24 July 1711] If we mean to support the liberty and independence which it has cost us so much blood and treasure to establish, we must drive far away the demon of party spirit and local reproach. --George Washington (17321799) American general and commander-in-chief of the colonial armies in the American Revolution [1775-83] and first president of the United States [1789-97]. Letter to Arthur Fenner [4 June 1790]. . . see: "EMOTIONS & FEELINGS" for related links see: "LOVE & MARRIAGE (OR NOT)" for related links To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion. --Albert Camus (19131960) French novelist, dramatist, and essayist who won the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature. Quoted in _Carnets, 1935-1942_ [pub. by Hamish Hamilton, 1963, 2nd ed.]. Man is only great when he acts from his passions. --Benjamin Disraeli (18041881) British Tory statesman, novelist, and Prime Minister [1868, 1874-80]. _Coningsby_, bk. 4, ch. 13 [1844] If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins. --Benjamin Franklin (17061790) American politician, inventor, and scientist. _Poor Richard's Almanack_ [May 1749] Some of these philosophers tried to extinguish all of their passions, as did the Cynics and Stoics. That is evidently madness, for we cannot extinguish passion without destroying our whole body. --Arnold Geulincx [ pseu.: Philaretus] (16241669) Flemish metaphysician and logician. _Ethics_ [published posthumously] - Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. --Kahlil Gibran (18831931) Lebanese poet. "On Reason and Passion" in _The Prophet_ [1923]. - Feminine passion is to masculine as an epic is to an epigram. --attributed to Karl Kraus (18741936) Austrian satirist. - The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. They are a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without. --Franηois de La Rochefoucauld (16131680) French classical author. _Reflections; or, Sentences and Moral Maxims_ [1678], maxim 8 Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fire. --Franηois de La Rochefoucauld (16131680) French classical author. _Reflections; or, Sentences and Moral Maxims_ [1678], maxim 276 - He submits himself to be seen through a microscope, who suffers himself to be caught in a fit of passion. --Johann Kaspar Lavater (17411801) Swiss writer, Protestant pastor, and founder of physiognomics. Attributed in James Wood (ed.) _Dictionary of Quotations ..._, p. 145 [1893]. Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot. --D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence (18851930) English novelist and poet. _Studies In Classic American Literature_, ch. II [1923] [Ambition] is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied. --Niccolς Machiavelli (14691527) Florentine statesman and political philosopher. _The Discourses_ [1517] When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted. --Thomas Paine [spelled Pane prior to 1774] (17371809) English-American writer and political pamphleteer. _Rights of Man_ [1791] The ruling passion, be it what it will, The ruling passion conquers reason still. --Alexander Pope (16881744) English poet. _Epistles to Several Persons_ "To Lord Bathurst", l. 155 [1733] - A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them. --Publilius Syrus (8543 B.C.) Latin writer of mimes who was originally a slave. In D. Lyman _The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus_ [1856]. Who is strong? He who subdues his impulses. --Talmud (A.D.1st-6th cent.) Rabbinical writings. Quoted in Louis I. Newman (comp.) _The Talmudic Anthology_ [1945]. The happiness of man in this life does not consist in the absence, but in the mastery, of his passions. --Alfred, Lord Tennyson (18091892) English poet. --French proverb, as quoted in D. E. MacDonnel _A Dictionary of Quotations in Most Frequent Use..._ [1809 ed.]. . . - History, and religious and moral opinion, have so enshrined Gandhi in this sacred matrix that in many quarters it is blasphemous to question whether this entire procedure of passive resistance was not simply the only intelligent, realistic, expedient program which Gandhi had at his disposal; and that the "morality" that surrounded this policy ... was to a large degree a rationale to cloak a pragmatic program with a desired and essential moral cover. ... Gandhi did not have the guns, and if he had had the guns, he would not have had the people to use the guns. Gandhi records in his _Autobiography_ his astonishment at the passivity and submissiveness of his people in not retaliating or even wanting revenge against the British. ... The contention that it was a pragmatic, rather than a principled decision, is based on the Declaration of Independence of Mahatma Gandhi issued on January 26, 1930, where he discussed "the fourfold disaster to our country." His fourth indictment against the British reads: "Spiritually, compulsive disarmament has made us unmanly, and the presence of an alien army of occupation, employed with deadly effect to crush in us the spirit of resistance, has made us think we cannot ... even defend our homes and families ..." These words more than suggest that if Gandhi had had the weapons for violent resistance and the people to use them this means would not have been so unreservedly rejected as the world would like to think. --Saul Alinsky (19091972) American community organizer and writer. _Rules for Radicals_ [1971], Vintage Books, pp. 38-9 & note: Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest. --Mohandas K. Gandhi (18691948) Indian statesman and leader of the nationalistic movement against British rule. _An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth_, p. 446 [1927] - . . see: "TRAVEL" for related links - The most precious book I possess is my passport. Like most such bald assertions, this will come across as something of an overstatement. A passport, after all, is a commonplace object. You probably don't give a lot of thought to yours most of the time. Important travel document; try not to lose it, terrible photograph, expiry date coming up soonish: In general, a passport requires a relatively modest level of attention and concern. And when, at each end of a journey, you do have to produce it, you expect it to do its stuff without much trouble. Yes, officer, that's me, you're right, I do look a bit different with a beard, thank you, officer, you have a nice day too. A passport is no big deal. It's low-maintenance. It's just ID. I've been a British citizen since I was 17, so my passport has indeed done its stuff efficiently and unobtrusively for a long time now, but I have never forgotten that all passports do not work in this way. My first Indian passport, for example, was a paltry thing. Instead of offering the bearer a general open-sesame to anywhere in the world, it stated in grouchy bureaucratic language that it was valid only for travel to a specified and distressingly short list of countries. On inspection, one quickly discovered that this list excluded almost any country to which one might actually want to go. Bulgaria? Romania? Uganda? North Korea? No problem. The USA? England? Italy? Japan? Sorry, sahib. This document does not entitle you to pass those ports. Permission to visit attractive countries had to be specially applied for and, it was made clear, would not easily be granted. Foreign exchange was one problem. India was chronically short of it, and reluctant to get any shorter. A bigger problem was that many of the world's more attractive countries seemed unattracted by the idea of allowing us in. They had apparently formed the puzzling conviction that once we arrived we might not wish to leave. "Travel," in the happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking, interest-pursuing, vacationing Western sense, was a luxury we in India were not allowed. We could, if we were lucky, be granted permission to make trips that were absolutely necessary. Or, if unlucky, denied such permission, which was just our tough luck. In "Among the Believers," V.S. Naipaul's book about his travels in the Muslim world, a young man who has been driving the author around in Pakistan admits that he doesn't have a passport and, keen to go abroad and see the world, expresses a yearning for one. Naipaul reflects, more than a little caustically, that it's a shame that the only freedom in which this young fellow appears to be interested is the freedom to leave the country. When I first read this passage, years ago, I had a strong urge to defend that young man against the celebrated writer's celebrated contempt. In the first place, the desire to get out of Pakistan, even temporarily, is one with which many people will sympathize. In the second and more important place, the thing that the young man wants freedom of movement across frontiers is, after all, a thing that Naipaul himself takes for granted, the very thing, in fact, that enables him to write the book in which the criticism is made. I once spent a day at the immigration barriers at London's Heathrow Airport, watching the treatment of arriving passengers by immigration personnel. It did not amaze me to discover that most of the passengers who had some trouble getting past the control point were not white but black or Arab- looking. What was surprising is that there was one factor that overrode blackness or Arab looks. That factor was the possession of an American passport. Produce an American passport, and immigration officers at once become color blind, and wave you quickly on your way, however suspiciously non-Caucasian your features. To those to whom the world is closed, such openness is greatly to be desired. Those who assume that openness to be theirs by right perhaps value it less. When you have enough air to breathe, you don't yearn for air. But when breathable air gets to be in short supply, you quickly start noticing how important it is. Freedom's like that, too. --Sir Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) Indian-born British novelist. _Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction from 1992 to 2002_ [2002] - end page | PACIFISM - PAIN | PAINTING - PARENTING | PARIS - PASSPORTS | PAST (THE) - PATRIOTISM | PEACE - PERCENTAGES | PEOPLE | PERCEPTIONS - PERSUASION | PESSIMISM - PHILOSOPHY | PHONIES - PHYSICS | PIANO - PLANS | PLACES | PLANTS - POETRY | POISON - POLITICAL PARTIES | POLITICS & POLITICIANS (PAGE 1 A - L) | POLITICS & POLITICIANS (PAGE 2 M - Z) | POLLS - POPES | POPEYE - POTENTIAL | POVERTY | POWER | PRACTICALITY - PRAYER | PREACHERS - PREPARED (BE) | PRESENT (THE) - (THE) PRESS | PRETENSION - PRIVACY | PROBLEMS - PROGRESSIVES | PROGRESS - PROPAGANDA | PROPOSALS - PUBLIC (THE) | PUBLIC OPINION - PUNCTUATION | PUNISHMENT - PURPOSE | QUALITIES - QUIPS | QUIRKS - QUOTATIONS | | H | I - J | K - L | M | N - O | P - Q | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The Reviews | |
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