Africa Is Not A Fun Place, You

Out Of Its Squalor And Human Decay, Its Eruptions Of Butchery, India Produced So Many People Of Grace And Beauty, Ruled By Elaborate Courtesy. Producing Too Much Life, It Denied The Value Of Life; Yet It Permitted A Unique Human Development To So Many. Nowhere Were People So Heightened, Rounded And Individualistic; Nowhere Did They Offer Themselves So Fully And With Such Assurance. To Know Indians Was To Take A Delight In People As People; Every Encounter Was An Adventure. I Did Not Want India To Sink [out Of My Memory]; The Mere Thought Was Painful.

All The Details Of The Life And The Quirks And The Friendships Can Be Laid Out For Us, But The Mystery Of The Writing Will Remain. No Amount Of Documentation, However Fascinating, Can Take Us There.

Africa Is Not A Fun Place, You Know. A Fun Place Is Somewhere That Lifts The Spirits, That Cossets The Senses. I Don't Think That Can Be Said Of The Africa I Traveled In.

If A Writer Doesn't Generate Hostility, He Is Dead.

It Was A Good Place For Getting Lost In, A City No One Ever Knew, A City Explored From The Neutral Heart Outward, Until After Many Years, It Defined Itself Into A Jumble Of Clearings Separated By Stretches Of The Unknown, Through Which The Narrowest Of Paths Had Been Cut.