"Polly belonged wholly to her time. Alert to its defects and dangers, she nevertheless had reached what she herself called an "adjustment," and she w… - Paul Bowles

And yet always you feel as though you understood perfectly the people and why they do everything as they do.Still you are absolutely severed from them.

Death is always on its way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life....we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times...How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet is all seems limitless.

That was one of the troubles with the Istiqlal, with all politics: you talked about people as though they were not really people, as though they were only things, numbers, animals, perhaps, but not really people.