Men who scorn the idea of submission to the divine Will and are outraged by the notion of a God who requires submission are among the first to demand… - Gai Eaton

All human enjoyment is limited. Paradise is by definition boundless, for it opens out onto the Infinite. On the human level this can be suggested only in numerical terms - we shall have a thousand joys, ten thousand, a million and so on - or in terms of increase without end, but without repetition. Erotic love, for example, will have all the wonder and all the freshness of 'first love' (the 'perpetually renewed virginity' of the 'Houris', which causes so much amusement to Western students of Islam, is an obvious reference to this). Every drink is like the first drink of a thirsty man, though none thirst in Paradise, and every taste of food is like the first taste taken by a starving man, though none starve there, and every meeting is true friendship discovered for the first time, and there is nothing is Paradise that is not newly minted and to be enjoyed with the fresh appetite of youth....The greatest marvel is always overtaken by a greater marvel, the sweetest companionship is forever growing sweeter, and love - though from the very start it seems perfectly consummated - still grows limitlessly. The people of Paradise are constantly surprised, for every time they think that they hold perfection in their hands, and that there can be nothing better than this, they find before them something better still. 'The lowest place of any of you in Paradise,' said the Prophet, 'is that in which Allah will tell him to make a wish, and he will wish and wish again. Allah will then ask him if he has expressed his wish and, when he replies that he has, He will tell him that he is to have what he wished for together with as much again.

Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred foreground makes it impossible to attend to them. This landscape is unreal and the passengers in the express train turn to their books, their thoughts or their private fantasies.
The subjectivism of our age has a good deal to do with this imprisonment in a speeding vehicle, and the fact that we made this vehicle ourselves, with all the tireless care that children give to a contrivance of wood and wire, does not save us from the sense of being trapped without hope of escape.
A further effect of such vertiginous speed is a kind of anaesthesia, entirely natural when the operation of the senses by which we normally make contact with our environment is suspended. With no opportunity to assimilate what is going on, our powers of assimilation are inevitably weakened and certain numbness sets in; nothing is fully savoured and nothing is properly understood. Even fear (which exists to forewarn us of danger) is suspended. This would be so even if speed of change were the only factor involved, but the kind of environment in which a large part of humanity lives today — - the environment created by technology at the service of immediate, short-term needs – does much to intensify this effect. Outside of works of art which embody something beyond our physical needs, our own constructions bore us. Those who, when they have built something and admired the finished product for a decent moment, are ready to pull it down and start on something new have good sense on their side.

The independence movements in the colonies and protectorates came into being, not through return to indigenous values on the part of those concerned, but through the absorption of occidental ideas and ideologies, liberal or revolutionary as the case might be. The process of modernization - a euphemism for Westernization - far from being halted by this withdrawal, was in fact accelerated. The enthusiasm of the new rulers for everything 'modern' was not restrained, as had been the enthusiasm of their former masters, by any element of self-doubt. The irony implicit in this whole situation was tragically apparent in the Vietnam war, when the people of that country fought, not to preserve their own traditions or to gain the right to be truly themselves, but under the banner of a shoddy occidental ideology and for the privilege of imitating their former masters in terms of nationalism and socialism. The west was at war with its own mirror image in a vicious dance of death.