In an interview in 2005, Gilbert explained the title of his book Refusing Heaven:
I think of heaven and think that I wouldn’t want to just float around in happiness, in a place without imperfection, where you don’t fall in love. I picture everything there being one colour. I can’t imagine anything better than being here on earth.
And someone replied beautifully to this:
If the heart is capable of love on earth, it still will fall in love in heaven.
Either he dares not to take spiritual adventure
or earth is the only place he knows.
I love books; I read and write them for the same reason I love to talk with a friend for 10 hours, not 10 minutes (let alone, as is the case with the average Web page, 10 seconds). The longer our talk goes, ideally, the less I feel pushed and bullied into the unbreathing boxes of black and white, Republican or Democrat, us or them. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays.
There’ll always be a place for the short sentence, and no one could thrill more than I to the eerie incantations of DeLillo, building up menace with each reiterated note, or the compressed wisdom of a Wilde; it’s the elegant conciseness of their phrases that allow us to carry around the ideas of an Emerson (or Lao Tzu) as if they were commandments or proverbs of universal application.
“The trunk is the foundation of your marriage, and all the fruits are borne from it.”
It was as though a lifetime flashed before me in three weeks. It is incredible how reflection matures the self. What honest conversation can bring to two people. A relationship brings two people together, to experience humanity, to grow, to become better people. Shoaib’s insight and patience helped me see into myself. I see a capacity for change I never saw before. In him and myself.
There was excitement and nervousness on the day we married. Then when we returned to Kabul, returning to the room, clearing it out, and then cuddling close to him as the night wintered away – I felt a calming wedded bliss. To many we just met and quickly married. But to us, we took the time we needed! There was a future we wanted, and over nights of conversations, carefully pieced our picture together. A piece of trust. A piece of respect. A piece of love. We healed together from past hurts and he held all my little regrets in his big heart. Our love grew over a time infinite to us.
Tagore reads:
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.
~~~
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.
~
I rolled in on an intuition I never persuaded myself to trust. Then those seemingly urgent decisions have happened to be some of the best in my life. The cause that calls, sometimes without reason. When one feels compellingly drawn, though not forced. I don’t know when my intuition works. It comes without making an event. I only infer in retrospect when the decisions made contradict my usual rational stubborn self. I did sometimes doubt my decision to get married at 23. We talked about it days before the wedding too. But when I close my eyes and think of the ordinary day: Welcoming him home after work. Sharing the books I read. Watching him fall asleep. Dancing in front of the mirror. He will walk with me and astound me with what his child-like eyes see. And all of this is worth living for.
We see our conflicts as opportunities to grow and to love each other better. We take this life a step at a time. This is the sturdy tree we call marriage, and each smile he brings to me is a fruit born.
And there he is, here again and again.
My Masi Arfat and I talked before the nikah. She said “He is a jewel of a man. Accept him for who he is.” It is in this acceptance that nurtures a great friendship. The butterfly spreads its wings. And the rainbow finds its way back to its source.
Pico Iyer is one of my favourite writers. He is a descriptive, rapid, but a sensitive story-teller. Though he over-intellectualizes at times, I feel the process sparks questions we should ask ourselves even if they do not necessarily lead to sane or real answers. We all grapple with our identity – who we are, where we come from, – to some level identity is given, and to others created, or some amalgam of the two. But the question of identity is becoming increasingly relevant and important in a world where you grow up in one country, study in another, and work in yet another. Even those who have not lived abroad, even they straddle between cultures – cultures of the contemporary, cultures of fashion, music, art, religion….the blend takes us on very confusing journeys. Sometimes we attempt to fit in, to define ourselves when we don’t really need to. The borders of identity, of home, of nationality, of race have become nebulous. And the funny thing is, we never had to choose a fit, in the first place. We are ever-changing, we flow like the Magdalena River.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.
