The Only Dream worth having...Arundhati Roy

"The only dream worth having ...
...is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead ...
To love. To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated or to complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch.
To try and understand.
To never look away.
And never, never to forget."
Arundhati Roy - The Algebra of Infinite Justice

Sometimes a passage you read, rings like music in your mind, and commits itself to memory and almost instantaneously at that. Not that you remember every word but you remember phrases, and you certainly remember the powerful thought within it. This is one such.

Arundhati Roy is perhaps not only one of the greatest wordsmiths, but one of the greatest painters of emotion. Besides which she is also a woman of passion - not just the passion of an individual with deep feeling, but passion for the humanity of the world, and a passion for life.

For those who never read Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, and Algebra of Infinite Justice, I would say read them! They are powerful words of passion, power and hope. Hope because one human being dares to write about the things that matter. The former is perhaps the only tragic novel I have read, that nevertheless has a vibrant hope within its celebration of life itself. The latter is a powerful, even if sometimes emotional (this is for some who feel that if writing is emotional it is unreliable!), honest appraisal of the way the world works the way it does, and why. We may not agree with all she says, but she has cared enough to think, feel, research, agonise, and write. And that perhaps for me counts.

If I can do half as much with words and live the same passion for life and the world, I would be satisfied.