Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London

Начало книги

ONE DAY, beside a slender stream in the high mountains, a monk met an essayist and they fell to talking. The minutes passed as they reclined there in the presence of dragonflies. It soon seemed clear to the essayist that the monk’s view of life, perched as it was upon a foundation of faith, was ripe for a good debunking.

The essayist laid out the required argument in painstaking detail, ending with these words: “Since you have no proof, I must conclude your beliefs are merely your own invention.”

“So what?” the monk responded, with a smile as steady as it was serene.

“So what? So everything. You’re a monk!”

The monk hiked up the robe he was wearing and dipped the back of one powerfully muscled calf in the water. “I invented myself,” the monk said. “Until yesterday I was an Olympic sprinter.”

The essayist stared, incredulous.

“Invention,” the monk explained, “is a blessing.”

—

GLOBALIZATION IS A brutal phenomenon. It brings us mass displacement, wars, terrorism, unchecked financial capitalism, inequality, xenophobia, climate change. But if globalization is capable of holding out any fundamental promise to us, any temptation to go along with its havoc, then surely that promise ought to be this: we will be more free to invent ourselves. In that country, this city, in Lahore, in New York, in London, that factory, this office, in those clothes, that occupation, in wherever it is we long for, we will be liberated to be what we choose to be.

Читать дальше →