6
" For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us." Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, " what the core of contemplative life is?" " Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, " Prayer." Or maybe " The search for God." Or " Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.She saw I didn't see." It takes time to do this," she said finally.Her " this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers. "
8
" I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. " I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. "
9
" I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, " no, certainly not!" but I said, " ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, " of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water." When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like " this is a very handsome man" and " you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and " you're lucky you have another brother" ; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, " Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute! "
16
" All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming inside her head, or a yogi racked with pain. How she had managed to fool anyone, let alone everyone, mystified her (how obtuse people were!) and, oddly, made her extraordinarily bitter. Because the price of her gift for evasion was to have no one, not one person, who understood how horrible she felt. All the time. Absolutely all the time. "
― Jean Hanff Korelitz , Admission
18
" When I was a nursemaid at the home of the landowners, a nun who happened to pass once gave me something square and white.Timidly I licked it and discovered that it was sweet and delicious. I realize now that it must have been a sugar cube;but still, more than twenty years later, I remember clearly the joy I felt then. It's not just children; everyone seems to be deeply touched by unexpected joy brought to them by others and is unable to forget it.
That child will be grown up by now, and if he hasn't forgotten me, whenever he sees a crying child he'll want to say a kind word and wipe the kid's nose. And when that kid grows up, he'll do the same. To do something kind for another is never a bad feeling; it fosters a spirit of caring for other people. And who knows,after a hundrend years, human beings may even learn to cooperate with one another...Yes, that was it: I'd try to teach children that if they felt glad when someone gave them a single piece of candy,then they in turn should give to others. "
― Sayo Masuda
19
" When you are walking down the road in Bali and your pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, " Where are you going?" The second question is, " Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better.The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, " Are you married?" Again, it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. it's such a relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, " Are you married?" the best possible answer is: " Not yet." This is a polite way of saying, " No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: " Not yet. "