"This is the Wall" says the Gatekeeper, slapping the broad side of the battlements. "Seven yards tall, circles the whole Town. Only birds can clear the Wall. No entrance or exit except this Gate. Long ago there was the East Gate, but they walled it up. You see these bricks? Nothing can dent them, not even a cannon."
The Gate keeper picks up a scrap of wood and expertly pares it down to tiny sliver.
"Watch this," he says. He runs the sliver of wood between the bricks. It hardly penetrates a fraction of an inch. He tosses the wood away, and draws the tips of his knife over the bricks. This produces an awful sound, but leaves not a mark. He examines his knife, then puts it away.
"This Wall has no mortar," the Gatekeeper states. "There is no need. The bricks fit perfect; not a hair-space between them. Nobody can put a dent in the Wall. And nobody can climb it. Because this Wall is perfect. So forget any ideas you have. Nobody leaves here."
The Gatekeeper lays a giant hand on my back.
"You have to endure. If you endure, everything will be fine. No worry, no suffering. It all disappears. Forget about the shadow. This is the End of the World. This where the world ends. Nowhere further to go."
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World By Haruki Murakami
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"I prefer being unfree, too. Up to a point, Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it's true- all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventh century. They're dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey. Walkabout is perfect metaphor for their lives. When the English came and built fences to pen in their castle, the Aborigines couldn't fathom it. And, ignorant to the end of the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous and antisocial and were driven away, to the outback. So I want you to be careful. The people who build high, string fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny the reality only at the risk being driven into the wilderness yourself."
Kafka on the Shore By Haruki Murakami
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"There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on."
"The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" by Ursula K. Le Guin
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"Entrance not for Everybody." And: "For madmen only." I scrutinized the old wall opposite in the secret hope that the magic night might begin again; the writing invite me, the madman; the little doorway give me admittance. There perhaps lay my desire, and there perhaps would my music be played.
The dark stone wall looked back at me with composure, shut off in a deep twilight, sunk in a dream of its own. And there was no gateway anywhere and no pointed arch; only the dark unbroken masonry. With a smile I went on, giving it a friendly nod. "Sleep well. I will not awake you. The time will come when you will be pulled down and plastered with covetous advertisements. But for the present, there you stand beautiful and quiet as ever, and I love you for it."
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
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"The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilised fruit and grown hard red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney pots into interminable distances. It was curious to think that the skye was the same for everybody, in Eurosia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who had never learned to think by who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!"
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
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Here is what I do on the first day of snowfall every year: I step out of the house early in the morning, still in my pajamas, hugging my arms against the chill. I find the driveway, my father's car, the walls, the threes, the rooftops, and the hills buried under a foot of snow. I smile. The sky is seamless, the snow so white my eyes burn. I shovel a handful of the fresh snow into mouth, listen to the muffled stillness broken only by the cawing of crows. I walk down the front steps, barefoot, and call for Hassan to come out and see."
From "The Kitten Runner", Khaled Hosseini
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"...By the time, she was thirteen, she was having terrible depressions, and of course the whole time, whatever she was feeling, May was feeling. And then, when April was fifteen, she took our father's shotgun and killed herself"
I hadn't expected that. I sucked in my breath, then felt my hand go up and cover my mouth.
"I know," said August. "It's terrible to hear something like that." She paused a moment. "When April died, something in May died, too. She never was normal after that. It seemed like the world itself became May's twin sister."
August's face was blending into the tree shadows, I slid up in my chair so I could still see her.
"Our mother said she was like Mary, with her heart on the outside of her chest. Mother was good about taking care of her, but, when she died, it fell to me and June. We tried for years to get May some help. She saw doctors, but they didn't have any idea what to do with her except put her away. So June and I came up with this idea of wailing wall."
"A what kind of wall?"
"Wailing wall," she said again. "Like they have in Jerusalem." The Jewish people go there to mourn. It's a way for them to deal with their suffering. See, they write their prayers on scraps of paper and tuck them in the wall."
"And that's what May does?"
August noded. "All those bits of papers you see out there struck between the stones are things May
has written down - all the heavy feelings she carries around. It seems like the only thing that helps her."
I looked in the direction of the wall, invisible now in the darkness. Birmingham, Sept 15, four little angles dead.
"Poor May," I said.
"Yes," said August. "Poor May." And we sat in the sorrow for a while, until the mosquitoes collected around us and chased us indoors. "
From "The Secret Life of Bees", Sue Monk Kidd
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