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2002-04-02 - 4:05 a.m. 1) When the Thought Police aims its torchlight at you, this is the reply, "Why should I have to justify my own conscience when that very conscience is justification for my deeds?" 2) Goethe: "A man’s virtues are his own, his faults are those of his time." 3) The idea that didn't banish your own loneliness: That someone in the world right now is as lonely as you are. 4) I am who I am. You are who you are. Prelude to the world's major quarrels. Like Sartre said, "Hell is other people." 5) Somewhere in some forgotten void deck, the last Mat Rock, an orange comb and redneck bandana in his too-tight Wranglers jeans, wearing just a leather vest, his belt buckle gleaming like a Peruvian medallion, his long permed hair, which once marked him to be served last in a public queue, framing his bowed head, is repairing the strings on his Navajo-Chief-black-markered guitar, and this gesture carries an uncanny echo of the last fisherman, in a coastal kampung swallowed up by the ravenous encroachments of the land rather than the sea, who is mending his fishing net, in deep meditation, his mind inhabiting not the frayed present, already terrorised by the squeal of machines, but all that is left of his past... 6) This is what will happen on the day the world ends. Silence. Then, for the first time, the echo of silence. And more echoes. 7) Alfian, remember always what was told to you: "You will become what you do not resist." 8) The thought, in bed, that sleep will not answer: "What did he mean when he said that to me?" 9) Dawn. Birds, like noisy butlers, arrive to dismantle chandeliers of dew. 10) Password to the imagination: 'beyond'. 11) Do April fools become sages by May? 12) Moonlight through the window grilles: three silver serviettes on my lap. I look up to see the moon, a dining plate.
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