Earlier this fall, I read Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. There were some pretty good quotes but I never bookmarked them. I thought I could remember the pages. Thanks to modern conveniences, my memory is kaput. So, unless I reread the whole book, I’ll never know the gems Greene meant for us to remember.

However, there was one quote I did leave a receipt tucked into the spine crease. That quote is below. It is a piece of dialogue spoken by the Cuban torturer/police officer Captain Segura and it outlines who is in the “torturable class”:

‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal….

‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’

One more note to add to this. I recently met someone who tried to escape communist Romania during the bad old days and was caught. Now we know at least one of the worst case scenarios for capture: this woman was beaten for three days. They knocked out many of her teeth. (She was in her early twenties when she made her first escape attempt. Tooth loss is a common Romanian affliction.) Luckily, one of the secret police knew her father and arranged for the woman to be released. Yet, now she was on the bad books. More secret police came to her house. On one occasion, her father chased an agent away with an axe. Her family knew that they would never let up and she would always be in danger. Next time she was in custody, she may not be able to obtain a release. She had to escape again, successfully this time. And so she did.

During the last three or four years, I have become a husk of a human. I merely survive because breathing and eating and sleeping are the easiest things to do. It seems like most of my inner life has worn away. I am numb to most things, even as I am content with the material trappings that have come with finally having stable employment. I even forgot the terrible things that happened to me years ago. It’s as if there was once this passionate, sad person and now-me, and we are separated by a large chasm. There is no way to get across this chasm though I can see former-me on the other side. There are some ribbons joining us. But the wind might blow away the ribbons, or the rains might whittle them down to strands of threads, which could break so easily.

The inventory of what’s lost are the heavily etched memories – again, I am separate from the person I was for my first thirty years – and the ability to do things. I look back at younger me, who went through a prolific cooking stage, a prolific drawing stage, a prolific reading bout and so on. The stages would last months or years and overlap one another. I can see why people liked me back then.

Now, I am lucky if I finish a book. That is the height of my achievements. I can no longer draw or paint. Cooking? I live on instant noodles if other people don’t feed me. I can still boil eggs but that is a passive endeavour. The water and the gas stove does most of the work. I am good at cleaning the house. I am good at my job. The latter might be the reason for this eradication of former-me. To be good at my job, I have to concentrate and work hard. One step in front of the other is what I have to tell myself every day as I face off against a thirty-page to-do list. Maybe the relentless pushing forward sapped everything else out of me.

The problem with living a surface existence is the lack of charisma. At the beginning of this year, a friend was listing everyone’s talents. “You are good at photography,” she said to my sister. “And I am good at writing.” When she came to me, she became confused. “You must be good at something,” she said. The subject changed and I never found out what my talents are obvious.

Earlier, Matt bought me a book about finding one’s strengths. Mine was finding information. Everything about this strength seems useless. At best, I have nothing to offer but linking A to B, linking outside information because there’s nothing I can bring of myself. At worst, I have a horrified feeling that this means I am a boring pedant who dominates conversations.

Since I like to solve problems, I came up with solutions to my mere survival. My favourite solution is to travel alone to tragic places. Suffering during said travel would also build some character and supply something of an inner life. I wonder too if I work too much. But how does one dismantle an apparatus that has taken so long to build?

Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s medieval police mystery novel was a lot less Agatha Christie than expected, with some supernatural shenanigans thrown into the mix. Other critics have explained the story in many other places on the internet, so there’s no need for a synopsis from me. I just want to pick out a couple of quotes:

“…Though they would believe they were passing judgment on someone else’s tragedy, in reality, they would simply be giving expression to their own.” (Page 37)

“…Albania would have to find new ways to defend itself. It had to create structures more stable than “external” laws and institutions, eternal and uiversal structures lying within man himself, inviolable and invisible and therefore indestructible. In short, Albania had to change its laws, its administration, its prisons, its courts and all the rest, it had to fashion them so that they could be severed from the outside world and anchored within men themselves as the tempest drew near. It had to do this imperatively or it would be wiped from the face of the earth.” (Page 145)