“
If only Africa had more mosquito nets then every year we could save millions of mosquitoes from dying needlessly of aids
”
”
Jimmy Carr
“
Malaria-hosting mosquitoes will not wait politely during their most active evening feeding hours for people to go to bed under mosquito nets.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
In the morning she found pieces of a bird
chopped and scattered by the fan
blood sprayed onto the mosquito net,
its body leaving paths on the walls
like red snails that drifted down in lumps.
She could imagine the feathers
while she had slept
falling around her
like slow rain.
”
”
Michael Ondaatje (The Man with Seven Toes)
“
He feels
ennui
depression
adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because
—dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway
—buy mosquito nets and the boys
you save grow up to
—rape women
—set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army
—steals them and uses the women as slaves and
Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon’s opinion of the human species
that people are basically
shit.
”
”
Don Winslow
“
My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.
”
”
Francis Bacon
“
I went back to the ocean for a wash. The salt stung my face. I didn't know my skin was so raw. I slung my backpack over my shoulders, and with the white mosquito netting wrapped around me like a wedding dress, I went back into the jungle.
”
”
Margot Berwin (Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire)
“
mosquito-netted open windows was an enormous privilege. ‘You must not think you are superior to them,’ he would say. ‘You are just
”
”
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
“
I sat at my bedroom window after I changed; the cashew tree was so close I could reach out and pluck a leaf if it were not for the silver-colour crisscross of mosquito netting. The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily, drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window's netting. I heard Papa walk upstairs to his room for his afternoon siesta. I closed my eyes, sat still, waiting to hear him call Jaja, to hear Jaja go into his room. But after long, silent minutes, I opened my eyes and pressed my forehead against the window louvers to look outside.9
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Purple Hibiscus)
“
When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
His stone walls are knee-high, not castle-worthy. They have large gaps in them for driveways and paths and grape arbors.
And yet every time he drives past a property he's shaped with his own heavy hands, he pictures the parents sitting down to dinner with their children, harmony wrapping the table like mosquito netting as if literal foundations might lay the pattern for emotional ones.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Perfect Match)
“
Like I could take a nap at 4:15 p.m. and then I'll wake up twenty minutes later and have absolutely no clue where I am. I'm like, "What era is this? Is it the 1920s? Am I a flapper? Should I go and put on a flapper costume and go flap at a party?" Then I'm like, "Is that what flappers even do? Flap? Is flapping a verb?" I'm that out of it. And I'm also drenched in sweat. Like some little Dutch boy in knickers ran over to me while I was sleeping and poured a bucket of water on me. Or like I have malaria and it's 1932 and I'm surrounded by mosquito netting. I'm drenched. I'm covered in goo. I'm like a baby deer covered in placenta hobbling around trying to learn how to walk, thinking that it's the 1920s and I'm a flapper and there's a little Dutch boy running around with a bucket of water. That's what naps are like for me.
”
”
Michael Showalter (Mr. Funny Pants)
“
My mother named me Vivia Perpetua because she believed naming me after some long-dead, mostly forgotten saint would motivate me to spend my life collecting unused eyeglasses for the blind or doling out mosquito netting to malaria-plagued Africans. Not that there is anything wrong with those efforts, but please." Vivia in Faking It
”
”
Leah Marie Brown (Faking It (It Girls, #1))
“
My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.
”
”
Francis Bacon (Interviews with Francis Bacon)
“
But he didn't have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn't explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him. He couldn't tell her that at night, sweating in the folds of his mosquito net, he had begun to recite her name over and over, as if it were a spell that might summon her into his room.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (The Shell Collector)
“
Les moustiques porteurs du paludisme n’attendront pas poliment jusqu’à ce que les gens se couchent sous des moustiquaires
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
Mary's extremely nice cousin had given us two small square sacking-covered pillows filled with balsam needles. I always slept with mine under my neck or, if I slept on my side, with my ear on it. It was the smell of Michigan when I was a boy and I wished I could have had a sweet-grass basket to keep it in when we traveled and to have under the mosquito net in the bed at night.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (True at First Light)
“
Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn’t 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet.
”
”
Michael Herr (Dispatches)
“
There are so many ghosts here. In the dark mildewed wing, where the rotting mosquito nets hang, lives the apparition of the Dutch governor’s daughter. In 1734 she threw herself down a well after being told she could not marry her lover, and has startled generations since, making them avoid the room where she silently exhibits herself in a red dress. And just as the haunted sections are avoided for sleeping, the living room is avoided for conversation, being so huge that all talk evaporates into the air before it reaches the listener.
”
”
Michael Ondaatje (Running in the Family (Vintage International))
“
When I was a kid, I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my cheeks. One in each cheek.”
I threw the book down. It was impossible to read anything with a guy like Orr around you.
“Why?” I finally asked.
“Because they’re better than horse chestnuts,” he answered with a twinge of triumph in his voice.
“Why’d you walk around with crab apples in your cheeks? That’s what I asked,” I said, glaring at him.
He didn’t notice, of course. He was still pacing around the room.
“When I couldn’t get crab apples, I used horse chestnuts. They’re about the same size and actually have a better shape, though the shape don’t matter much. Who belongsa this?” He was holding the hunting knife from the mosquito-net bar by the dead man in our tent. That guy Orr’d pick up anything. I told him it was the dead man’s. So he chucked it backwards, and it landed three inches away from the dead man’s head. If Old Orr had better aim, it probably woulda killed the guy, if he weren’t already dead.
“Why did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?” I was losing my patience now. You always lose your patience when you’re talking with a guy like Orr.
“I didn’t walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks, and when I couldn’t get crab apples I used horse chestnuts. In my cheeks. One in each cheek.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted…
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
How did we define “poverty-free”? After interviewing many borrowers about what a poverty-free life meant to them, we developed a set of ten indicators that our staff and outside evaluators could use to measure whether a family in rural Bangladesh lived a poverty-free life. These indicators are: (1) having a house with a tin roof; (2) having beds or cots for all members of the family; (3) having access to safe drinking water; (4) having access to a sanitary latrine; (5) having all school-age children attending school; (6) having sufficient warm clothing for the winter; (7) having mosquito nets; (8) having a home vegetable garden; (9) having no food shortages, even during the most difficult time of a very difficult year; and (10) having sufficient income-earning opportunities for all adult members of the family. We will be monitoring these criteria on our own and are inviting local and international researchers to help us track our successes and setbacks as we head toward our goal of a poverty-free Bangladesh.
”
”
Muhammad Yunus (Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty)
“
After we had been back on Pavuvu about a week, I had one of the most heartwarming and rewarding experiences of my entire enlistment in the Marine Corps. It was after taps, all the flambeaus were out, and all of my tent mates were in their sacks with mosquito nets in place. We were all very tired, still trying to unwind from the tension and ordeal of Peleliu. All was quiet except for someone who had begun snoring softly when one of the men, a Gloucester veteran who had been wounded on Peleliu, said in steady measured tones, “You know something, Sledgehammer?” “What?” I answered. “I kinda had my doubts about you,” he continued, “and how you’d act when we got into combat, and the stuff hit the fan. I mean, your ole man bein’ a doctor and you havin’ been to college and bein’ sort of a rich kid compared to some guys. But I kept my eye on you on Peleliu, and by God you did OK; you did OK.” “Thanks, ole buddy,” I replied, nearly bursting with pride. Many men were decorated with medals they richly earned for their brave actions in combat, medals to wear on their blouses for everyone to see. I was never awarded an individual decoration, but the simple, sincere personal remarks of approval by my veteran comrade that night after Peleliu were like a medal to me. I have carried them in my heart with great pride and satisfaction ever since.
”
”
Eugene B. Sledge (With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa)
“
Then she called Matthew.
He answered, "Where the fuck are you? I've been calling you for hours."
She said, "I was asleep. Just woke up. What's the problem?"
"Don't tell me you're still in your hotel room in your bed."
"Didn't I say I just woke up? Still in bed. Needed some sleep. Just waking up. . . ."
"Is that right?"
. . . "Where are you right now?"
"Antigua motherfucking Yacht Club. Room twenty-fucking-nine. Sitting on a . . . four-poster bed that has a damn mosquito net pulled back so I know I can see what the fuck I see. And I see an empty four-poster bed . . . But hell, maybe I'm wrong, because I know I didn't marry a goddamn liar. So I guess if I'm in your room and you're in the goddamn bed, just waking up, then either I am as blind as a fucking bat or you must be fucking invisible.
”
”
Eric Jerome Dickey (Dying for Revenge)
“
As for the little banshees, when they returned home they, too, were satisfied.
“I wouldn’t mind marrying him,” said the eldest, Hope.
“I wouldn’t either,” said Faith.
“Nor me,” said Charity. “I w-wouldn’t…mind, too.”
Then they sighed. “Mother will tell us which one it’s going to be,” said Hope. “As long as it’s not Prudence.”
Prudence was still in nappies and far too small to be in the running, but she had curls and a dimple and her sisters hated her.
As for Clovis, he lay freshly bathed in a linen nightshirt between cool and spotless sheets. No mosquito netting, no flypaper, no beetles…yes, he would definitely hold out for at least a week. He had promised Finn and he would do it.
But Sir Aubrey was not yet in bed. He had limped up to the Picture Gallery at the top of the house and stood for a long time looking at the portrait of Alwin Taverner in his naval uniform.
Really, the likeness was extraordinary! The nose, the eyes, the mouth, the way his hair fell over his forehead--all of it was the same as in the boy who had come today.
It happened sometimes that a likeness skipped a few generations and then showed up stronger than ever, thought Sir Aubrey. That was the amazing thing about The Blood.
”
”
Eva Ibbotson (Journey to the River Sea)
“
I had a heady dream of loving her, as if she were an actress on a stage of my own making; and as the night wore on, my imaginings wandered into make-believe, and died beyond the tent of the mosquito net, where Vincent was snoring, and the African stars were shining in through our lone window, and nothing was quite real.
”
”
Colin Thubron (Night of Fire)
“
Khun Mae went to bed past midnight. After a few minutes, her mouth opened. Her hair
was a dark cloud on the pillow. Up and up, she drifted above her bed, through the white
mosquito nets, until she was as light as a sea bird. She drifted through the open flap of her
window, into the balmy night air. Through the rainstorm, she flew, over the city of Bangkok and
its blurry lights, until the stars themselves guided this bird on her journey into the mountains, and
above Tham Luang cave.
”
”
Suzy Davies
“
Khun Mae went to bed past midnight. After a few minutes, her mouth opened. Her hair was a dark cloud on the pillow. Up and up, she drifted above her bed, through the white mosquito nets, until she was as light as a sea bird. She drifted through the open flap of her window, into the balmy night air. Through the rainstorm, she flew, over the city of Bangkok and
its blurry lights, until the stars themselves, guided this bird on her journey into the mountains, and
above Tham Luang cave.
”
”
Suzy Davies
“
Khun Mae went to bed past midnight. After a few minutes, her mouth opened. Her hair was a dark cloud on the pillow. Up and up, she drifted above her bed, through the white mosquito nets, until she was as light as a sea bird. She drifted through the open flap of her window, into the balmy night air. Through the rainstorm, she flew, over the city of Bangkok and its blurry lights, until the stars themselves, guided this bird on her journey into the mountains, and above Tham Luang cave.
”
”
Suzy Davies
“
It is seventeen years since she sailed slowly up the Mekong, in a slow boat with canvas awning, to Savannakhet, a large clearing in the virgin forest-land, surrounded by grey rice fields. At night, clusters of mosquitoes on mosquito nets. He cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, picture her at twenty-two, sailing up the Mekong. He cannot picture that face as a young face. He cannot imagine the eyes of an innocent girl seeing what she can see now. He is walking more slowly now. It is already too hot. Gardens everywhere on this side of the town. The funeral scent of oleanders. The land of oleanders. He never wants to see those flowers again. Never. Not anywhere. He had too much to drink last night. He drinks too much. There is a dull ache in the back of his neck. His stomach is queasy. The pink oleanders melt into the pink sky at dawn. The piled-up heaps of lepers scatter and spread. He thinks of her. He tries to think of her, nothing but her: a girlish figure seated on a couch, overlooking a river. She is gazing in front of her, no, he cannot see her, she is lost in the shadows. He can only see her surroundings: the forest, the Mekong river. A crowd of about twenty people has gathered in the metalled road. She is ill. At night she weeps, and it is thought that the best thing would be to send her back to France. Her family are alarmed. They never stop talking. They talk too much, too loudly. Wrought-iron gates in the distance, sentries in khaki uniform. Already they are guarding her, as she will be guarded for the rest of her life. It would be a relief to everyone if she would give vent to her boredom in an angry outburst. It would not surprise them if she were to collapse before their eyes, but no, she is still sitting silently on her couch when Monsieur Stretter arrives, and carries her away in his official launch. He told her: 'I shall leave you in peace. You are free to return to France whenever you wish. You have nothing to fear.' And all this, when he, he, Charles Rossett–he stops in his tracks–oh! he, at this period of Anne-Marie Stretter's life, was no more than a child.
”
”
Marguerite Duras (The Vice-Consul)
“
Inside the white screen of the mosquito net, bathed in the sunlight streaming through the windows, she felt as if she were in her own little oasis. Isolated from the rest of the world and its hostility. Although she could barely see past the bright, sunlit cloth, a movement in the shadows behind the net caught her eye. She frowned, straining her eyes to see what it was when, slowly, the net parted to reveal a gigantic figure. The light shone on his body and face to reveal what turned out to be a dark-eyed, broad-shouldered man.
A strange feeling was born in Bianca’s chest. A mixture of panic and embarrassment left her body in the shape of a scream. With no clear thoughts in mind, she yelled for someone to help her, until it dawned on her that she was in an unfamiliar apartment, in a town where no one knew about her, and where there was no one who could help her. She was alone, and the pervert in front of her undoubtedly wanted to take advantage of the situation. Stopping just enough to breathe and continue screaming, she got on her knees in the bed and kept on yelling at him, who then seemed to fall off whatever disgusting trance he was, and took a surprised step back. His fingers, still tangled in the mosquito net, ripped the fabric from the ceiling, exposing her further.
Bianca knew she was on her own. She could not count on anyone else to save her. When that realization hit, an unknown instinct made its way inside her and all the accumulated frustration caused by the situation with the paparazzi, the betrayal of her husband and losing her company concentrated inside her like a laser to focus on a single aim: the man in front of her. Feeling powerful, she grabbed the sheet tight around her with one arm to cover the front of her body, set one foot on the ground, and grabbed the closest thing to her: the purse. Her screams, which initially were meant to ask for help, transformed into a sound of pure rage.
Without taking her eyes off him, Bianca reached into her bag and threw everything she found inside it: a phone, an agenda, a bottle of water, a lipstick, a tissue, the box of condoms, a book. Even a small toiletry bag. When the bag was empty, she used it as a projectile too.
”
”
Sienna Mercier (The Woman In The Red Dress (Mediterranean Love #1))
“
The second legend is about paradise. “They pulled it off. They did it. On the servers of one of the big studios in California they used ready-made scans to set up a whole world on the other side of the Uncanny Valley. Or at least a house, a garden, and some bodies. They created a foolproof filter, so that finally you could connect to the net – mind-to-mech and even mind-to-mind – without any risk of malware unstitching your memory or infecting your consciousness. So they log in, and there, on the other side, they have soft, warm, moist bodies again, miraculously fleshy to the touch. They can touch, smell, and taste again.” Dagenskyoll speeds up, and the hulking robots bunched around him in a spellbound circle press even closer, leaning in, sticking out microphone tongues and scanner tendrils.
“They can drink and eat and drink.” He raises his glass of vodka and a long metallic grating sound rings out, krrrshaaahhrrr: the screeching interference of speakers and microphones, or maybe even the sighing of embarrassed machinery. “They drink, drink and sleep, even if they can’t dream, and they walk on the grass and bathe in the sunshine—”
Krrrshaaahhrrr!
“They have dogs, cats, birds, bugs. Mosquitoes bite them, dust and pollen get in their eyes, the sun blinds them, since the sun is always rising there, and they set up grills and burn their fingers—”
Krrrshaaahhrrr!
“—as they eat the steaming meat.”
Now this is too much, and the robots press up against Dagenskyoll, almost crushing him.
“Do you know the IP?”
“Only the bosses of the alliances know it. They’re the ones who meet there. To discuss strategies for the future, exchange information, and resolve disputes.”
A black medico mech roars from a distorted speaker straight into Dagenskyoll’s front display:
“BUT WHERE! WHERE IS IT?!
”
”
Jacek Dukaj (Starość aksolotla)
“
like the big bed it was enclosed in a permanent canopy of heavy netting. Mosquitoes were the least of the creatures this net was intended to exclude; its absence, at any time, night or day, would have been an invitation for snakes and scorpions to make their way between the sheets. In a hut by the pond a woman was even said to have found a large dead fish in her bed. This was a koimachh, or tree perch, a species known to be able to manipulate its spiny fins in such a way as to drag itself overland for short distances. It had found its way into the bed only to suffocate on the mattress.
”
”
Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide)
“
The progressives are right that there is no way Gates can spend $50 billion on himself. He can only eat three meals a day and wear one set of clothes at a time. Even his heirs can be provided for with a fraction of that amount. Gates actually knows this. He has vowed to give away most of his fortune to charity. Nor is he waiting for death to do this. He has already given away billions. He buys mosquito nets for people in poor countries so that they don’t get malaria. He invests in medical research. He funds educational projects in America and abroad.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party)
“
In one study of eight villages in rural Uganda, researchers found that willingness to use a net related closely to perceptions of the group consensus. Subjects who believed most people slept under a mosquito net were almost three times more likely to do so themselves than those who did not believe most people used a net. Moreover, 23 percent of subjects believed, incorrectly, that most adults in their community were not using mosquito nets each night. In all, a third of the participants in the study either misinterpreted or were unsure about the norm for mosquito net use in their community.
”
”
Todd Rose (Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions)
“
Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them—they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was under a month old—and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,22 and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap.
”
”
Alan Moorehead (Gallipoli)
“
Not all of the men went into the restaurant business, and not all of them left York, Pennsylvania. Yang You Yi, the detainee who first folded a paper pineapple in prison, had run a weaving company in China, using old looms to manufacture mosquito nets. Through Joan Maruskin and Sterling Showers, he was introduced to a local man named David Kline, a gentle weaver with an Amish-style
”
”
Patrick Radden Keefe (The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream)
“
The empire is being crushed by its own weight,” Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear, pierced cities like laces, cities transparent as mosquito netting, cities like leaves’ veins, cities lined like a hand’s palm, filigree cities to be seen through their opaque and fictitious thickness.
”
”
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
“
Mom to my left, Dad to my right, a mosquito net like a crown covering all of us.
”
”
Javier Zamora (Solito)
“
believe, then, / in the mosquito: how it begins to take / your blood - heat and ghost and age and itch / as you press the net to your temples / and scratch in wild belief while / outside, leaves darken, insects / bite, and you smash a body / with the back / of your palm.
”
”
Carlina Duan (I Wore My Blackest Hair)
“
Iris wrapped Oliver in a blanket and walked outside to put him inside his carriage. The sun shone brightly in his face, and she made sure to turn the carriage around, so he wasn’t in the direct sun, then pull down the mosquito net. She looked at her son in the carriage and felt her heart melt as their eyes met. He looked so much like his dad already, and that often made her laugh. He was like this miniature version of Gary, a wrinkled and prune-like version of him. But he was also so incredibly gorgeous that her heart could hardly contain it. And neither could Gary. She saw it in his eyes when he came home from work and picked up the boy. She saw the deep pride in them. But she also saw something else lately that had startled her a little.
”
”
Willow Rose (What You Did (Eva Rae Thomas #2))
“
One Day Eight Years Ago - Poem by Jibanananda Das
It was heard: to the post-mortem cell
he had been taken;
last night—in the darkness of Falgoon-night
When the five-night-old moon went down—
he was longing for death.
His wife lay beside—the child therewith;
hope and love abundant__in the moonlight—what ghost
did he see? Why his sleep broke?
Or having no sleep at all since long—he now has fallen asleep
in the post-mortem cell.
Is this the sleep he’d longed for!
Like a plagued rat, mouth filled with crimson froth
now asleep in the nook of darkness;
And will not ever awake anymore.
‘Never again will wake up,
never again will bear
the endless—endless burden
of painful waking—’
It was told to him
when the moon sank down—in the strange darkness
by a silence like the neck of a camel that might have shown up
at his window side.
Nevertheless, the owl stays wide awake;
The rotten still frog begs two more moments
in the hope for another dawn in conceivable warmth.
We feel in the deep tracelessness of flocking darkness
The unforgiving enmity of the mosquito-net all around;
The mosquito loves the stream of life
awake in its monastery of darkness.
From sitting in blood and filth, flies fly back into the sun;
How often we watched moths and flies hovering
in the waves of golden sun.
The close-knit sky, as if—as it were, some scattered
lives, possessed their hearts;
The wavering dragonflies in the grasp of wanton kids
Fought for life;
As the moon went down, in the impending gloom
With a noose in hand you approached the aswattha,
alone, by yourself,
For you’d learnt
a human would ne’er live the life of a locust or a robin
The branch of aswattha
Had it not raged in protest? And the flock of fireflies
Hadn’t they come and mingled with
the comely bunch of daffodils?
Hadn’t the senile blind owl come over
and said: ‘the age-old moon seems to have been washed away
by the surging waters?
Splendid that!
Let’s catch now rats and mouse! ’
Hadn’t the owl hooted out this cherished affair?
Taste of life—the fragrance of golden corn of winter evening—
seemed intolerable to you; —
Content now in the morgue
In the morgue—sultry
with the bloodied mouth of a battered rat!
Listen
yet, tale of this dead; —
Was not refused by the girl of love,
Didn’t miss any joy of conjugal life,
the bride went ahead of time
and let him know
honey and the honey of reflection;
His life ne’er shivered in demeaning hunger
or painful cold;
So
now in the morgue
he lies flat on the dissection table.
Know—I know
woman’s heart—love—offspring—home—not all
there is to things;
Wealth, achievement, affluence apart
there is some other baffling surprise
that whirls in our veins;
It tires and tires,
and tires us out;
but there is no tiring
in the post mortem cell
and so,
there he rests, in the post mortem cell
flat on the dissection table.
Still I see the age-old owl, ah,
Nightly sat on the aswattha bough
Winks and echoes: ‘The olden moon seems
to be carried away by the flooding waters?
That’s splendid!
Let’s catch now rats and mouse—’
Hi, granny dear, splendid even today?
Let me age like you—and see off
the olden moon in the whirlpool at the Kalidaha;
Then the two of us will desert life’s abundant reserve.
”
”
Jibanananda Das (Selected Poems (English and Bengali Edition))
“
Discharging cargo in the ports along the coast of South Africa went faster than loading it, but from Durban up to Dar es Salaam, hoping to save a little time not to mention port costs, we frequently did both at the same time, in these quaint little harbors along the coast,
By now some of these ports had become old hat to me and so I volunteered to stay aboard. This way I could make some overtime pay by covering for some of the other mates, who wanted to go ashore.
When we finally got to Dar es Salaam and I was informed that we would be there for a few days, I took advantage of the situation and finally went ashore. One of my favorite places in this British owned, colonial town was the “New Africa Hotel.“ It had an open air courtyard in the middle of the building, with wild monkeys swinging through the trees making loud blood curdling noises. Although the rooms were not air-conditioned, they were open to a constant breeze coming in off the Indian Ocean.
In the 1950’s, all of the beds had mosquito netting to keep the pesky winged vampires out and to prevent getting malaria; which most of us got anyway.
”
”
Hank Bracker
“
Schelling writes the way he speaks: with a wry smile and an impish twinkle in his eye. He wants to make you a bit uncomfortable.* Here, the story of the sick girl is a vivid way of capturing the major contribution of the article. The hospitals stand in for the concept Schelling calls a “statistical life,” as opposed to the girl, who represents an “identified life.” We occasionally run into examples of identified lives at risk in the real world, such as the thrilling rescue of trapped miners. As Schelling notes, we rarely allow any identified life to be extinguished solely for the lack of money. But of course thousands of “unidentified” people die every day for lack of simple things like mosquito nets, vaccines, or clean water.
”
”
Richard H. Thaler (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics)