A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Open Arms His face turned to me now, and I could not draw a breath. I thought for a moment that my first impression of him had been correct. He was a ghost and this was the moment he would carry me away with him. My breath was gone, never to return. But he did not...
Impatience of the Heart

Impatience of the Heart

Our host, a lawyer by profession and dogmatic by nature, opened the discussion. Employing the usual arguments, he put forward the usual airy nonsense: the present generation, he said, knew all about war and would not let itself be tricked so innocently into the next...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? Putting it...
Arabian Sands

Arabian Sands

From Abyssinia I was sent to Syria, where I served in Jabal al Druze and later worked for a year among the tribes. The deserts in which I had travelled had been blanks in time as well as space. They had no intelligible history, the nomads who inhabited them had no...
Eva Luna

Eva Luna

He knelt beside me. “What’s the matter?” “I’m afraid?” “Of what?” “Of the sounds, of this darkness, of evil spirits, of snakes and bugs, of the soldiers, of what we’re going to do Saturday-that we’ll all be killed …” “I’m afraid, too, but I wouldn’t miss this for...