Part two from Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize winning novel The English Patient:
The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever.
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. We were young. We knew power and great finance were temporary things. We all slept with Herodotus. "For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before. . . . Man's good fortune never abides in the same place."
Tags: Ondaatje, English Patient, Herodotus
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