hope and love. My student didn’t wish for anything like ‘total liberation’ – a revolution, a new social set-up – just for a satisfying marriage. And it is worth noting about the classic heroines of literature – Anna Karenina or MadameBovary, or even the characters in David Lean’s Brief Encounter – that they are not compulsive transgressors. They are asking for very little, and for everything, which, for them, is a fuller, more satisfying love. Complete happiness is a fiction, but some happiness is possible; indeed, it is essential. There are some people you can ‘realise’ yourself in relation to, and they are worth searching out. But there is a price. Something radical does have to change to make this possible – certainly, for women, in terms of the whole society – and there will be inescapable guilt.
Compared to Freud, Reich and his coevals prove, in the end, to be the more limited, if not conservative, concentrating on too small a notion of human need and fulfilment. Freud had a novelist’s capaciousness; Reich was a headline writer. If constraint of some sort is impossible to avoid, the question is: which constraint, when, where?
Nick and Meg go to Paris because love is the most considerable business of all, and they need to know what sort of relationships make life worth living, and, if they have a future together, what it might be like. Do they suffer less together than they would apart? The decision they make at the end of the film can only be provisional, and the questions they ask have to be confronted repeatedly, since there isn’t one answer that can satisfy them.
This Door Is Shut
More or less the last thing Farhana remembered before finding herself on the Boulevard Saint-Germain was her son Yasin waking up his driver and her guard, and ordering them to take her to Karachi airport. As Yasin was too drunk to drive her himself, he instructed the men to put Farhana on the 2 a.m. flight to Istanbul, where she could change for Paris.
Yasin, who had not long before dragged her across the marble floor by her loveliest silk chiffon dupatta, and struck her across the face with the back of his hand, smashing her lip, now bowed before his mother. He said that after her behaviour she should never come back to Pakistan. And since he doubted whether he would live to be old, or that he would go to the West again, it was, as he put it, goodbye, or ‘khuda hafiz’.
‘May Allah protect you, and, never forget this –’ his mother said, wagging her finger at him as she was helped into the car, ‘Allah is always watching you.’
She could hear him laughing as she closed the window.
The following morning, once more wrapped in her favourite trench coat, she was walking around her adoptedcity. First she’d go to the market; then, perhaps, she’d go to an exhibition, or look again at La Hune, her favourite bookshop, or the other wonderful little places on the Left Bank where she lived, selling hand-made paper and bizarre knick-knacks. In the afternoon she liked to go to the Tuileries or the Luxembourg for a sorbet, watching the children with their au pairs. There was plenty to see. When her first husband had been alive, she’d been a photographer, selling her pictures to Pakistani papers and magazines, and she knew how to look. It wasn’t that Paris looked different now; she had only been in Karachi for a month. But she was full of new words, and would talk about the city differently, when she had the opportunity.
Farhana’s husband, Michel, a retired critic and journalist, was, as always at that time of the morning, reading in his study on what she called his charpoy – his day-bed – supported by oriental tasselled cushions. He hadn’t seen his wife the previous night, and now he didn’t get up to greet or kiss her, as if it would take too much physical effort. He didn’t say he was glad to have her home. But he did wave, lean forward a little, and say, ‘You are back early. What happened
Compared to Freud, Reich and his coevals prove, in the end, to be the more limited, if not conservative, concentrating on too small a notion of human need and fulfilment. Freud had a novelist’s capaciousness; Reich was a headline writer. If constraint of some sort is impossible to avoid, the question is: which constraint, when, where?
Nick and Meg go to Paris because love is the most considerable business of all, and they need to know what sort of relationships make life worth living, and, if they have a future together, what it might be like. Do they suffer less together than they would apart? The decision they make at the end of the film can only be provisional, and the questions they ask have to be confronted repeatedly, since there isn’t one answer that can satisfy them.
This Door Is Shut
More or less the last thing Farhana remembered before finding herself on the Boulevard Saint-Germain was her son Yasin waking up his driver and her guard, and ordering them to take her to Karachi airport. As Yasin was too drunk to drive her himself, he instructed the men to put Farhana on the 2 a.m. flight to Istanbul, where she could change for Paris.
Yasin, who had not long before dragged her across the marble floor by her loveliest silk chiffon dupatta, and struck her across the face with the back of his hand, smashing her lip, now bowed before his mother. He said that after her behaviour she should never come back to Pakistan. And since he doubted whether he would live to be old, or that he would go to the West again, it was, as he put it, goodbye, or ‘khuda hafiz’.
‘May Allah protect you, and, never forget this –’ his mother said, wagging her finger at him as she was helped into the car, ‘Allah is always watching you.’
She could hear him laughing as she closed the window.
The following morning, once more wrapped in her favourite trench coat, she was walking around her adoptedcity. First she’d go to the market; then, perhaps, she’d go to an exhibition, or look again at La Hune, her favourite bookshop, or the other wonderful little places on the Left Bank where she lived, selling hand-made paper and bizarre knick-knacks. In the afternoon she liked to go to the Tuileries or the Luxembourg for a sorbet, watching the children with their au pairs. There was plenty to see. When her first husband had been alive, she’d been a photographer, selling her pictures to Pakistani papers and magazines, and she knew how to look. It wasn’t that Paris looked different now; she had only been in Karachi for a month. But she was full of new words, and would talk about the city differently, when she had the opportunity.
Farhana’s husband, Michel, a retired critic and journalist, was, as always at that time of the morning, reading in his study on what she called his charpoy – his day-bed – supported by oriental tasselled cushions. He hadn’t seen his wife the previous night, and now he didn’t get up to greet or kiss her, as if it would take too much physical effort. He didn’t say he was glad to have her home. But he did wave, lean forward a little, and say, ‘You are back early. What happened
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