"For if it were not for Hope, men would commit suicide by the scores, and the world would remain a barren desert in which no oasis exists. On this tortuous road of life, man goes on hoping that the next turn of the road will bring him in sight of the goal. But when he takes the turn and still there is no sign of the promised land he still says that at the next turn he will come to it. Thus from turn to turn he goes on hoping, believing in the will-o'-the-wisp that is Hope. And Mir Nihal went on believing in disbelief. Days and weeks passed, as the years had flown before; and life held sway as of yore, over the empires of the world."
--Ahmed Ali, from the novel Twilight in Delhi, first and last paragraphs of Book 2, Chapter 5, pp 120 and 125.
(Context: My current leisure reading. And because, as the doldrums of monsoon season set in, one finds a melancholy comfort in the desperation of characters like poor Mir Nihal in Ahmed Ali's classic tale of interwar Delhi. On a related note, the so-called doldrums of monsoon season are exacerbated if not principally caused by this blogger's lack of a laptop computer, whose adapter short-circuited three weeks ago and has not yet been replaced; in case any reader wondered where I am.)
