2 Excerpts from my recent reading: "The God of Small Things"

"He made them imagine that the Earth- four thousand six hundred million years old- was a fourty six year old woman- as old, say as Aleymamma teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the Earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five- just eight months ago- when dinosaurs roamed the earth. 'The whole of human civilization as we know it,' Chacko told the twins, 'Began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life'... The whole of contemporary history,... the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge- was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. 'And we, my dears, everything that we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye,...'"

"In Pappachi's study, mounted butterflies and moths had disintegrated into small heap of iridescent dust that powered the bottom of their glass display cases, leaving the pins that impaled them naked. Cruel. The room was rank with fungus and disuse. And old saint's discarded halo. A column of shining black ants walked across a windowsill, their bottoms tilted upwards, like a line of mincing chorus girls in a Busby Berkeley musical. Silhouetted against the sun. Buffed and beautiful."