{"id":4942,"date":"2013-09-29T12:50:22","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T12:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=4942"},"modified":"2013-09-29T12:50:22","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T12:50:22","slug":"journey-to-the-centre-great-middle-lines-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=4942","title":{"rendered":"Journey to the centre:  Great middle lines &#8211; 6"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Half-way through Michael Ondaatje&#8217;s <em>The English Patient,<\/em> the patient arrives at the point in his tale where his tough personal barrier was penetrated.\u00a0 &#8216;I am a man who kept the codes of my behaviour separate,&#8217; he says on p. 144.\u00a0 Then the turning point:\u00a0 we learn why and how he ended up in hospital (well, a hospital of sorts), the turning point in his life where it dawned on him that Clifton&#8217;s wife, Katharine, was breaking down his defences, and this led to a relationship, and this led to an accident.\u00a0 On p. 150 of 300 pages, I read this:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:30px;\">&#8220;He said later it was propinquity.\u00a0 Propinquity in the desert.\u00a0 It does that here, he said.\u00a0 He loved the word &#8211; the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours.\u00a0 Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps.\u00a0 In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\">*****<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Half-way through Michael Ondaatje&#8217;s The English Patient, the patient arrives at the point in his tale where his tough personal barrier was penetrated.\u00a0 &#8216;I am a man who kept the codes of my behaviour separate,&#8217; he says on p. 144.\u00a0 Then the turning point:\u00a0 we learn why and how he ended up in hospital (well, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=4942\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Journey to the centre:  Great middle lines &#8211; 6&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[460,2,478,462,463,226,479,270],"class_list":["post-4942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-great-middle-lines","tag-20th-century-literature","tag-literature","tag-michael-ondaatje","tag-middle-lines","tag-novels","tag-postaday2013","tag-the-english-patient","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}