In his subsequent sojourns abroad, he came across a great many things that teased his unobstrusive taste for unobstrusive passions: the colourful umbrellas that ubiquitously dotted the streets of Calcutta; the deep blue Mediteranean sky on wanton afternoons in Rome; the grungy shophouses that festooned the loud nights of Bangkok. These passions of his often mystified his friends - "Why travel to busy places? Don't you tire of them?" Love lives only in people, he replied.
He'd take photographs of children with carefully-arranged heaps of vegetables on varying corners of their dinner plates. Maybe write about little old ladies who haggle (with a vengeance) about the price of chicken, and then about the equally vengeful butchers who slam down their cleavers really hard, secretly hoping that their chickens were little old ladies. He'd sit at the beach, and marvel not at the sunset, but at the dozens of other people who do - young couples, old couples; families, friends, lone persons. Every individual sat upon a world of unimaginable wonder, he said to me one morning, as we were rowing out to sea. Love speaks of fraility in the face of courage, and courage in the eye of fraility. The soft sunlight danced upon the sea in the exuberance he beseeched; and then I understood.
"Beauty spurns life, for life is never short enough," read his obitutary, a few weeks later. "But beauty will never live, for life can never end."
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I've started an online word bank! And this is one of its by-products ^_^
