How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
India's enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back. (7.41).
Okay, this one is a little mysterious, but Miller had a real beef with how the West had destroyed India. You may not get that information here, but it's useful to know that he thought India, which had once been a center of spiritual enlightenment, had become morally and spiritually bankrupt. Thanks a lot, West.
Quote #8
In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis (7.44).
By now, we know that Miller isn't exactly "with us" in the psychological sense. He believes that time is just a construct we impose on things to make sense of the order of our lives. Of course, he has transcended such suffocating beliefs.
Quote #9
They look so absolutely peaceful and contented, as if they had been dozing there for years, that suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time, that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink of an eye even, will shatter. (7.86)
Walking into Van Norden's new hotel room is like walking into a time capsule. Miller feels that he has no sense of time, nothing to anchor him to the present.