Yes, that Latinesque quote of Phil's a few weeks back was from the same book I just finished reading this week. A book that a friend in a completely different area of my life told me I'd most assuredly appreciate. Which cropped up in a third conversation with another person who doesn't know the other two, and who had in her bookshelf this very book to loan to me. Coincidence.
Weird things like that happen to me, often. I'm not a 'coincidence theorist' but how else do you explain odd things popping up in tandem, often things that are invested with personal meaning of one sort or another?
I'd heard Phil first say it years ago while sharing a ride to the cactus garden, and then after a recent gardening meeting while packing up the visual aids, he said it again. Imagine my WHA!? of recognition and Ahah! of understanding when I ran across it while reading The Handmaid's Tale. (Odd, too, how Diane Rheme just this week mentioned another Margaret Atwood novel to her guest in reference to another topic. Maybe that path needs following as well.)
But these things do happen.
Then, in the same short stack of books on loan from Tree, why would second book touching on the repression brought on by politicized religion, only written thirty years later and in another language, turn up?
My take on both is that 'Taliban' can come in any hue, at any time, and with the same awful monstrous inhuman result... Spanish Inquisition, anyone? "God is on OUR side" has been used by every sort of organized religion to defend slavery, misogyny, child abuse, political repression, torture, war.
This probably belongs on the cranky blog, but those were the books that 'came' to me*, and that's my theory, and I'm sticking with it.
*I have a corollary gardening theory related to this, if you're interested, I'll post it later.
