"As indeed the time may show."

I'm going to Miami tomorrow (work-related). Reading Homi Bhabha's introduction to the new edition of The Location of Culture last week, I noticed his affinity for Naipaul's characters and how they often manage to survive horrendous situations:

"It was the ability of Naipaul's characters to forbear their despair, to work through their anxieties and alienations towards a life that may be radically incomplete but continues to be intricately communitarian, busy with activity, noisy with stories, garrulous with grotesquerie, gossip, humor, aspirations, fantasies - these were signs of a culture of survival that emerges from the other side of the colonial enterprise, the darker side. Naipaul's people are vernacular cosmopolitans of a kind, moving in-between cultural traditions, and revealing hybrid forms of life and art that do not have a prior existence within the discreet world of any single culture or language."

*

I have a 1944 Faber edition of Stephen Spender's Selected Poems. It's a short, portable hardcover edition that fits in my coat pocket. It includes this excerpt from his play "Trial of a Judge":

"JUDGE: For by your law, the jungle
Is established; and the tiger's safety is guaranteed
When he hunts his innocent victim,
By all the iron of the police.
I condemned to death gunmen
And gangsters, but they are
The highest functions of this society;
Except perhaps for machine guns and those inhuman
Instruments of killing
Which are more powerful even than your fangs--
As indeed the time may show."