In a house in a dank alley in Paris on March 24, 1897, a 67-year-old man is writing. We do not know who he is. As the Narrator begins his story in Umberto Eco's novel The Prague Cemetery, no one has yet 'been named'.

Fayadh escaped the death sentence. The news came in early February: his sentence was commuted to eight years jail and 800 lashes.

There is a story about a Bedouin living far from Damascus, in the interior of Syria, who was disappointed when he rode a train for the first time. "I'm not satisfied," he complained to his friend. "The ticket was expensive, but the journey ended too quickly."

It is 2016. At 75, my life lying before me is far less than the life I've lived. This is the age when people are usually uneasy with the present, because in the 21st century the present is increasingly whipped along by the future. The technology surrounding us is not there for right now: fast trains, solar energy cars, hologram communication... life seems to be moving without pausing in the present.

If there is one icon that marks our times, it is the hand phone. The Indonesian word for it is perfect: 'telepon genggam' or 'clutched phone'. We can clutch it any time, anywhere, but it, too, can hold us in its clutches any time, anywhere. Whenever someone sits alone in a corner, or together with a friend in a caf, on a crowded bus or attends a village meeting, out comes the HP from the pocket, eyes scan the messages on the narrow screen, and attention is momentarily diverted. More often than not, conversation stops.

A militant is someone who makes himself vanish in order to become something effective, terrifying, overwhelming. Saaman, the character in Pramoedya's novel Keluarga Gerilya (The Guerilla Family), is at age 23 already a guerilla leader in Jakarta then occupied by Dutch forces, and he plans a series of killingsincluding that of his own stepfather who is on the other side. Saaman is captured. But he knows he has to die, just as he has to kill. He is a militant.