Take a photo of a barcode or cover
Later that night, as I'm looking out from my balcony, I think of the young man from Fayoum, and of the young man of fourteen I used to be back then, and of myself now, and of the person I might have been had I stayed here thirty years ago. I think of the strange life I'd have led, of the wife I would have, and of my other children. Where would I be living? I suppose in my great-grandmother's apartment—it would have fallen to me. And I think of this imaginary self who never strayed or did the things I probably regret having done but would have done anyway and don't wish to disown; a self who never left Egypt or ever lost ground and who, on nights such as these, still dreams of the world abroad and of faraway America, the way I, over the years, have longed for life right here whenever I find I don't fit anywhere else.
As for a sheath, however, I'd spot mine in a second. It is place. I begin my inward journey by writing about place. Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God, or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. I write about a city called Alexandria, which I'm supposed to have loved, and about other cities that remind me of a vanished world to which I allegedly wish to return. I write about exile, remembrance, and the passage of time. I write—so it would seem—to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.
Quiet. The black of the sky was dimming with light, so the black shapes of trees and the black of the water were beginning to stand out against it, beneath it. Morning birds had begun to stir. The figure beside him seemed veiled now, neither quite hidden nor quite visible. He could not bring himself to look at her directly, and she did not look at him, both of them as still as if the kindly dark were not receding from them. What would be the one sufficient thing to say, before the flood of light swept over them, now that their world was ending? Amen, he thought. He was undisgraced and she was unoffended, a devout hope more or less fulfilled.
She'd heard people say that a sad woman will have a sad child. A bitter woman will have an angry child. She used to think that if she could decide what it was she felt, as far back as she remembered, she could know that much, at least, about the woman who bore her. Loneliness. She pitied the woman for her loneliness. She didn't want this child of hers to feel afraid with no real reason. The good house, the kind old man. I got us out of the rain, didn't I? We're warm, ain't we? In that letter he had said there's no such thing as safety. Existence can be fierce, she did know that. A storm can blow up out of a quiet day, wind that takes your life out of your hands, your soul out of your body. The fire went up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning. And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. She had copied this fifteen times. It reminded her of the wildness of things. In that quiet house she was afraid she might forget.
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
It was a strange sickness—I saw it over at Fort Riley. Those boys were drowning in their own blood. They couldn't even speak for the blood in their throats, in their mouths. So many of them died so fast there was no place to put them, and they just stacked the bodies in the yard. I went over there to help out, and I saw it myself. They drafted all the boys at the college, and influenza swept through there so bad the place had to be closed down and the buildings filled with cots like hospital wards, and there was terrible death, right here in Iowa. Now, if these things were not signs, I don't know what a sign would look like. So I wrote a sermon about it. I said, or I meant to say, that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers. And I said that their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us from the Lord's judgment when we decide to hammer our plowshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God.
Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress
Harold Koda, Richard Martin, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Orientalism is not a picture of the East or the Easts. It represents longing, option, and faraway perfection. It is, like Utopia, a picture everywhere and nowhere, save in the imagination.
Art did not invent the dressing process, though that process is clearly a cultural artifice. But art has made us acutely aware of dress as symbol and of the workings of apparel as a means of claiming beauty.
The love of reading that has passed down through generations of my family is the greatest gift that I could imagine and the greatest legacy I can leave my child. I am so lucky to have been raised as a reader. The essayist Rebecca Solnit once wrote, "A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another." When we read together, our hearts beat as one. At least that's what my grandmothers taught me.