- the strangeness of grief ⇢
- my sorrow lasted for two years. for two years i mentally dated everything, even the purchase of a book, by its distance from shiva’s death.
- the wound of multilingualism ⇢
- the more i felt at home in english, the less arabic felt like one. so much so that learning a new language was to acquire a new wound. multilingualism meant multi-wounding.
- what college can't do ⇢
- in “the waste land”—a poem that is about, among other things, modern busyness—people seem superficial, hollow, disengaged, and exhausted. but the problem isn’t their individual choices; it’s the age, which shouts, at every opportunity, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” inside, they are as alive as ever—but in ways that are “not to be found in our obituaries / or in memories draped by the beneficent spider / or under seals broken by the lean solicitor / in our empty rooms.”
- the anxiety of influencers ⇢
- i mention this only to observe that if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. [...] the angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of t the algorithm.
- that the view of personhood produced by the economy of influence is the same brass-tacks thinking that has infiltrated the university might be the single greatest repudiation of the pixelated world that we’re now asking them to inhabit. whether they’re ordinary undergrads or social-media celebs, they all strike me as unbearably sad, and it’s a sadness that seems more than casually related to the ways in which we’ve defined what it means to be a person.
- to speak is to blunder ⇢
- that something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. one weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in and claims understanding and empathy do people call it a tragedy.
- one’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.
- “to kill time,” an english phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities.
- memories, left untranslated, can be disowned; memories untranslatable can become someone else’s story.
- what language, i wonder, does one use to feel? or does one need a language to feel?
- in speaking and in writing in an adopted language, i have not stopped erasing. i have crossed the line, too, from erasing myself to erasing others. i am not the only casualty in this war against myself.
- it’s your friends who break your heart ⇢
- it gets trickier as you age, living.
- it’s the friendships with more deliberate endings that torment. at best, those dead friendships merely hurt; at worst, they feel like personal failures, each one amounting to a little divorce.
- you feel bereft, for one thing. as if someone has wandered off with a piece of your history. and you fear for your reputation. friends are the custodians of your secrets, the eyewitnesses to your weaknesses. every confession you’ve made—all those naked moments—can be weaponized.
- what makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. you have to continually opt in. that you choose it is what gives it its value.
- if our friends become our substitute families, they pay for the failures of our families of origin.
may 25 2021 ∞
oct 18 2022 +