My Friends

by Hisham Matar

And perhaps this is the natural way of things, that when a friendship comes to an inexplicable end or wanes or simply dissolves into nothing, the change we experience at that moment seems inevitable, a destiny that was all along approaching, like someone walking toward us from a great distance, recognizable only when it is too late to turn away.

“We are in a tide,” he had said back in the passionate days of the Arab Spring, when he was trying to convince me to return to Benghazi with him, “in it and of it. As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity.”

There are moments, moments like this, when an abstract longing overcomes me, one made all the more violent by its lack of fixed purpose.

The effectiveness of the system lay precisely in its vagueness. You remained on guard and in need of exoneration because you never could be absolutely certain what might land you in trouble and destroy the miraculous piece of good fortune of studying abroad.

“There must be the dark background to show up the bright colors.”

“Friend. What a word. Most use it about those they hardly know. When it is a wondrous thing.”

“Listen, if a writer is to achieve his full potential, he needs to be connected to the source. ‘From the root the sap flows to the artist,’ as Paul Klee put it.”

Love and pity are not the same. Sometimes the love we feel seems much more easily endured if converted to pity, when that just kills it.

had the weary tiredness of one who, in surrendering to her fate, was ennobled by it.

In war you are nowhere, neither part of the past nor the future, and it opens up a hunger in you that widens with each day. Until that is all you are. You could easily get swallowed up by it.