My Friends

by Hisham Matar

As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity.”

he had to me the reliable air of one who believes in time, in the human initiative to measure it, but also in its supremacy over human affairs; that everyone, their deeds and character, will not only yield to time but be revealed by it, that the true nature of things is concealed and the function of the days is to strip away the layers.

He was obsessed with the political history of the Arab World, with a focus on the rise of nationalism, what he liked to describe as “the colonizers’ parting gift.”

Come night, the water turned thick and heavy and black. I entered and it made way. In the deep I sensed that what lurked beneath was alive with intent. You have to be vigilant, I told myself, because perhaps the point is that there is no point: that the sea, its bright and its dark, is not concerned with human yearning. And that people get shot or do not get shot, fishermen drown or do not drown, according to the same logic of nature’s insouciance.

the very presence of books in your room cultivates you, that books are not only to be read but to be lived with.”

When he would visit me upstairs and his eyes would fall on my wall of books, something resembling delight and regret would pass across his face, as though what he secretly found troubling was not the sight of a large number of books but the stability that such an acquisition assumes. Reading requires one to be still. So does writing.

where an exile chooses to live is inevitably arbitrary.

we ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends: to help us mediate and interpret the world.

“No man should seek to see his family objectively,” she said. “Not only because of the sheer impossibility of the task, but because such an ambition alone breaks the covenant between kin. The whole point, silly child, is to love unfathomably. Where hate and affection, bewilderment and clarity, are braided so tightly that they form an unbreakable cord, a rope fit to lift a nation. That’s what your forebears did. And you—it’s not your games with the truth, your disregard for God and tradition, but this, this above all else lights the fire in my veins: you sit, as a stranger would, as a member of the audience, observing, affording yourself the space created by that objectivity of yours, which is nothing but a cold and empty schoolyard at night, a sad and abandoned place, in order to watch from a distance. Watch, then, as we lift our loads, as if you were the master and we the slaves. For the point about this life, my boy, is not to be good or wise but to be human, not to show the rest of us up.”

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. I’ve seen it happen. At times I believed I saw life as it truly is, naked, and it shook my soul. It is a terrible thing to see.