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Heart, liver, stomach, lungs, neck, eyes, soul…It is as if love, by its fluid nature, its riverine force, is all about the melding of markers, to the extent that you can no longer tell where your being ends and another’s begins.
“That is what happens when you love someone—you carry their face behind your eyelids, and their whispers in your ears, so that even in deep sleep, years later, you can still see and hear them in your dreams.”
“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”
“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”
Witnessing this makes the boy sad. We never want our parents’ weaknesses to be seen by others. Their failures are our own private affair, a secret we would rather keep to ourselves; when they become public, for everyone’s consumption, we are no longer the children we once were.
If, as the poets say, the journey of life resembles the march of rivers to the sea, at times meandering aimlessly, at others purposeful and unswerving, the bend in the flow is where the story takes a sudden turn, winding away from its predicted course into a fresh and unexpected direction.
“Words are like birds,” says Mr. Bradbury. “When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”
More and more, he comes to realize that people fall into three camps: those who hardly, if ever, see beauty, even when it strikes them between the eyes; those who recognize it only when it is made apparent to them; and those rare souls who find beauty everywhere they turn, even in the most unexpected places.
After Zaleekhah moved out to go to university, something shifted. Not a sudden falling-out but a gradual estrangement so subtle and slow as to be almost imperceptible. They still spoke regularly on the phone, and grabbed a coffee every so often, but it was never the same. And when Helen got married and had three children in quick succession, the differences in their lives became too great to ignore. The mutual affection was still there, but there was just never enough time together. Zaleekhah still feels the loss of that sisterhood like a missing limb.
You’re at that stage when you’re too old to rebel, too young to admit defeat.”
One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it is left behind.
The divisions that make up class are, in truth, the borders on a map. When you are born into wealth and privilege, you inherit a plan that outlines the paths ahead, indicating the shortcuts and byways available to reach your destination, informing you of the lush valleys where you may rest and the tricky terrain to avoid. If you enter the world without such a map, you are bereft of proper guidance. You lose your way more easily, trying to pass through what you thought were orchards and gardens, only to discover they are marshland and peat bogs.
It is perhaps easier to justify the end of a relationship—both to yourself and to others—when there is a definite, tangible cause, no matter how painful. But it is harder to grasp the gradual evaporation of love, a loss so slow and subtle as to be barely detectable, until it is fully gone. Now she feels like a passenger on a sleeper train who awakens and draws back the curtains, only to find an unfamiliar landscape that had been there all along. She cannot pull the curtains closed again.
Few things harden the human heart as fast as jealousy. Cold and commanding, it settles quickly in the warm spot left by affection, chilling it with its bitter touch.
She was silent when she should have spoken; she spoke when she should have been silent. Either way, guilt is her most loyal companion. And regret, too—not so much for her acts as for her failure to act. She
“What happens after catastrophes? Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all over again, as one always does, as one always must.”
Home is where your loved ones are, but the reverse is also true. Those you love are your sanctuary, your shelter, your country and even, when it comes to that, your exile. Wherever they go, you will follow.
But there is something else separating these communities, something less visible and tangible. It is their relationship with time. The wealthy do not have to rush after ticking clocks; they simply glide through each day, dandling the hours in their hands, wearing them like elegant gloves. For the poor, however, time is mere rags, tattered scraps that are never enough, no matter how much you pull and tug at them, neither covering goose-pimpled flesh nor providing any warmth.
Discomfort is not an emotional state but a doorway she easily passes through several times a day.
There’s this line that Enkidu says to Gilgamesh just before they set out on the road. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things you can say to a friend or spouse or lover.” Nen pauses for a second, her eyes sparkling in the light of the flickering candles, and then she recites: “Where you have set your mind begin the journey Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.”
Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever. A shared expectation that tomorrow the sun will rise again, the earth will remain fertile, and the waters will never run dry. A comforting delusion that, though we will all die, the buildings we erect and the poems we compose and the civilizations
“In Ancient Sumerian, ki-ang was ‘to love’—strangely, the word meant ‘to measure the earth.’ Love was not a feeling or an emotion as much as an anchor that rooted you to a place. All these years I have never yet found myself compelled to measure the earth.
the same tradition, Sinjar is more than a mountain. The highest peak in a hundred-kilometer range, for centuries it has been a sanctuary for the persecuted and the oppressed. Countless people have taken refuge in its small caves and craggy gulleys. At its base nestles the Sharfadin Temple, eight hundred years old, built of pale yellow stone with two cones atop its roof. Every inch of this landscape is holy to the Yazidi faith.
She carries a glass of water, which she splashes in his direction and smiles. “What does that mean?” asks Arthur. “We spill water for luck and protection. Go like water, come back like water—freely and easily.”
You go to distant lands hoping to find something entirely different from what you had at home, never suspecting that you will return a changed person. Arthur
when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often subconsciously biased. They appear successful and content, and so we conclude there must be something wrong with us, since we cannot be more like them. But that image is not the full reality and nor are we that simple or static. “We are all like clay tablets, chipped around the edges, hiding our little secrets and cracks.” “Not everyone, though.” “Everyone, I promise you. Is there such a thing as absolute happiness? Never-ending success? A perfect marriage? A quick fix to cure anxiety? We want to believe there
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the fanatics who slaughter the innocent and defenseless, pillaging villages, enslaving women and children, believe themselves to be holy. With every sorrow and suffering they rain on other humans, they expect to earn favor in the eyes of God, move closer to completing the bridge from this world to their exclusive paradise. How can anyone assume they will please the Creator by hurting His Creation? Nowhere in Grandma’s tales did even the most depraved practice such self-delusion.
Trees are “rooted water,” streams are “flowing water,” birds are “flying water,” mountains are “rising water,” and, as for humans, they are, and will always be, “warring water,” never at peace. Water has memory. Rivers are especially good at remembering.
August is the worst of times to travel from Nineveh to Castrum Kefa. It is less a month than an elegy for the vibrant songs of spring, a lament that floats through the desiccated stalks and brittle reeds bowed by the wind.
“But I am no poet, my friend. I am just a devoted reader.”
Arthur is convinced that everyone has a gift. Given a chance and a modicum of support, anyone can elevate their skill. In the end, perhaps what separates one individual from another is not talent but passion. And what is passion if not a restlessness of the heart, an intense yearning to surpass your limits, like a river overflowing its banks?
We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honor, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, “Remember us.” It is our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too.
French immunologist Jacques Benveniste, who developed the theory of “water memory” at the cost of his career and professional reputation.
