An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

Literature gives me life, and life kills me.

Beginnings are pregnant with possibilities. As much as I enjoy finishing a translation, it is this time that tickles my marrow most.

From my vantage point, as I watched men I didn’t recognize carry my ex-husband’s coffin away, I measured his life and found it wanting.

most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

“watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity . . . from left to right”—right to left, in my case—“line by line, over the ruled paper.”

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

“It takes a long time for men to acquire their particular countenances. It is as if they were born without their faces, their foreheads, their noses or their eyes. They acquire all these with the passage of time, and one must be patient; it takes time before everything is properly assembled.”

I also noted that the army pants were no longer the cheap kind. I felt crushed.

During the war in Beirut, the powerful had power, but only those with true power had water.

I was intrigued enough by the strangeness of the situation that my memory retained a few palimpsests of the lovemaking, early images, when everything was technical or mechanical.

“The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”

When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life? If that’s the case, why do Americans always behave as if they’re victims?

Life in Beirut is much too random. I can’t force myself to believe I’m in charge of much of my life.

Apollo, ever the alchemist, still sails his chariot in the skies of Beirut, wielding a philosopher’s stone. Into gold I transmute the very air.

Young men in perfectly clean uniforms were able to shoot people while gnawing on a kebab sandwich and sipping Pepsi.

I love the idea of a place of worship with hanging poetry, gilded no less.

The city belongs to the young and their apathy.

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

“Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.”

Have I grown too old for Beirut? Beirut, my Beirut.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology.

I extract explanations where none exist.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

I am you.

Toward the northwest corner, where cars can’t reach, tiny red carnations miraculously flourish in a small patch of earth.

such splendor around me that it became more real than my life, which I found more incomprehensible with every passing day. I belonged in his book, not mine.

I thought that if I translated the book into Arabic, I could combine both. I did.

“The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”

She introduced so many of us, those who can read English but not the original language, to Heaven’s passions.

Mine are translations of translations, which by definition means that they are less faithful to the original.

Using Edwardian prose for Dostoyevsky is like adding milk to good tea. Tfeh! The English like that sort of thing.

“No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.

yet: I have never published.

Literature in the Arab world, in and of itself, isn’t sought after. Literature in translation? Translation of a translation? Why bother?

I’m committed to the process and not the final product.

man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.”

I began to rebuild this house of cards called ego. A huff and a puff.

I also can’t say that I haven’t harmed a living soul. I sold books, after all.

“Kafka and Pessoa journey not to the end of a dark night, but of a night of a colourless mediocrity that is even more disturbing, and in which one becomes aware of being only a peg to hang life on, and that at the bottom of that life, thanks to this awareness, there may be sought some last-ditch residue of truth.”

Joy is the anticipation of joy. Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan.

go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.

Feminism in Lebanon hasn’t reached espadrilles or running shoes yet; sensible heels are where it’s at. The choice not to marry hasn’t entered the picture.

Would you like a gloomy Wittgenstein with your rice, or a bitter Schopenhauer? A cup of Hegelian metaphors, perhaps?

If, as a child, I returned home with some injury, say a bleeding knee from a fall, it was an opportunity for my mother to rattle off all the hurts she’d sustained in her life.

Hell, Beirut has survived for thousands and thousands of years by spreading her beautiful legs for every army within smelling distance.

Whenever I gingerly remove my mother’s noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

“Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.”

No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.

Over the nightgown of my abandoned sleep, over the robe of yesterday’s embarrassment, I put on my burgundy mohair coat,

I worship—well, I worshipped, past tense, for this morning I don’t have the stomach to believe in anything—at the shrines of my writers.