Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

It was what Borges called a creative infidelity. Time appeared inside time, inside yet another time. The book was, he said, so vast and inexhaustible that it was not even necessary to have read it since it was already an intricate part of humankind’s unconscious memory.

Treatises on Ophthalmology, was written in the ninth century by the Arab physician Hunayn ibn Ishaq. The individual components of the eye, he wrote, all have their own nature and they are arranged so that they are in cosmological harmony, reflecting, in turn, the mind of God.

He had told her that morning that she could not stay over at a friend’s house. He had been sharp with her. Wake now, he thought. Just wake and you can go wherever you want. Open your eyelids and I will never say another stern word, I promise, all you have to do is open your eyes.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer, was a keen falconer.

Burton traveled the world in pursuit of gnosis: he wanted to discover the very source of meaning and existence. He made a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853. He knew full well that non-Muslims were not allowed in the city, under pain of death.

Beyond that, anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war. What had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mythology of the instincts.

Persian poet, Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

The Kabbalists, in their attempt to examine the nature of the divine, are known to envision two aspects of God. The first, known as Ein Sof, finds God to be transcendent, unknowable, impersonal, endless and infinite. The second aspect is accessible to human perception, revealing the divine in the material world, available in our finite lives.

She wore a smile that looked like she was in the middle of a permanent question.

When they slid Smadar out on the metal tray, Rami noticed her grandfather’s watch on her wrist: it was still running.

He himself carried the burden. He had created so much of it. The Occupation, he said, was a corruption. And the aid from the United States for military equipment had become a plague. Freedom, he said, begins between the ears.

Peace was a moral inevitability. Neither side could keep the other from it.

Matti Peled died of natural causes eighteen months before his granddaughter. It was the only thing, in either death, that Rami and Nurit were thankful for.

During the vote, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, said he was only sorry that the most Zionist of birds, the dove, had not made the final cut. It was, said Nurit, one of the most perverse lines she had heard in her life, although it was, she added, apt that the name Peres in Hebrew meant bearded vulture.

Frankenthal sold everything he could to support himself so he could devote his time to the search. He finally found forty-four families who were willing to come together to talk. He gathered them in small groups, in libraries, cafés, sometimes his own home.

They were married thirty-four days later. Bassam had talked to her for a total of two hours.

In a letter to Rami, Bassam wrote that one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

Time doesn’t wait for you. You want it to wait, to freeze, to paralyze itself, to go backwards, but it just doesn’t. You need to wake up, to stand up and face yourself. She is gone.

We are not doomed, but we have to try to smash the forces that have an interest in keeping us silent.

But today we have one side, the Palestinians, who are completely thrown to the side of the road. They don’t have any power. What they do is out of incredible anger and frustration and humiliation. Their land is taken.

There can be no way that one side has more rights than the other—more political power, more land, more water, more anything. Equality. Why not? Is it as insane as theft? As murder?

I know that it will not be over until we talk to each other—that’s what it says on the sticker on the front of my bike.

Who knows where things finish? Things go on. That is what the world is. Do you understand what I mean? I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what I mean. We have words but sometimes they’re not enough.

We, the Palestinians, became the victims of the victims. I wanted to understand more. Where was all this coming from?

My life became my message. I flung myself into it. It made perfect sense to me.

To live on in the memory of others means that you do not die.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

Once, in a fever, Rami dreamed himself installing a microphone in the ground so he could hear all the answers to the questions he had not yet asked Smadar.

And yet he had agreed to meet them. He had arrived on time. His story was his duty and his curse.

The technique was rediscovered in 1784 by Henry Shrapnel, a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery, who filled a hollow cannonball with spheres of lead to wreak maximum damage.

In science, the hard problem of consciousness is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to our subjective experience of the mind and the world.

From a purely objective point of view we can seem to scientists to be akin to robots governed by the elemental triggering of synapses in our brains. Our minds register the experience. The neurons fire. The brain receives a form of documentary cinema which rolls onward.

Feinstein wrote in a letter before his death: There is life worse than death, and there is death greater than life.

the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by. ~ Archilochus ~

liked the ideas of Doctor King: to find a method to reject revenge, aggression, retaliation. The past is prophetic. Wars are poor chisels. Lightning makes no sound until it strikes. He turned into the pillow. He tried to sleep. He could not.

Seven centuries later, a John Cage piece was due to be performed at the cathedral. The eight-page score was titled As Slow as Possible. The aim of the music was to stretch the notes so they would sound out, uninterrupted, for another 639 years. The project was conceived by theologians and musicians as a tribute to the late Cage and also as a philosophical examination of the helixes of music and time.

He was prepared to tell the story anywhere. It was, he said, the force of his grief. The weapon he had been given. He could stand up onstage and take the impact.

the minbar of Saladin,

Maimonides, the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, said that the process of repentance included three stages: confession, regret, and a vow not to repeat the misdeed.

In the ninth century the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. It was the first book to introduce the concept of algebra to European scholars. Al-Khwarizmi developed a unifying theory which allowed rational and irrational numbers to be treated as algebraic objects.

One Thousand and One Nights.

Everyone knows that there are many versions of the truth. In some cases the sources were directly contradictory of one another and even the experts are at odds with one another.

Finally, to those who feel compelled (and please do) to contribute to the nonprofit agencies mentioned here, please send your contributions to the Parents Circle Family Forum (theparentscircle.org): they really deserve all the support we can give. Other charities to keep in mind are Combatants for Peace (cfpeace.org), Telos (telosgroup.org), and Narrative 4 (narrative4.com). And last but not least, please look out for the new initiative The Abir-Smadar Foundation.

publishers were brave enough to do—is already asking the reader to step out

I suddenly understood that Rami and Bassam were both doing the Scheherazade thing—they were telling their stories in order to keep their daughters alive, so naturally, then, it had to be in 1001 cantos.

novelists are architects. You create a structure and you hope that it houses the very best of human endeavor. You want it to stand for a long time. And you want people to enter the structure and be changed by it. When I think of how you structured Book of Night Women, or Brief History, I know that I’m in the presence of a great architect. The structure becomes a container for the human music.

But the people who took the real risk were Rami and Bassam in allowing me to tell their stories. They gave it to me. They gave me a chance to listen.

It’s always difficult to make a list because I am afraid I will leave someone out. I am an enormous fan of Raja Shehadeh’s work. He gets to the core of things in Palestine. He’s a writer for our times. And Assaf Gavron captures the temperature of contemporary Israel in an extraordinary way. If I began the rest of the list it would extend for pages on end, but I always recommend going to the poets, and Darwish is a great staple.