Evil Eye

by Etaf Rum

Already her mind was racing like a browser with too many tabs open, brimming with everything and nothing at once.

As she lowered herself into the seat, she said: “I know most of you are here to fulfill the art elective, but my goal is for you to find something truly valuable in this class, regardless of your major or intended career.” They looked back at her, unmoved. She cleared her throat and went on. “You might be thinking: Why art? What can it possibly do for me? I get it. At one point, the humanities were a sacred endeavor where we were encouraged to seek and cultivate beauty in our every day, but that is no longer the case. Now we live in a world of mass media and technology, a world where everything must have a function, and maybe we’ve lost our appreciation for art, or for doing something for the sake of creativity and pleasure alone.” A few students shifted in their seats. Others looked down at their phones. Yara resisted the urge to get up and snatch their devices away. “Art is a window into the transcendent, into the divine,” she continued. “And we need it in our lives in order to make a connection to something beyond the limited world we live in. My hope is by the end of the semester, you have made one beautiful thing, and by doing so, expanded your relationship with beauty in other parts of your life.”

Stopping to rest on a bench in the shade of an oak tree, she synced the photos to her phone, and uploaded one to her personal Instagram—the campus lake in August sunlight, its surface a shining mosaic. “Drink your coffee, embrace the silence, do not take people seriously, do not take life upon yourself, do not exaggerate your emotions, and do not please anyone against your will,” she wrote as a caption, quoting Mahmoud Darwish.

Think of what Kahlil Gibran wrote,” Mama said. “‘Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one. People ruin beautiful things.’”