Nabila Chowdhury’s Reviews > Study for Obedience > Status Update

"Nevertheless, I say to myself, softly, I am living, I claim my right to live."

"So much was refused in advance. So much transpired on a scale of time and space that was longer than a lifetime, wider than a country, vaster than the story of the exile of a single people. And bigger still."

"What right, what reason did they have, one’s ancestors, to flee into the forest, cross the water, peddle rags, go to school – what was it all for, when in the final analysis one was never meant to survive? What was left? And was it enough to carry on? But we begin to weary of this line, do we not? Because here, after all, we are."

"The fundamental question that I pose now, that has been posed before and elsewhere, more or less word for word, here it is, my brother, prepare yourself, is whether one can go on living after all, whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living."

"And yet I see it would not be enough for me to go away, to leave this place, I am implicated personally now where before I had only been implicated historically, yes, it is much too late, I have read the theorists on this point, that things are such that they remain at the boundaries of verbal articulation."

"One comes up short, of course one does, short of oneself, short of the world."

"Do I suggest that a reorganisation of the sensible is possible, of the commonsensible? Not at all, no. I allow myself no horizon of possibility. Where one might expect two poles to meet – at the greatest extreme of enfeeblement – what one finds is only distance and misunderstanding."

"The less we are offered, the finer the quality of attention we bring to bear."

"Here, one was forced back into one’s context, given a kind of depth, no longer an atomised individual but part of a structure of feeling that was centuries old. How capacious it was in comparison! How inevitable! How beautiful to be conscious of the inexorable process of eternal recurrence. I felt held. I hoped my brother would someday feel held by it, too."

"No, I thought, they would not come for him, he must understand that now, must understand, yes, that history for them was indeed a matter of flesh and bone, that no amount of rehabilitation could make it otherwise, no, those paths had been laid out long ago."