Chadi Raheb’s Reviews > Sidewalks > Status Update

It’s a fact that the happiness of others is, by a simple act of comparison, the main reason for our personal unhappiness.
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[Again reminds me of all the fake happy and fulfilled lives on Instagram! I never understood why we have to show all our happy moments off to strangers there. I used Insta as -metaphorically- a bathroom where all the overthinking & chagrin could be flushed away through pics’ captions.]

There’s a well-known anecdote:
Metaphysics was the accidental invention of a librarian who, on receiving Aristotle’s masterwork, didn’t know where to shelve it.
Having deliberated for some time, he placed the newly arrived volumes after the philosopher’s “Physics”.
To remind himself where they were, he noted in his catalog: “tá méta tá fisica” (literally: “that which comes after physics”).

Writing: drilling walls, breaking windows, blowing up buildings. Deep excavations to find—to find what? To find nothing.
A writer is a person who distributes silences & empty spaces.
Writing: making “relingos”.

[She’s now talking about & quoting from Proust’s à la recherche du temps perdu, Beckett, & Wittgenstein! Now I really don’t want this book to end. It’s full of 70% of things that I love!]

Learning a language is a first banishment [from Paradise], an involuntary, silent exile to the interior of that nothing in the heart of everything we name. Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.

A child, before it can talk, speaks the world -speaking to himself- with a pointing finger & babbling. But one day the soft sound of the “m” becomes attached to the “a”, & is repeated—“mama”. Then, something snaps. The moment we pronounce the name of that bond, our first & most intimate one, some link with the world is broken.

The nostalgia isn’t always nostalgia for the past. There are things that produce nostalgia in advance -spaces that we know to be lost as soon as we find them- places in which we know ourselves to be happier than we will ever be afterwards. In such situations, the soul twists itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in retrospect....

Nostalgia was the invention of Johannes Hofer, a military doctor.[...]Nostalgia, according to Hofer, is an illness that expresses itself in a specific symptom: pain (algia) for the home (nostos). And like any other illness, remedies can be found to treat it. If the nostalgia is a longing for something concrete, it may perhaps be weakened by eclipsing the memory of what was with the overwhelming presence of what is.

“Saudade isn’t homesickness, lack, or longing. The Finish kaihomielisyys -though it contains smooth, mellifluous sounds- expresses only its most desolate sense. The German Sehnsucht & the Icelandic söknudur seem to suck out the meaning of the word; the Polish tesknota sounds bureaucratic; the Czech stesk shrinks, cringes, cowers;[...]