Compass Quotes

“We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Silence comes after everything. Everything is enclosed in silence. Everything is extinguished there, or falls asleep there.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“(...) cet espoir se dilua dans le gris qui paraissait attrister même les arbres de la rue Custine, engoncés dans leurs grilles de fonte, cette limitation si parisienne à l'acharnement végétal (rien ne représente plus l'esprit moderne que cette étrange idée, la grille d'arbre. On a beau vous persuader que ces imposants morceaux de ferraille sont là pour protéger le marronnier ou le platane, pour leur bien, pour éviter qu'on ne nuise à leurs racines, il n'existe pas, je crois, de représentation plus terrible de la lutte à mort entre la ville et la nature, ni de signe plus éloquent de la victoire de la première sur la seconde)”
― Mathias Enard, Boussole

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.” So the European archaeologists had acquired an extremely specialized and technical Arabic vocabulary: dig here, clear there, with a shovel, a pickax, a small pick, a trowel — the brush was the privilege of Westerners. Dig gently, clear quickly, and it was not rare to overhear the following dialogue: “Go one meter down here.” “Yes boss. With an excavation shovel?” “Um, big shovel . . . Big shovel no. Instead pickax.” “With the big pickax?” “Big pickax no. Little pick.” “So, we should dig down to one meter with the little pick?” “Na’am na’am. Shwia shwia, listen, don’t go smashing in the whole wall to finish more quickly, OK?”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Sleep has never really wanted me, it abandons me very quickly, around midnight, after pestering me all evening.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“now that computers have taken over, we rarely see the calligraphy of our contemporaries, perhaps handwritten cursive will become a form of nudity, an intimate, hidden manifestation, concealed from everyone except lovers, lawyers, and bankers.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Le spie sono dei viaggiatori, i viaggiatori sono delle spie. “Non fidarti delle storie dei viaggiatori” dice Sa’di nel Roseto. Loro non vedono niente. Credono di vedere, ma osservano solo riflessi.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“La vita è una sinfonia di Mahler, non torna mai indietro, non ricomincia mai daccapo.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Hedayat aveva una di quelle ferite del sé che fanno andare nel mondo barcollando, e quella incrinatura si è poi aperta fino a diventare una crepa; e come nell’oppio, come nell’alcol, come in tutto ciò che ti apre in due, non si tratta di una malattia ma di una decisione, la volontà di spezzare l’essere, fino in fondo.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“…it was the first time someone had imposed the label “German” on me to enroll me among the followers of Hitler. This violence of identity pinned on you by the other and uttered like a condemnation…”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Tuberculars and syphilitics, there’s the history of art in Europe—the public, the social, tuberculosis, or the private, the shameful, syphilis.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Music is time domesticated, reproducible time, time shaped.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“…hundreds of composers throughout all of Europe, over all of Europe the wind of alterity blows, all these great men use what comes to them from the Other to modify the Self, to bastardize it, for genius wants bastardy, the use of external procedures to undermine the dictatorship of church chant and harmony…”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“..life ties knots, life ties knots and they’re rarely those on St. Francis’s cincture; we meet, we run after one another, for years, in the dark, and when we think we finally hold another’s hand in ours, death takes everything away from us.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonize populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“la musique est le temps raisonné, le temps circonscrit et transformé en sons, si je me débats aujourd’hui dans ces draps, il y a gros à parier que je suis moi aussi atteint de ce Haut Mal que la psychiatrie moderne, dégoûtée de l’art et de la philosophie, appelle dépression structurelle, même si les médecins ne s’intéressent, dans”
― Mathias Énard, Boussole

“I light a cigarette to put off the journey till later / To put off all journeys till later / To put off the entire universe till later.” The entire universe is in a bookcase, no need to go out: what’s the point of leaving the Tower, said Hölderlin, the end of the world has already taken place, no reason to go experience it yourself; you linger, your fingernail between two pages (so soft, so creamy) where Álvaro de Campos, the engineer dandy, becomes more real than Pessoa, his flesh-and-blood double. Great are the deserts and everything is desert.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“This was the big advantage of “Oriental“ campaign excavations: whereas in Europe they were forced by their budgets to dig them selves, archaeologists in Syria, like their glorious predecessors, could delegate the lowly tasks. As Bilger said, quoting The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”: “you see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig.” So the European archaeologists had acquired an extremely specialized and technical Arabic vocabulary: dig here, clear there, with a shovel, a pickax, a small pick, a trowel — the brush was the privilege of Westerners. Dig gently, clear quickly, and it was not rare to overhear the following dialogue:
“Go one meter down here.”
“Yes boss. With an excavation shovel?”
“Um, big shovel… Big shovel no. Instead pickax.”
“With the big pickax?”
“Big pickax no. Little pick.”
“So, we should dig down to  one meter with the little pick?”
“Na’am, na’am. Shwia shwia, Listen, don’t go smashing in the whole world to finish more quickly, OK?”
In these circumstances there were obviously misunderstandings that led to irreparable losses for science: a number of walls and stylobates fell victim to the perverse alliance of linguistics and capitalism, but on the whole the archaeologists were happy with their personnel, whom they trained, so to speak, season after season....[I am] curious to know what these excavations represent, for these workers. Do they have the feeling that we are stripping them of their history, that Europeans are stealing something from them, once again?
Bilger had a theory: he argued that for these workmen whatever came before Islam does not belong to them, is of another order, another world, which falls into the category of the qadim jiddan, the “very old”; Bilger asserted that for a Syrian, the history of the world is divided into three periods: jadid, recent; qadim, old; qadim jiddan, very old, without it being very clear if it was simply his own level of Arabic that was the cause for such a simplification: even if his workers talked to him about the succession of Mesopotamian dynasties, they would have had to resort, lacking a common language that he could understand, to the qadim jiddan. ”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“A volte [...] avevo l'impressione che le mie considerazioni fossero come il Bosforo - un bel luovo fra due rive, certo, ma che in fondo era solo acqua, per non dire aria fresca.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Die Teesträucher fließen die Hügel hinab; es sind kleine Büsche von rundem Wuchs mit länglichen Blättern, die dicht nebeneinander gepflanzt werden: von oben betrachtet sehen die Felder aus wie ein grünes, eng gelegtes Mosaik aus Knöpfen, bemoosten Kugeln, die sich über die Hänge des Himalaya ziehen.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“In der Liebe können wir die Leiden des anderen ebenso wenig teilen wie unsere eigenen heilen.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Bei der Lektüre von Sarahs Randnotizen (Krähenfüße, schwarze Marginalia, die ich mehr entziffern als lesen musste)konnte ich eine der fundamentalen Fragen erahnen, oder glaubte, sie zu erahnen, die nicht nur Sarahs Werk zugrunde lagen, sondern die auch die Texte von Annemarie Schwarzenbach so fesselnd machten – der Orient als Resilienz, als Suche nach Heilung von einer geheimnisvollen Krankheit, einer tiefliegenden Angst. Eine psychologische Suche. Eine mystische Suche ohne Gott, ohne andere Transzendenz als die innersten Bereiche des Selbst, eine Fahndung, die im Fall von Schwarzenbach mit einem traurigen Scheitern endete.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Danke für diese diplomatische Nachricht, sie hat mich zum Lachen gebracht – das ist im Augenblick sonst ziemlich schwierig. Du fehlst mir sehr. Oder vielmehr, alles fehlt mir sehr. Ich habe das Gefühl, aus der Welt zu sein, ich schwimme in der Trauer. Ich brauche nur dem Blick meiner Mutter zu begegnen, und schon beginnen wir beide zu weinen. Wir weinen über die Traurigkeit des anderen, über die Leere, die wir auf dem erschöpften Gesicht des anderen sehen. Paris ist ein Grab, nur Erinnerungsfetzen. Ich setze meine Streifzüge durch die literarischen Gefilde des Opiums fort. Ich weiß nicht mehr genau, wie es um mich steht.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“When I received this Andalusian letter I collapsed: Tehran came flooding back to me, the memories of Damascus too, Paris, Vienna, suddenly tinted, the way a simple ray of light is enough to give its tonality to the immense sky of evening, sadness and bitterness. Dr.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“«En la vida hay heridas que roen como una lepra el alma en la soledad», escribe el iraní Sadeq Hedayat al principio de su novela La lechuza ciega: ese”
― Mathias Énard, Brújula