Places of Mind Quotes

“He chose not to be buried in Palestine. The political symbolism of his life made the desecration of his grave an unfortunate possibility. Instead, drawing on Mariam’s family connections, he selected a small Quaker cemetery perched on a grassy, tree-lined shelf of a steep hill in Brummana, Lebanon. There his simple black marble slab rests, his name appearing in English above and in Arabic below. Like the cemetery itself, the plot is tucked away from the world, almost secreted, in a way entirely unfitting a life like his own, except for the encroaching signs of modernity marring the general splendor of the valley. Modern high-rises vie with cypress trees to border the verdant triangle of the graveyard, which, although small, is too large for the number of Quakers buried there. And although it faces south toward Palestine overlooking a mountain range towering above Beirut, even the final resting place was not quite right.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“In a defensive posture, Shavit felt himself beaten in the interview, losing ground, and so resorted to ruses of insinuation and evasion. Annoyed, Said took stock of his interlocutor and thought to himself: “Look at you. You claim to be representing a people and a civilization, and you don’t get it at all. You’re not understanding what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, one committed to worldliness and universal justice. You may have the weapons and the resources, but intellectually and morally you’ve already lost, and it’s just a question of when others figure it out.”61”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“For many of his colleagues, humanism had long conjured images of slave owners lecturing colored people on the benefits of reason. If the term had been unpopular in the early days of his career, by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become for almost everyone around him a slogan that evoked every crime of Western civilization. University administrators still solemnly invoked it, but that discredited it even more.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Playing down the drama, Said stuck to the story he told whenever anyone told him to take it easy—that the idea of rest made him sick and that sleep was already a kind of death. He was planning a second volume of Out of Place, bringing the story up to the present, and there were other projects too.6”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The lesson might have been slow in coming, but he had learned that wasting time was also a way of spending it and that amusements were retaliation against his self-imposed regimes.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Authors may at times read their work aloud, but essentially they compose in silence and their audience consumes the work in silence.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Later a stalwart in the BDS movement, she remained convinced that although Said disliked the “rigidity” of the BDS movement at times, he would have taken his stand with it critically. In the last years of his life, he had already supported targeted divestment and boycotting the settlements and was furious with his colleague the progressive historian Eric Foner for refusing to support defunding the settlements. For most of the Said”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Was it not betrayal then, some wondered, when he wrote that “exile seems to me a more liberated state,” or when he concluded that Palestine was “precisely irrecoverable . . . We are moving away from it. It is not to create the beautiful place with orchards and so on. I don’t believe in a final coming-home”?72”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Wadie’s initiative made him think again. Said’s former student Ashrawi, then working for the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, knew very well that he wanted desperately to be welcomed as one of their own by Palestinians living in the territories. That he was not hurt him deeply.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“As soon as the AUC experience was over, he announced he would spend a year in Palestine. His father did not believe him. When it was clear that Wadie was serious, Said tried to fathom the significance of the act, because he himself had been unwilling to do the same, even though there had been some unstated pressure to make such a gesture.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“As Ashrawi observed, a fatal process had been set in motion. Because the PLO and Israel were officially at peace, the entire Arab world could now begin to normalize relations with Israel.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Polyphony, after all, is a genre of harmony that holds independent voices together in unison without merging them, keeping a number of contradictory positions in play, but also on occasion meeting at a point where they momentarily blend.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“He deplored modernism’s “extremes of self-consciousness, discontinuity, self-referentiality, and corrosive irony.”86”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Not as an art form but as a worldview or (in Lukács’s words) an “ideology,” modernism tended to raise the senses over ideas and viewed humans as solitary, asocial, unable to enter relationships.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Said was in this way caught between stodgy traditionalists upset by anything new and a vanguard that to him had thrown out some of the most critical thinking of the past on the grounds that it was white and male. He had become the nominal father of a field that he was reluctant to disown but that no longer resonated with his vision.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The motives of postcolonial studies, by contrast, might be described as a general loathing for a Western entity vaguely dubbed “modernity.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“During a bid almost a decade earlier, he had written to Harry Levin on December 26, 1985, to put his feelings plainly: despite the frenetic pace of New York, he felt a “deepening solitude . . . So one gets lonelier all the time, and the alienating effect of this most rootless and exilic of cities has amplified the loneliness.” 41 This was all the truer when contemplating death. But when Said realized that his motives for leaving New York were mostly about what his hometown lacked rather than the attractions of Cambridge itself, he pulled back. On April 22, 1993, he declined the offer from Harvard for good, putting an end to a courtship of two decades.42 Only four months later, he was asked to assist in the defense of Nidal Ayyad, accused in the World Trade Center bombings, by helping the lawyers assess the “grammatical styles of two notes/ letters that the United States plans to introduce as evidence in its case in chief.” Said curtly declined three weeks later.43”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“On the personal side, even before his mother died, women were his closest confidantes, a fact that established his deeply felt personal and professional indebtedness to the insights that only women brought to his life and the special ease he felt around them.117 When he sought counsel, it was to women, not men, that he turned.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“His investments, all the same, were personal, not only intellectual. Said began intense analysis as an undergraduate at Princeton and remained in therapy until the end of his life.87 The turmoil over a father he perceived as distant and unsympathetic, the steep sexual learning curve as he escaped his mother’s smothering embrace, a profound insecurity about his own identity, the violent oscillation between boastfulness and self-doubt—all played a part. But he also felt an irreconcilable tension between the movement politics of which he berated himself for not doing enough and the life of the mind he could not live without. His habits of writing were similarly tortured. Instead of letting his ideas unfold in a progression of steady drafts, he bottled them up, letting fragments out in conversation until he could no longer bear it, setting them down in a torrent of writing. Although he let few see it, he lived in agony.88”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“As in liberal thought generally, the private individual is portrayed as inevitably threatened by the hierarchy of groups, parties, and parliaments.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“In the next instant, propped up by nervous energy, he mobilized his charm, seizing upon an idea and turning his insecurity into eloquence. Salman Rushdie actually mistook him for a person at ease at a gala for the Sandinistas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he described Said standing “friendly, handsome . . . an expansive talker, a laugher and gesturer, a polymath, [and a] flirt.”23”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Even though he navigated New York society with Mariam in support, he felt an outsider at such events, plagued once again by self-doubt. Well-wishers found his insecurity odd, knowing him well enough to figure out that as he moved about the room, he was quietly torturing himself with the question “What would these people want with little me?”22”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Ever since his breakup with Maire, the difficulty he had sleeping as a schoolboy had developed into an aversion to sleep that endured in later life and was redoubled as a useless tribute to his mother’s troubled sleeping, he later speculated, during the final stages of her illness.13 Whether stemming from Protestant guilt for unproductive time or clinical depression (as his daughter, Najla, surmised), insomnia helped enshrine for him the activity of speech.14 As time moved on, he typically found his relaxation by taking sudden breaks to which he was as dedicated as work, rushing to a concert on the spur of the moment or planning trips as he did to Spain in 1979, to Tunisia for a month in 1982, and to Morocco with his family in 1988 in the midst of a grueling work schedule.15 His reading for that reason was more or less on the fly, in airplanes or at home after classes, and the greatest part of his workday remained, essentially, conversations with visitors or on the phone. Although a scholar, he lacked the seclusion usually needed for the job, living rather the distracted life of a journalist.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Of all his modes of working, writing was the least fragmented. His essays typically took from two to three days to write and went through three drafts of minor corrections. With some exceptions, he does not seem to have toiled over phrasing or diction. His prose was never sculpted, driven more by ideas than by form, although alert to a mixture of high diction and informality, foreign phrases and colloquialisms. In any case, it flowed out of him in more or less the form it appeared in print, a valuable talent as he faced new challenges in the New York media of the 1980s.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Or, altogether differently, because writing was for him a sensual experience, it might have been that the different tactilities jostled him out of an impasse.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“His early reputation among the profession’s elite, and certainly his numerous offers from other schools, were based on the widely shared feeling that he was the best teacher they had ever seen.127 “Being with him was like being with a playful, alternately super-engaged, super self-absorbed, suddenly very funny, suddenly very angry, or testy friend—a difficult friend who was also your best friend,” Ric Burns added. “He could sort of push you around and then be at the same time solicitous.”128 One minute you were in his protected zone and seemed to be all that mattered; the next, when his attention waned, you experienced what one colleague liked to call “the fade” when his mind moved quickly elsewhere.129”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“He had a unique way of stalking a text. His classes tended to begin very slowly, and he often displayed nerves until he warmed up: “You could almost see the sweat, until he broke through and hit an emotional second wind, now totally absorbed, his art a combination of rigor and improvisation,” said a former student, the filmmaker Ric Burns.118 He himself attested to the “uncomfortable, stomach-churning, palm-sweating anxiety I still feel before (and even during) a class.”119 Arriving home late at night from a four-day speaking tour, he would be up at 4:00 a.m. rereading books he had read dozens of times before, making sure that he entered class prepared.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The organizers had wanted balance, he explained, so he and Williams were there apparently to represent the Left, David Caute the middle, and Kristeva (along with “the rather odd reactionary philosopher” Roger Scruton) “constituted the Right.”83 The Nation eventually cut the passages on Kristeva, ostensibly to improve the column’s focus, where he had complained that she constantly interrupted the discussion with “an insistent affectation that was intended to dignify her threadbare clichés.”84”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“By the end of the 1990s, postcolonial studies was no longer simply an academic field. Its watchwords—“the other,” “hybridity,” “difference,” “Eurocentrism”—could now be found in theater programs and publishers’ lists, museum catalogs, and even Hollywood film. It had become part of the general culture, partly due to his influence, which posed a problem because he denied that a postcolonial condition even existed. “I’m not sure if in fact the break between the colonial and post-colonial period is that great,” he said, and later confessed to a colleague, “I don’t think the ‘post’ applies at all.”26 The duty of the critic was to show that colonialism was still thriving, yesterday in India and Egypt, today in South Africa, Nicaragua, and Palestine.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Orientalism’s fame certainly added to the physical strain. With redoubled media exposure, he found the joys of lingering over texts for the sheer love of reading harder to come by. Distractions”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said