Just Saw This On Pinterest And It Hit Me Like A Truck

Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (trans. Ibrahim Muhawi) [ID'd]

on context: "[set during] the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut [...] Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)?" (source)

fuck it I’m drunk. The points being articulated in TBK are literally incoherent! Every single idea established is then torn down--- either parodied, deconstructed, inverted, or paralelled at some other point, to such a degree that it turns into idealogical and philosophical soup. "Pro and Contra", as is stated. The ending is bleak, underwhelming, and ineffectual! Alyosha's speech at the end is a failure. He is trying SO hard to follow the doctrine that Father Zossima gave him, that he is needed in the world, he is trying so hard to say the right thing to these poor children but his words pale in comparison to the great suffering that has transpired and will continue to transpire ceaselessly. These children then hear his words and exalt him and the Karamazov family name, that stands for all that is base and sick in the world. Ivan is still sick. His ideology and intellect, all he is and all he has, has failed him. He has a very long reckoning yet to come. Dmitry is still imprisoned and in purgatory. Absolutely everyone has completely failed to acknowledge that Smerdyakov was a human being and their family member, despite the entire idea being repeated, ad nauseum, that we are ALL meant to be "servants to our servants and servants to all men" and our brothers keepers. Despite or even because of all of this, the book is extraordinary. Though he had ideas that any particular reader may disagree with, this incoherence cannot be an accident. Dostoevsky can convey a point to exactness, in all it's complexity, to a degree that rivals any author who has ever lived. Then I am reminded that this was not even meant to be THE Book, this was only ever the PRELUDE to THE Book. This was all just the set up for something. And the payoff of whatever was supposed to be "The Life of a Great Sinner" was robbed from us by his death! And so Dostoevsky himself departs, and takes all the answers with him, into the great mystery. And we are left only with the endless questions, the ineffectual answers, the contradictions, the speculations, and the mystery. Exactly as we are in regards to the questions and ideas posed by all of religion itself. It's the kind of allegory that would be much too on the nose if you tried to put it into a film or a story.

“They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.”

— Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds

It's a pale, silent day: I would like to be walking in a wood, far away.

Katherine Mansfield in a diary entry dated 21 October 1918

Franz Kafka

Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don't find yourself.

— Franz Kafka, Diaries 1914-1923