The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Traveling Salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect, despite this overwhelming transformation transformation Gregor find himself worrying about how he will catch the train to work and what his boss will think. A work Gregor despises and hates, yet he is forced to do to pay his father’s debt and provide daily livings as he is the sole caretaker of his parents and sister.

He attempts to adjust with his new condition trying to balance himself and walk with his numerous tiny legs, only when his mother came calling at his door that he sensed his physical appearance and worried how others would perceive him, when his work superior came knocking at the door to find out why he is late, he is forced to reveal himself to which he immediately met with repulsion and confined in his room.

Gregor sister decided to take care of him provided food and cleared room space for him to crowl, but as Gregor can no longer work the whole family is forced to work, and later burdened with him, his family repulsion turned into hatred. His sister even suggest ridding of him “we must get rid of it… You just have to put from your mind any thought that it’s Gregor”. So Gregor neglected and filled with sorrows and rejection wills himself to die.

The Metamorphosis has different interpretation for everyone, for me Gregor sudden transformation provided him with escape from responsibility and the job he hates, being an insect he could no longer participate in society as he becomes undesirable. Another point is that our humanity is highly shaped with our appearance, if we are repulsive even if it’s not our fault we find ourselves cut and cast away from society. This book is dark but it’s a good read.

 

 

I Wake and Feel The Fell of Dark by Gerard Manley Hopkins

While reading (The Year of The Magical Thinking) by Joan Didion I came across this poem written by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins writes about how he woke up from a nightmare and found himself insomniac and depressed, how his prayers to god went unheard, and the bitterness of his soul and the aches of his body. This is a brilliant dark poem.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hours we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.

   With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

---

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

   Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

When I found out that Hitchens has written a memoir after he was diagnosed with cancer describing his thoughts regarding the illness and his thoughts about his ever nearing death, I immediately had to grab a copy and start reading. My reasons was that I was so anxious to find out if Hitchens maintained his convictions regarding god in his final moments, it’s one thing to have a theory about something so far from you and another thing when you are facing it. After reading this book I felt ashamed that I doubted his convictions and felt extreme admiration for the way he lived his final days.

As the news of his illness spread out, Christopher found as he expected that the theists  will try to make as much as possible of his cancer, they tried give it a supreme nature making it a direct punishment from god, Christopher with his wit and reason answer these gloating individuals as such, he asks which primate has the ability to know the will of god, and further he writes ( the vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all it could think off is exactly the cancer that my age and former life style would suggest that I got,…, and if you maintained that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia). Others prayed for him even established (Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day) he wondered what is the reason for their prayers, was it to recover from cancer or to convert his believes and achieves salvation. Christopher assures them that his convictions will remain firm and he will not be subjected to superstations untill his last breath. He even jokingly wondered, what will happen if he is actually cured from cancer. Some might have the idea that their prayers have saved him, which would somehow irritate him.

“Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice. Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is among the many gods in which (whom?) I do not believe.”

Christopher writes that he appreciates all the prayers he is getting. he just doesn’t want people to bother a deaf heaven with their cries. his opinion on prayers remains as it was. he wonders why believers can’t see the paradox, that the man who prays is a man who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong and also thinks that he can instruct god to put them right. (The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not…..
the prayers replicate the silliness of the mandate that god is enjoyed or thanked to do what he is going to do anyway).
as his disease progress he writes down how his daily existance has become a struggle. (I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so … considerate. )
his voice began to lose its strength and how that loss was huge for him. (Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice). his voice was his weapon by which he ridiculed his opponents.

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

when he used to give talks, he used to say that when faced with extension he would rather be fully conscious in order to experience death in the active not the passive. but one thing grave illness gave him. that it had made him examine familiar principles and reliable sayings. one particular saying started to annoy him for obvious reasons. that of Frederick Nietzsche (what doesn’t kill you can make you stronger ).

One can’t help but feel amazed that through all the illness and invasive treatments with their side effects, Christopher maintained his faculty and chain of thoughts and delivered one of his brilliant works. As his wife said (my husband was an impossible act to follow) it’s hard to think that someone like him will ever appear again, he was truly one of a kind.

 

 

 

 

Aubade by Philip Larkin

Not so many people can sum up that brief moment when we often think about death as Philip Larkin in his poem Aubade. fear, religion role and irrationality captured with elegance. I came across this poem when I was reading Christopher Hitchens (Mortality).

 

This poem is the perfect poem ever written about death.

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

---

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,

The anasthetic from which none come round.

---

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

---

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

Well, after reading (What I Believe), I decided to read Bertrand Russell lecture (Why I Am Not a Christian), and again at once I was amazed by his simplicity and clear logic. This lecture should be called (why I am not religious) as it appeals to all the three wide spread religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism). Certainly the logic behind his arguments can be applied to these three religious dogmas. What I like about Bertrand is how he delivers his messages, he tries to be as sensitive as possible to people of faith.

He sets immediately to define first what a Christian is. To call yourself a Christian you have to have an amount of a definite believes, and these are of dogmatic nature, that you must believe in god and immortality. If one doesn’t believe in those two things certainly he can’t call himself a Christian. Further than that one must have some kind of believe about Christ, that at the very least Christ is the best and wisest of men.

So Bertrand Russell examines these two aspects in his lecture, the existence of god and the character of Christ.

I will write only about the first aspect, the existence of God arguments from Bertrand views and in the future I will elaborate more on the rest of the lecture.

Here are the arguments;

The First Cause argument;

This argument maintains that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back to the chain of causes further and further you must come to a first cause, and that cause is God.

Simply this argument has no validity in Russell view, and he shows its fallacy as such; if everything must have a cause then god must have a cause. If there is anything can be without a cause it may very well be the world as god. There is no reason that the world could not have come without a cause nor that it always existed. The idea that everything must have a beginning is due to the lack of our imagination.

The Natural Law Argument;

This argument was common in the 18^th century under the influence of sir Isaac Newton, the argument states that all the natural laws must have a creator responsible for it. Off course this argument is the weakest as it comes merely from ignorance, Bertrand view is as such;

Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and, being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were you are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others? If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others ‐‐ the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it ‐‐ if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.

The Argument From Design;

The argument is; everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different we could not manage to live in it.

There is simply no evidence of design but on the other hand there evidence of adaptation. Furthermore Bertrand wit negates this argument with his simple logic;

 It is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti, and Mr. Winston Churchill?

The Moral Arguments For Deity;

This argument was introduced by Immanuel Kant in his book (the Critique of Pure Reason) after he disposed of the previous three arguments and it states the following; there would be no right and wrong unless God existed. That morality comes from god.

This argument and explanation was difficult for me to understand, but in brief Russell argues that if there is a difference between right and wrong and if this difference is due to the will of God, then for God himself, there is no difference between right and wrong. It is then ridiculous to make the statement “God is good”. If you want to believe that “God is good”, then you must say that right and wrong have a meaning that is independent of God’s will because God’s whims are good, independent of the fact that he made them. This makes right and wrong logically anterior to God.

The Argument For The Remedying Of Injustice;

The argument is; the existence of god is required in order to bring justice to the world. And since this world a far away from justice as it could be its essential to believe in the afterlife, to believe in hell and heaven sort out this injustice.

But for a scientific man there is no ground to believe in afterlife, and even if there is one its probable that there will be injustice there also;

” Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: “The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.” You would say: “Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment;” and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say: “Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one.”

Bertrand Russell end his argument against the existence of god by saying that all these intellectual arguments are irrelevant for the majority of people simply because most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. From this end I would like to add a personal note.

I was born a Muslim, and ever since I was little people have said to me and others this statement (how lucky are you to be born a Muslim), and I would like to emphasize on the word LUCKY. I don’t consider it luck to be subjected to childhood indoctrination whether it’s Islam, Christianity or Judaism as this indoctrination takes away the intellectual ability and limits our choices, so in a sense we are born and brought under the believes of others not our own. By the time we grow up its often too late to use our intellect as these believes becomes rooted in our mind that even thinking about them will bring anxiety and fear. So I don’t consider it being LUCKY at all.

On the other hand if being born a Muslim is LUCKY, what about the million others how were not so lucky as me. It’s an apparent fact in today’s world that our religion is determined highly by our geography, if I was born in a Christian country I might have been a Christian, In that case would I have considered myself unlucky? If god is of omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite Deity, wouldn’t he give everyone the same chance as the others to follow his instructions, he certainly would have no reason to prefer some over the others. An Omniscient god could have spread religion to all humanity in all the languages understood at the same time allowing for little skepticism, he certainly would have no reason to have a preference, unless god is biased and lacks justice. And then who would want to believe in such a god.

You can also say, we are born into a religion and thinking about it is an illness

What I Believe by Bertrand Russell

This essay was published in 1925, in which Bertrand Russell examines what he believes in, one of the most enjoyable reads I have encountered it’s an essential read for everyone who likes to think outside the conventional way of thinking that societies and religions force us to follow,  the essay simply address our logic in thinking about some fundamental elements in our lives, it advises the reader to follow common sense and break away from irrationality. in the preface Bertrand Russell writes that  in human affairs we can see that there are forces making for happiness and forces working for misery, we do not know which will prevail but to act wisely we must be aware of both. The essay was evidence in the 1940 court proceeding to declare Bertrand unfit for lecturing at City College New York, strangely enough a decade later he was presented with noble prize of literature.

The essay is divided into five parts and here is my summary of each;

Nature and man ;

As the physical world becomes revealed with science it becomes less and less interesting in the sense that knowledge destroys the notion of the supernatural. Man physiology can be reduced to its physical basis, mental phenomena seems to be bound up with material structure, so we cannot suppose that the individual thinking can survive the death of the body since it distorts the organization of the brain and dissipates the energy which utilize the brain tracts. Thus the proposition of immortality is irrational and mostly improbable.

“Persons are part of the everyday world with which science is concerned, and the conditions which determine their existence are discoverable. A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilized at death, and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based. “

In the case of the soul, logic says that the soul can be indivisible that it certainly cannot occur as a whole within the human body, Bertrand believes that the soul is part of human physiology that through conception, gestation and infancy no one can believe that soul is perfect and complete, the soul grows parallel with the human body which makes it more probable the soul has a material element within our bodies.

So what make men so irrational as to believe in such things ( immortality and the survival of the soul after death ), Bertrand says its the fear of death, as fear is the basis of all religious dogmas. Immortality which is offered by religion relieves people of the fear of death.

The Good Life ;

Many people have different views of what constitutes a good life but Bertrand believes that a good life is one that inspired by love and guided by knowledge. and both are extensible, so no matter how good can life be it can always get better and neither one of them can produce a good life without the other. love is sometimes regarded  more essential as it can lead to seeking knowledge in order to benefit the loved ones.

love as emotion cover a variety of feelings ranging between pure delight  and pure benevolence (the desire of others wellbeing ) . when conflict arise between the two it should be solved by compromise not by complete surrender of either. in aiming for good life the limits of humans must be brought to mind. and here when knowledge come .

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

 

Regarding knowledge Bertrand speaks about scientific knowledge as he disapproves of ethical knowledge. If we desire to achieve some end knowledge show us the means and this knowledge may loosely pass as ethical but Bertrand do not believe that we can decide which conduct is right or wrong except by reference to it consequences, all moral rules must be tested by examining whether or not it lead to ends that we desire .

And here he speaks of ends that we desire rather than (what we ought to desire), the difference being is that what we ought to desire is usually what others want us to, others being societies, authorities and religion. Since all behaviors springs from desire it’s clear that ethical notions have no importance except that they influence desire and they do this through the desire for approval and the fear of disapproval.

Moral Rules ;

The practical rules of morals arise from the conflict of desire whether of individual or different people at the same time. Current morality is a curious blend between utilitarianism and superstations, but the superstitious part has the stronger hold and that’s natural since it’s the origin of current moral rules. When acts are thoughts displeasing to gods it’s widely regarded as sinful and immoral. Bertrand asks us to examine the divine laws as we are men of science, that we should inquire whether the act does harm or whether the believe that the act is sinful is what causes the harm. In his view he believes if the act is innocent and does not cause harm to anyone then it’s acceptably moral even if it goes against superstitious scriptures.

Salvation – Individual and Social ;

Traditionally the religious life is a dialogue between the soul and god, so if an individual obeys the will of god presumably he achieves individual salvation regardless of the state of his community. But Bertrand thinks that in the modern world we should aspire to social rather than individual salvation as it leads to the good life. The good life as he said consist of love guided by knowledge, this knowledge is mainly attainable by multitude of factors that requires the unity of the community. So we require a different code of guidance other than religion that considers the welfare of the whole society.

Science and Happiness;

The purpose of the moralist is to improve men’s behavior, but Bertrand disapproves of the methods they use to achieve that purpose. They either use moral exhortation or a system of rewards and punishments. Bertrand thinks that there are other methods that can be effective. These methods rely on first identifying the roots of bad behavior which are either ignorance or bad desires. In the case of ignorance the solution is knowledge, but in case of bad desire it’s much complicated.

Bad desires is defined as desires that thwart the desires of others or thwart more desires than they assist. They spring from active malevolence. The causes of malevolence in the society is fear, Bertrand speaks about fear as an irrational passion not of the rational preservation of misfortune. This fear can be compacted by increasing social security and cultivating courage. And this is the duty of the scientific moralist. Other causes of malevolence include envy and disappointment. Envy is compacted by encouraging the idea of collective enterprise rather than competition. Where envy is unavoidable it must be used to as stimulus to one’s own efforts not to the thwarting of the efforts of rivals.

These are just some of the parts that I liked about the essay, it’s by no mean a complete summary. I think this essay is one of the most brilliant concise texts I have ever read, I found out that most of the things that Bertrand Russel believes in are also my believes. I would advise everyone to go and read it.

 

 

 

 

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

The book is heavy, at the end it keeps you on edge and leaves a lump on your throat and you just keep hoping for a brighter end that will not come.

What makes this book great is that it’s based on a true story, it’s set on Iceland in 1828, it’s about Agnes Magnúsdóttir one of three convicted of murder and sentenced to death after killing two people and burnt them, as they are waiting for the execution date each of them is sent to live with a district officer family and Offered a priest to help guide them to absolution in their final days. Agnes has chosen a young Priest who showed her kindness in the past and was sent to Kornsa farm. The family Agnes was sent to was understandably reluctant to accept a criminal among their house. They meet Agnes with the prejudice and judgment carried by her crime. But as time passes pits of her history is revealed as Agnes opens up to the priest in the bedstofa while the family listens, and they feel her loneliness and the hardship she went through , she soon becomes part of the family, they care for her and she for them.

The story is set around an Icelandic community that is governed by the weather, much of their lives evolve around surviving the next winter, the families work as a whole unit even in the way they live ( the Badstofa) such an amazing way where the whole family, servants and farmworkers share the same space with no divisions, they all share the same work and the food. I also got to understand how the Icelandic naming is done, by adding the word (son or dottir ) to the end of the father name while keeping the first name as it is ( that’s why all those football players from Iceland and Sweden end with SON, finally!).

The Badstofa; A Heated living space shared by all the households

Agnes was the last person to be executed in Iceland and her story is well know by the people there, after that the capital punishment has been suspended. Hannah Kent who is Australian ! did a tremendous research for her story, each chapter within her book is opened by a real translated letter of correspondence regarding the trail and the events surrounding it. Though the view of Agnes in history is a bit controversial and often presented in local stories as wicked and manipulative, Hannah choses to present a rather ambiguous version of Agnes, a more lonely and misunderstood version.

The Author herself Hannah Kent by the execution  site where the real events took place

My favorite part of the story is the end, it was very hard to go through, I sort of had a tear waiting to be shed, I was keeping my hope up for Agnes up to the last page. I love how writers have the ability to capture the thoughts that goes through their characters minds when they are facing death, and Hannah is no exception to this, her end of the book was truly an epic.

“You will be lost. There is no final home, there is no burial, there is only a constant scattering, a thwarted journey that takes you everywhere without offering you a way home, for there is no home, there is only this cold island and your dark self spread thinly upon it until you take up the wind’s howl and mimic its loneliness you are not going home you are gone silence will claim you, suck your life down into its black waters and churn out stars that might remember you, but if they do not they will not say, they will not say, and if no one will say your name you are forgotten I am forgotten.”

I always had a personal view regarding the death penalty, I don’t agree with it and I think I will never do. I mean what is point and benefit. The dead will always be dead and another death won’t bring them back or add any benefit to those who survive them. The cruelty of the death penalty l think is in the duality of its punishment, first by the waiting and then by the death itself.

Everyone should read this book but with caution, it certainly stirred up emotions I thought gone.

Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

Disclaimer ; Julian Barnes is my favorite author.

That’s taken out of the way, I have to say that Flaubert’s Parrot is a very enjoyable book, certainly not a typical novel but more like a biography written as a novel. Julian Barnes has a way with words that make you want to read whatever he writes be it a fiction, non-fiction or an article. He is just brilliant.

It’s about Geoffrey Braithwaite a scholar doing a biography on the French author Gustave Flaubert, he seems to be fascinated by his personality and by his writings especially (Madame Bovary). As the title hints he searches for a parrot that Flaubert used in one of his stories. during this search he embarks on a journay to Gustave home town Croisset, during that journay he introduce us to Gustave through Gustave’s writings, letters and through his friends.

the book starts by  Geoffrey critiquing himself saying ;

“Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we live well alone? Why aren’t the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writer’s personality ; yet still we disobediently pursue.”

Though in his case I think he did it to defend his favorite writer from the criticism he was subjected to. I have to admit that I developed a liking for Gustave Flaubert after reading this book some of his views and thoughts are just fascinating and I loved this book because it introduced me to a unique philosopher and  writer.

The style of the novel is unique and enjoyable, each chapter has its own style whether it’s the chronology of Gustave through his quotes or comparing him to Animals in (The Flaubert bestiary ) or through enlisting some of the coincidences he went through and how ironic they were (Snap). In ( the Case Against ) chapter he defends Gustave views on humanity, democracy, involvement in life and women. My favourite chapter is (Pure story) in  which much is revealed about Geoffrey Braithwaite and the reasons behind his obsession with Gustave.

Gustave Flaubert is interesting character he comes out mostly as a pessimist but I guess that’s the case of all Realists, my advice is to read this book holding a pencil because you don’t want to miss underlying the many brilliant quotes. Some of Flaubert quotes that I loved within the book;

Life

“If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much'”

“When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up. ”

“Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?”

Happiness

“Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution.”

“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”

Friendship

“With me, friendship is like the camel; once started, there is no way of stopping it”

People

“People are like food. There are lots of bourgeois who seem to me like boiled beef: all steam, no juice, and no taste (it fills you up straight away and is much eaten by bumpkins). Other people are like white meat, freshwater fish, slender eels from the muddy river-bed, oysters (of varying degrees of saltiness), calves’ heads, and sugared porridge. Me? I’m like a runny, stinking macaroni cheese, which you have to eat a lot of times before you develop a taste for it. You do finally get to like it, but only after it has made your stomach heave on countless occasions.”

Love

“Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.”

Feelings and the heart

“As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.”

“Each one of us has in his heart a royal chamber. I have had mine bricked up, but it is still there.”

“Some people have a tender heart and a tough mind. I’m the opposite: I have a tender mind but a rough heart. I’m like a coconut which keeps its milk locked away beneath several layers of wood. You need an axe to open it, and then what do you find as often as not? A sort of sour cream.”

“My heart remains intact, but my feelings are sharpened on the one hand and dulled on the other, like an old knife that has been too often sharpened, which has notches, and breaks easily.”

Patriotism

“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.”

Grief

“And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.”

Despair

“Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.”

The Past

“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.”

“It isn’t so different, the way we wander through the past. Lost, disordered, fearful, we follow what signs there remain; we read the street names, but cannot be confident where we are.”

The Realist ; Gustave Flaubert

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

 “Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.”  

This is one of the stories that you live while reading it, powerful book and provocative, makes you think and wonder about a lot of things in life, the purpose of it and how hard and horrific it can be yet as humans we prevail we always find a way to justify it and coup with it.

Winner of the Man-booker award 2014 a deserved win in my opinion, some classify the story as a war story others as a love story, in an interview done with Richard Flanagan he said he consider it a love story. the story is set around a group of Australian POWs in Japanese Camp working on the “The Death Railway”  taking Colonel Surgeon Dorrigo Evans as it’s central figure. How he found love for a brief moment in his life yet it affected it all, and how he was forced into becoming a model, a hero and leader by his circumstances.

What I loved mostly is how Richard captured the situation of the POWs from different views, from the POWs as they try to survive and find meaning in their suffering, and their Japanese counterparts as they try to find a justification for the cruelty they are imposing. And how both trying to coup afterward and find a way to continue living.

The love story was about the hurt and agony that comes with love rather than the joy, how that it’s sometimes can be sudden and it rocks the foundation of all your life, everything else becomes unimportant and trivial in front of it making it a highly destructive force .

The story is heavy and made me amazed and sorry on how much cruelty humans are willing to impose on fellow humans, how war degrades morals and leads to such unimaginable horrors. And then you just feel helpless because you realize that this is forever trend as long as human existed. Dorrigo certainly felt so and I loved how Richard Flanagan put it;

“For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.”

The Death Railway also known as the The Burma Railway was a 415-kilometre (258 mi) railway between Ban Pong, Thailand, and Thanbyuzayat, Burma, it was built by the Empire of Japan in 1943 to support its forces in the Burma campaign of World War II. Forced labour was used in its construction. More than 180,000 Asian civilian labourers (Romusha) and 60,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) worked on the railway. Of these, estimates of Romusha deaths are little more than guesses, but probably about 90,000 died. 12,621 Allied POWs died during the construction.

Starving Australian and Dutch POWs on the Burma Railway

 

 

 

 

 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”

As soon as i Finished this book, I immediately googled up Mark Haddon, and I expected one of two things either that he has a kid who is autistic or that he is a psychiatrist, and to my surprise he was neither, and it just assert the brilliancy of this book.

This book is not meant to be a literary masterpiece considering that it’s written from the perspective of a 15yrs old autistic child Christopher, but definitely meant to be enjoyable. It gives the reader a glimpse inside the fantastic mind of Christopher.

Chris loves animals because animals are predictable and don’t lie, he loves math because it follow logic, he never lies and expect everyone to speak the truth, he loves solving problems and mysteries because he can detect every minor detail that surrounds him. On the other hand Chris has a complete awareness of his limitations and deals with them on his own way sometimes by groaning and sometimes by defeating them with planning . He has no understanding of emotions, or metaphors.

The story start by Chris trying to solve the murder of his neighbor’s dog, that leads him to a series of discoveries, that his father lied to him about his mother being dead and that he killed the dog, leading him to be frightened of his father so he embark on a journey to London to be with his mother. So the story changes from mystery solving to a brave journey.

The book is a quick lovely read, it shows you how the life of an autistic feels like and how it affect everyone that surround it. At the end of it you can’t but feel but admiring and sympathetic for people who deal with it.