Bayn Al-Qasarayn

The young man rolled over in bed. He turned his mind away from the deluge of memories and began to follow the beats of the dough once more. He looked around the room, slowly becoming visible as the sun rose outside the closed shutters. His mother was making bread! She would continue to knead the dough morning after morning. God forbid that anything should distract her from concentrating her attention on preparing meals, washing the clothes or cleaning the furnishings. Great activities would not interfere with minor ones. Society would always be flexible enough to embrace exalted and trivial matters and to welcome both equally. But not so fast…. Was a mother not part of life? She had given birth to him, and sons fueled the revolution. She fed him, and nourishment fueled the sons. In fact, nothing about life was trivial. But would not some day come when a great event would rock all Egyptians, leaving none of the differences of opinion that had been present at the coffee hour five days ago? How remote that day seemed… then a smile came to his lips when this question leapt into his mind: What would his father do if he learned about his continual struggle, day after day? What would his tyrannical, despotic father do about it and his tender, affectionate mother? He smiled anxiously, because he would be exposed to problems no less significant than if the military authority itself should learn his secret.

He pulled back the covers and sat up in bed murmuring, “It’s all the same whether I live or die. Faith is stronger than death, and death is nobler than ignominy. Let’s enjoy the hope, compared to which life seems unimportant. Welcome to this new morning of freedom. May God carry out whatever He has decreed.”

- Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz.

This book made me shift uneasily from my position many a time. The setting was restrained and the plot excruciatingly slow. The characters formed almost the entirety of the book - and more often than not I put the book away and declared all their drama too wearing. But it was not wearing in the typical annoying manner that can warrant its dismissal due to boredom - rather, it elicited  an intrigue to love them in a second, and hate them with renewed vigour soon afterwards.

Mahfouz spared none of the characters of his exposition, he seemingly made no effort to make the reader side with anything. His line of storytelling would sometimes leave traces of a message he was trying to get across, and within a few pages afterwards, through his turn of events, he would trample it nonchalantly. The glaring tale was that of Cairo, and he told it with the kind of affection which could only be believable by the way he made it so infallible, imperfect.

At points where the story got unbearable, because the story, as it was, allowed me absolutely no room for the construction I wished for them - for the construction most books would allow - Fahmy Ahmad Abd El-Jawad made the next page worth turning. He made me want to throw the book in frustration when he lost his strong outward resolve in confrontation with his father, even more when he could not help but cry - but second afterwards, in the same pathetic manner, he defied the latter and ran out of the room, thus making me postpone my desire to give it up.

And guess what Mr. Mahfouz did. He killed him off just before the book ended.

Thanks a million. Here's looking forward to the next two.

Another Pointless Post

Oh, this is so nice, I can lie here this way forever...

Ba'da dhalika dhahabtu ila alkhizanati kutubi haithu yujadu kutub (wa ma aakhar?) wa qara'tu kitaba amamaha suratun binjamin faranklin.

"Reading was the only amusement I allowed myself. I spent no time in taverns, games, or frolics of any kind; and my industry in my business continued as indefatigable as it was necessary" Benjamin Franklin, 'Autobiography" (1771-1784).

A 'shame on you' from 241 years ago, no less.

Yeah Nah Yeah

That awkward moment when the awkward moment you were at yesterday made its way into the awkward moments on 9GAG. It's the object of many's intellectual affection, Professor Stephen Bottomley himself.

Taken from here.

In Vain I Have Struggled, It Will Not Do

My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I abhor and loathe you.

Who else read the title in Colin Firth's voice?

Ahem. I have tried drawing the line between the blog and excessive university ramblings because, well, they tend to be annoying (read: oh my god my studies are so difficult I wanna set myself on fire aaaargh....). But I have reconsidered that virtually nobody reads this blog and if one is to find such posts annoying, it is likely that other posts are equally annoying anyway . I would like to have some written remembrance of how it is to be a student when I graduate, of living in that rites-of-passage rabbit hole before venturing out into the real world. 

-------

Just now I have typed a tirade about my current concerns and I am horrified by how self-centered it is. I realised that this was why I was doubtful about treating this blog as some sort of an online diary - my overwhelming shallowness will seek center stage and I will no longer be able to hide it behind short, vague posts.

The original intention of this post was to complain about how hard Corporations Law is - does it get any more annoying than that? Ha! I planned to become wax lyrical, wax philosophical, giving a short discourse as to why this area of law is forever elusive to me, but even such an attempt is elusive per se.

Trying to even comprehend what I have been trying to read is like my attempting to learn Science - I have no flair for it, absolutely none. For this darned subject I have two textbooks totalling up to over 4000 pages of minute words (I'm not even joking) with no pictures, filled with very little content that my feeble mind would be capable of engaging with.

I am most probably, at best, going to scrape off with a mere pass for this subject. And having to face that realisation in every single sentence I try to digest over literally 3 days of grinding them is enough to make anyone go hoolaa.

Psst, Ariah. You forgot something.

What's that?

No one cares, really. 

The all-nighter is not happening tonight. I should go grab some sleep, for my own sake. 

p/s: do tell me of how horrible you're having it, misery loves company. I'd like to feel better about my own situation. Anybody? (....body? ...body? ...body?)

Catherine Sloper

"... In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. She never, that I know of, stole raisins out of the pantry; but she devoted her pocket-money to the purchase of cream-cakes..."

- Washington Square, Henry James. Pdf here. (You're welcome!)

Apathy

"... the student activist culture has become splintered. It functions in categories of niched, specialised enthusiasts. These are students who have waded through the wealth of available information and are highly knowledgeable on the ins-and-outs of their specific cause but operate within their own activist realm, mutually exclusive from the other causes. So whilst we may offer a nod of agreement to fair trade initiatives, or sign a petition in favour of gay rights of green power, the majority of us have only a general understanding of these issues and so are reluctant to deeply engage in advocating major change. Replacing what was once a mainstay of an inclusive campus culture, there is now an increasing tendency to designate the 'enviro, hippy type' as the keepers of the student activist tradition, whilst maligning them for their misguided allegiance to a bygone generation of protest and placard rebellion. And with sociologists and behavioural researchers telling us that we are more career driven than any previous generation, it's difficult to simply accept the honourable aspirations of these passionate few without viewing them with a suspicious, disingenuous glint that it's all part of some greater self-serving resume-padding exercise."

- Lisa Visentin, ' Where Have All The Protests Gone?'

Handwritten

Behind him I stood, straining my eyes - and he moved a friendly smile. As he moved on to observe my preoccupation, as I did his - a chuckle escaped him.

"I thought I was going blind. This is Braille, after all" 

I concurred by giving a slight laugh. The parchment we were observing was a letter by Louis Braille, who was born a blind man, and is - according to Helen Keller - the source of indebtedness by blind people of retrospect and on the future - in the same manner in which mankind is indebted to Gutenberg. I moved on to the next transcript on display - Charles Darwin.

This was just this afternoon - a windy and chilly affair - and I was running across the lawn of the national library, ascending the stairs in haste lest I be denied of admission due to being an hour late. My audience was booked for 2 pm, and after spilling excuses I was inside. Having only an hour and a half to explore Handwritten, I set to the task at hand immediately. Instinctively I took my phone out, and proceeded to take a picture of Hegel's letter regarding the importance of dwelling in philology before traversing into the study of philosophy, only to be told to delete it by the exhibition official.

But at least I made away with these droolworthy postcards...

I was overcome with awkward awe as I primarily walked through the Justinian code manuscripts - the authoritative text which paved the way for the 21st century Western civil law. Among others - Galileo, Napoleon, Newton, Marx, Curie, von Bismarck, Einstein, Beethoven, Cook, Michelangelo, Watt, Volta, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Descartes, Brahms, Handel, Austen, Pasteur, Nobel, Machiavelli, Nightingale, Grimm, Kafka - among others, I lost count as well as memory.

But despite of leaving me feeling high, I was rather worn out. Not once did I yawn after an hour of walking around the gallery (unforgivably rude, as some would see it) - and I retired to a bench in the middle of the room, looking for a sense of liveliness in the guidebook instead. The stature of the things in front of me was undeniable - it was indeed a perspective of a thousand years of history being put there for my experience - for me to see, to feel. But they did not trigger the same jubilation that I experience when coming into consideration of, say, the judgment of Mason CJ on Mabo. Indeed, Eddie Koiki Mabo was the centerpiece of the exhibition for me. I spent a considerable time experiencing the text that he wrote on a regularly-lined A4 paper, using a ballpoint pen, as with the typical nature of self-written texts. I read his plea to his people, and to the pro bono heroes of the profession I aspire to enter, regarding the indigenous people's right to native entitlement of land and laws - spurning a ten-year battle for almost a century of sovereign denial.

Mr. Mabo's self potrait- placed beside his text.

Sitting on that bench, in the middle of all these manuscripts, written by those who have contributed to writing arguably the world's primary history,  I chanced upon a realisation. This was not my history, and I could only feel detachment. These letters did not elicit a scene in my head of the centuries of change, they did as much as to remind me that these people - who I revere as much as the next average person - are not part of my consciousness, they did not form my conception of the past that I claim to be mine. 

And instead of feeling deprived, feeling denied of the opportunities traditionally available to those raised in more affluent surroundings (such as early exposure to literature, and musical education, etc.), I breathed a sigh of certainty: my real history is somewhere else. 

In those tar streets of Taman Aman Tiga. In that preexisting state of messiness that my house has eternally been. In those wooden steps of St. Dominic. In the small library in Fajar. In the PCs of MacroTech in Milimewa - and of the 50 cents noodles in Angel Cafe. In the gravel-road rides to enter Silabukan. In the small buses that go to Sepagaya. In the universe that Batu Dua was. In the green-ness of the road to a certain SMS.  In the small town I knew every inch of. In the faces of those I have known all my life. In the conversations, or rather non-conversations with the ones I love.

I could go on forever, see?