01 — Opening atmosphere
I can't say that I have read Naguib Mahfouz, but I want to. I want to read about his reverence for the dervish Umm Khulthum. I do not know Khalil Gibran; I read him only a few times, ever so briefly, as a teenager. But I wish to read Gibran more closely now, not for all the rage of rediscovery but to understand his meter. This renewed interest has led me to ask, as others have asked before me, did not Hemingway spoil us for choice with his writing style so much so that almost everyone his writing touches is influenced by it? And so, in my search for writing styles close to Hemingway's, I have come across a few authors who, through their essays and stories, have deeply settled into that uncharted dark blue corner of human fragility. Perhaps none so acutely as Orhan Pamuk and Joan Didion. It's with no small measure of commitment that I mention these two names here. Let me demonstrate what I mean. Orhan Pamuk writes, 'To be happy I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take their daily spoon of medicine everyday. When I learned as a child that diabetics needed an injection every day, I felt bad for them as anyone might. I may have thought of them as half dead...'
02 — Rising movement
During these dark days, I feel as if there is no line between life and death. I don't want to speak to anyone. Just as well maybe, since no one desires to speak to me too when I am in this state...
03 — Afterimage
Hemingway writes, 'In the late summer of those years we lived in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swifly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were dusty, and the leaves fell early that year, and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and the leaves stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.
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