« Even if you feel at home in time and space today, you know that you are already in mourning for the future loss of everything that is beautiful. This is the first time humanity is mourning in the future tense. »
« In order to survive amidst this bleak existence, the Mediterranean people established two distinct strategies: hopelessness or salvation. Some embraced hopelessness as the best way to approach the absurd condition of human life. »
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« To see the West as a process means that France was at one time westernized. Rome was westernized. Greece was westernized »
« This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. »
« To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere. »
Visiting his hometown, Tartus, he opened a drawer of old family photographs.
« Once the most social democratic country in Europe, and then, in the 1990s, the most neoliberal one, Sweden now aims to become the most nationalist one. »
Friendship is the only stable social relationship for which « paperwork » has not been invented.
« I think reimagining relationships of distance and proximity is interesting in order to go beyond romantic ideas of neighbors. »
« I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse. »
« Dreams could show an internalization of oppression just as easily as a resistance to oppression — which would mean a dream isn’t so free a realm after all. »
« This summer my inner warrior was kissed back alive by an unlikely figure: the Pope. »
Black on white, with a glint of copper. And inside: the Mediterranean as a sea between; dreams, and their political life; headaches — human, divine, and artificial. A woman steps in Tangiers; looted libraries whisper their afterlives; strangers write to strangers. What Sweden isn’t; Yugoslav tales of literary theft ascending; an angel is saved — or not — in a broken geography. Eight hours that don’t make a day, and the question of what the West means to the rest.
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