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| B01MS8EZ9X
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| 329
| Jan 10, 2017
| Jan 10, 2017
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it was amazing
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My 3 favorite stories from this collection would have to be: Traumphysik by Monica Byrne ★★★★★ (5/5) Her Scales Shine Like Music by Rajnar Vajra ★★★★★ ( My 3 favorite stories from this collection would have to be: Traumphysik by Monica Byrne ★★★★★ (5/5) Her Scales Shine Like Music by Rajnar Vajra ★★★★★ (5/5) That Game We Played During the War by Carrie Vaughn ★★★★★ (5/5) And the least favorite ones are: Finnegan's Field by Angela Slatter ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5) A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) The Great Detective by Delia Sherman ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) Ratings for other stories in the collection are as follows: The Three Lives of Sonata James by Lettie Prell ★★★★★ (5/5) A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark ★★★★★ (5/5) Everything That Isn't Winter by Margaret Killjoy ★★★★★ (5/5) The Weight of Memories by Cixin Liu ★★★★☆ (4/5) The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton ★★★★☆ (4/5) The City Born Great by N. K. Jemisin ★★★★☆ (4/5) Lullaby for a Lost World by Aliette de Bodard ★★★★☆ (4/5) The Weather by Caighlan Smith ★★★★☆ (4/5) Breaking Water by Indrapramit Das ★★★★☆ (4/5) Your Orisons May Be Recorded by Laurie Penny ★★★★☆ (4/5) The Caretakers by David Nickle ★★★★☆ (4/5) Terminal by Lavie Tidhar ★★★★☆ (4/5) Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage by Alix E. Harrow ★★★★☆ (4/5) meat+drink by Daniel Polansky ★★★★☆ (4/5) Clover by Charlie Jane Anders ★★★☆☆ (3/5) The High Lonesome Frontier by Rebecca Campbell ★★★☆☆ (3/5) The Art of Space Travel by Nina Allan ★★★☆☆ (3/5) The Maiden Thief by Melissa Marr ★★★☆☆ (3/5) La beauté sans vertu by Genevieve Valentine ★★★☆☆ (3/5) ...more |
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| 4.35
| 159,979
| Oct 30, 2013
| Sep 02, 2014
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our old intimacy we would have had to speak our secret thoughts, but I didn’t have the strength to find the words and she, who perhaps had the strength, didn’t have the desire, didn’t see the use. • I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things. • Time, as in all things, was decisive. Nino would last a single night, he would leave me in the morning. Even though I had known him forever, he was made of dreams, and holding on to him forever would have been impossible: he came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, he didn’t face the future. • She attacked me in very low but shrill tones, hissing with reddened eyes: We are nothing to you, you tell us nothing until the last minute, the young lady thinks she’s somebody because she has an education, because she writes books, because she’s marrying a professor, but my dear, you came out of this belly and you are made of this substance, so don’t act superior and don’t ever forget that if you are intelligent, I who carried you in here am just as intelligent, if not more, and if I had had the chance I would have done the same as you, understand? • every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shoved into a corner, waiting for an outlet, and in the end the outlet arrives. • (The world is profoundly unjust and must be changed, but both the peaceful coexistence between American imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracies, on the one hand, and the reformist politics of the European, and especially the Italian, workers’ parties, on the other, are directed at keeping the proletariat in a subordinate wait-and-see situation that throws water on the fire of revolution, with the result that if the global stalemate wins, if social democracy wins, it will be capital that triumphs through the centuries and the working class will fall victim to enforced consumerism.) • I found to my annoyance that I was poised between opposing feelings: on the one hand, a strong sympathy for all those young men and women who in that place were flaunting, gestures and voices, with an absolute lack of discipline, and, on the other, the fear that the disorder I had been fleeing since I was a child might, now, right here, seize me and fling me into the middle of the commotion, where an incontrovertible power—a Janitor, a Professor, the Rector, the Police—would quickly find me at fault, me, me who had always been good, and punish me. • Those girls, on the other hand, to varying degrees, must have grown up in easier circumstances, and were more prepared to change their skin; maybe they felt their presence in that place, in that atmosphere, not as a derailment but as a just and urgent choice. • Now that I have some money, I thought, now that I’ll earn who knows how much, I can have some of the things I missed. Or maybe not, I was now too cultured, too ignorant, too controlled, too accustomed to freezing life by storing up ideas and facts, too close to marriage and settling down, in short too obtusely fixed within an order that here appeared to be in decline. That last thought frightened me. • And he tried to assume an expression of benevolent irony, but in reality he had that new tone of someone who has an important task to complete and gives only sparingly to all the rest: • And so, in spite of his virtues, he was a frivolous, superficial man, an animal organism who dripped sweat and fluids and left behind, like the residue of a careless pleasure, living material conceived, nourished, shaped within female bellies. • She left in a daze, with the impression of having exposed herself too fully to people who, yes, were good-hearted but who, even if they understood it in the abstract, in the concrete couldn’t understand a thing. I know—it stayed in her head without becoming sound—I know what a comfortable life full of good intentions means, you can’t even imagine what real misery is. • Her heartbeats were now so powerful that they seemed capable of exploding the interlocking solidity of objects. The tenacity of the grip that held the walls of the room together had weakened, the violent knocking in her throat was shaking the bed, cracking the plaster, unsoldering the upper part of her skull, maybe it would shatter the child, yes, it would shatter him like a plastic puppet, splitting open his chest and stomach and head to reveal his insides. • And if you catch her again, she’ll slip away again, she’s an eel. This is her problem: even though she’s extremely intelligent, she can’t understand what she can do and what she can’t. That’s because she hasn’t yet found a real man. • I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage. • But the fact remained, incontrovertible, that they had accepted me, that I was about to marry Pietro, with their consent, that I was about to enter a protective family, a sort of well-fortified castle from which I could proceed without fear or to which I could retreat if I were in danger. So it was urgent that I get used to that new membership, and above all I had to be conscious of it. • I was curious. I now felt that I belonged to a legitimate power, universally admired, haloed by a high level of culture, and I wanted to see what garish guise was being given to the power I had had before my eyes since childhood—the vulgar pleasure of bullying, the unpunished practice of crime, the smiling tricks of obedience to the law, the display of profligacy—as embodied by the Solara brothers. • He didn’t want her in order to have sex and then forget her. He wanted the subtlety of her mind with all its ideas. He wanted her imagination. And he wanted her without ruining her, to make her last. He wanted her not to screw her—that word applied to Lila disturbed him. He wanted to kiss her and caress her. He wanted to be caressed, helped, guided, commanded. He wanted to see how she changed with the passage of time, how she aged. He wanted to talk with her and be helped to talk. • Certainly she was false, and she was ungrateful, and I, in spite of all that had changed for me, continued to feel inferior. I felt that I would never free myself from that inferiority, and that seemed to me intolerable. • For years after that, we didn’t see each other, we only talked on the phone. We became for each other fragments of a voice, without any visual corroboration. But the wish that she would die remained in a far corner, I tried to get rid of it but it wouldn’t go away. • Who knows what feeling I would have had about Naples, about myself, if I had waked every morning not in my neighborhood but in one of those buildings along the shore. What am I seeking? To change my origins? To change, along with myself, others, too? • This life of another, she said, clings to you in the womb first and then, when it finally comes out, it takes you prisoner, keeps you on a leash, you’re no longer your own master. • “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.” • Also, I had been forced by the powerful presence of Lila to imagine myself as I was not. I was added to her, and I felt mutilated as soon as I removed myself. Not an idea, without Lila. Not a thought I trusted, without the support of her thoughts. Not an image. I had to accept myself outside of her. • The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence. • I had in my head thoughts I didn’t want to formulate even to myself; I was afraid that the facts would magically fit the words. But I couldn’t cancel out the sentences; in my mind I heard their syntax all ready, and I was frightened by it, fascinated, horrified, seduced. I had trained myself to find an order by establishing connections between distant elements, but here it had got out of hand • But I never called nor did she call me. I was convinced that the long voice thread that had been our only contact for years hadn’t helped us. We had maintained the bond between our two stories, but by subtraction. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other. • Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her. • The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition. • “The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” • I hated competing in looks with another woman, especially under the gaze of a man, • Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object. • That for a while gave me a sense of irresponsibility, maybe even of innocence, as if the friend of Lila, the wife of Pietro, the mother of Dede and Elsa had nothing to do with the child-girl-woman who loved Nino and finally had made love with him. • Seeing each other was a terrible idea. We discovered that, instead of waning, desire had flared up and made a thousand demands with brazen urgency. If at a distance, on the telephone, words allowed us to fantasize, constructing glorious prospects but also imposing on us an order, containing us, frightening us, finding ourselves together, in the tiny space of the car, careless of the terrible heat, gave concreteness to our delirium, gave it the cloak of inevitability, made it a tile in the great subversive season under way, made it consistent with the forms of realism of that era, those which asked for the impossible. • He would aim at pulling me inside the materiality of desires. He would show me that our only chance was a secret relationship lived to exhaustion, amid evil actions and pleasures. The way was to betray, invent lies, leave together. ...more |
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Aug 27, 2024
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Aug 27, 2024
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| 0593420330
| 9780593420331
| B09BV2JNWV
| 3.82
| 123,018
| May 03, 2022
| May 03, 2022
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liked it
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★★★☆ ☆ (3/5) A selection of my favorite passages Bonds: A Novel | Harold Vanner · Solomon Rask was, therefore, a purveyor not only of the finest ★★★☆ ☆ (3/5) A selection of my favorite passages Bonds: A Novel | Harold Vanner · Solomon Rask was, therefore, a purveyor not only of the finest cigars, cigarillos, and pipe blends but also (and mostly) of excellent conversation and political connections. · The tobacco business could not have interested Benjamin less. He disliked both the product— the primitive sucking and puffing, the savage fascination with smoke, the bittersweet stench of rotten leaves— and the congeniality around it, which his father had enjoyed so much and exploited so well. Nothing disgusted him more than the misty complicities of the smoking room. · It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. This became clearer to him in time. The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details. There was no need for him to touch a single banknote or engage with the things and people his transaction affected. All he had to do was think, speak, and, perhaps, write. And the living creature would be set in motion, drawing beautiful patterns on its way into realms of increasing abstraction, sometimes following appetites of its own that Benjamin never could have anticipated— and this gave him some additional pleasure, the creature trying to exercise its free will. He admired and understood it, even when it disappointed him. · Helen felt softly vicious, possessed by a vague desire to do harm. She realized she was peering through the bottom of boredom. There was violence on the other side. · Mrs. Brevoort was sick and tired of her husband’s self- absorbed gibberish, his dubious science, and all the celestial nonsense that kept him from addressing his family’s very terrestrial needs. · The gift that God had given his daughter to converse with Him, he screamed, was not to become a sacrilegious circus act. His daughter would not be dragged into the frivolous mud in which his wife so much enjoyed to plod. His daughter would not be subjected to this intellectual harlotry. · Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self- sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it. They doubt their right to hold someone else accountable for their happiness; they worry that their loved one may find their reverence tedious; they fear their yearning may have distorted their features in ways they cannot see. Thus, as the weight of all these questions and concerns bends them inward, their newfound joy in companionship turns into a deeper expression of the solitude they thought they had left behind. · Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail— we are ruined by forces beyond our control. · As the city sank into the depression that followed the crash, Helen found it harder to leave the house. She knew that looking away from the destitute families, the breadlines, the shuttered stores, and the despair in every thinning face was a gross form of self- indulgence, but she also understood that the anguish she felt when confronted by this bleak reality was yet another of her luxuries. Helen had to acknowledge this paradox each time she went for a walk— · It started with a concave oppression in her chest. A disturbance in the air. She was unable to understand what brought about that dread until she realized she felt watched. Stares. Scowls. Whispers. Everywhere. Smirks. Slurs. Hisses. Everywhere. It was plausible, even expected, that some people would recognize and despise her. But everyone? Hate rang in every sound— every horn, every whistle, every scream was a curse. Hate streamed from every window— she felt narrowing eyes training on her from behind every curtain and every pane of glass quicksilvered by the sun. Hate was twisted into every grimace and every hand gesture— every passerby a merciless, obscene judge. · Benjamin tried not to indulge in this irrational and rather shapeless resentment, suppressing it as soon as it emerged and never letting it affect his relationship with Helen. He was a tender nurse who understood that his love was best manifested by its inhibition— he was present but unnoticed, solicitous but removed. · It is not unlikely that she felt genuine pain under the somewhat farcical spectacle of bereavement she put up for her circle. Some people, under certain circumstances, hide their true emotions under exaggeration and hyperbole, not realizing their amplified caricature reveals the exact measure of the feelings it was meant to conceal. My Life | Andrew Bevel · My name is known to many, my deeds to some, my life to few. This has never concerned me much. What matters is the tally of our accomplishments, not the tales about us. · For about a decade now I have witnessed a woeful decline not only in the business of our country but also in the spirit of its people. Where perseverance and ingenuity once dwelled, apathy and despair now loiter. Where self- reliance reigned, beggarly submission now squats. The working man is reduced to a panhandler. A vicious circle has taken hold of our able- bodied men: they increasingly rely on the government to alleviate the misery created by that same government, not realizing that this dependency only perpetuates their sorry state of affairs. · Business is the common denominator of all activities and enterprises. This, in turn, means there is no affair that does not pertain to the businessman. To him everything is relevant. He is the true Renaissance man. · This chapter will show that no investment pays higher dividends than education. I still live by this creed and consider myself to be a perennial student. · Some people are exceptionally clear- eyed. To them, nothing is ever too complex or mysterious. Answers invisible to most are in plain sight to these enlightened few. Their approach to the world is elementary and, without fail, right. They see through false complications and find the simple truths of life. · Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment. A man’s worth is established by the number of these defining circumstances he is able to create for himself. He need not always be successful, for there can be great honor in defeat. But he ought to be the main actor in the decisive scenes in his existence, whether they be epic or tragic. A Memoir, Remembered | Ida Partenza · In a reverse echo, questions that had faded out of my mind returned, obstinately, from out of the silence, growing louder with each repetition. Events, scenes and people I had forgotten came back with a vividness that challenged the physical reality around me. And perhaps because they came from so far back at such great speed, these questions and memories impacted and sometimes even pierced through the very image of myself that had solidified over the years. · What was not made of stone was made of bronze. Nothing shone but everything emitted a pale glow. Sounds had a tactile quality, and we all did our best not to litter the space with any audible objects of our own. · “I have no country. I don’t want one. The root of all evil, the cause of every war— god and country.” · Money is a fantastic commodity. You can’t eat or wear money, but it represents all the food and clothes in the world. This is why it’s a fiction. · Because I labored unsuccessfully on that book for so long, my mother acquired, forever, the texture and weight of a half- formed character in my mind. I have even come to distrust my love for her. · Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them. · But beneath the ink there was also a forest- like scent. An undertone of damp soil and unknown weeds. As if the bills were the product of nature. · What was individual about each man— Carnegie’s self- serving sanctimoniousness, Grant’s essential decency, Ford’s matter- of- fact pragmatism, Coolidge’s rhetorical thrift and so on— yielded to what I thought, at the time, they all had in common: they all believed, without any sort of doubt, that they deserved to be heard, that their words ought to be heard, that the narratives of their faultless lives must be heard. · “This is what I’m trying to convey. The simple depth of those who are close to the edges of existence. Her childhood and her fatal disease · Walking around Wall Street during the weekend, one gets the impression that the world’s affairs have been settled once and for all, that the age of work is finally over and that humanity has moved on to its next stage. · More often it fell entirely on me to make a father of him. Year after year I had made up for his shortcomings. Helped him be my parent. And I had loved our hard, complicated life. And I had loved him for his dim yet unbending principles and passions and for his wild notions of freedom and independence. But now I had to find a way to love a new, still shapeless idea of him. · a fortune seldom has one single owner. Many interests and parties are tied to it. Rather than a block of granite, wealth resembles a river basin with multiple tributaries and branches. Futures | Mildred Bevel · Music that one almost doesn’t need to listen to, because its development is all implied by the form. Just as Rhys says in her passage, “you always know what’s going to come next.” This music creates an unavoidable future for itself. It has no free will. There’s only fulfilment. It’s fatal music. · It’s not that I’m tired of him. I��m tired of the person I become around him. · Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering? · We’d been married for about 2 years before this. An amicable, respectful, exhausting period. Few effortless moments. We cared for each other, but care’s demanding. Did our best to fulfil what we imagined the other’s expectations were, repressed our frustration when we failed, and never allowed ourselves to be pleased when we were the recipients of those same efforts. It’s unsurprising that we should soon slip into politeness. No graceful way out of manners. · Something endearing about his stiff softness. But I’ve the feeling he’s (unknowingly) trying to create a bank of future memories for himself. These are the scenes he’ll go back to when I’m gone. He’ll see his own hand arranging my pillow and stroking my cheek. · The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of past events shifting as they rush away from us. · The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory ...more |
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Sep 17, 2024
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Aug 21, 2024
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| 1466886307
| 9781466886308
| B00R14E0X6
| 4.01
| 391
| Mar 04, 2015
| Mar 04, 2015
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it was amazing
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Aug 10, 2024
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Aug 11, 2024
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Aug 10, 2024
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| 0765384558
| 9780765384553
| 0765384558
| 3.55
| 296
| Sep 16, 2015
| Sep 16, 2015
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really liked it
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Aug 11, 2024
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| 9781466886315
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| Mar 11, 2015
| Mar 11, 2015
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really liked it
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Aug 08, 2024
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Aug 10, 2024
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Aug 08, 2024
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| B079MHCVG5
| 4.45
| 193,443
| Sep 22, 2012
| Sep 03, 2013
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it was amazing
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The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • But I soon gave in— the notebooks exuded the f The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • But I soon gave in— the notebooks exuded the force of seduction that Lila had given off since she was a child. She had treated the neighborhood, her family, the Solaras, Stefano, every person or thing with ruthless accuracy. • Immediately shatter everything and every person in the neighborhood, tear them to pieces, Lila and I, go and live far away, lightheartedly descending together all the steps of humiliation, alone, in unknown cities. It seemed to me the just conclusion to that day. If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately. Her rage expanded in my breast, a force that was mine and not mine, filling me with the pleasure of losing myself. I wished that that force would overflow. But I realized that I was also afraid of it. I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I’m incapable of violent reactions, I fear them, I prefer to be still, cultivating resentment. Not Lila. • I had a confused need for that aggression. The vise on my wrist, the fear that he would hit me, that river of painful words ended by consoling me: it seemed to me that at least he valued me. • The skin of my wrist was turning purple, giving him weight and authority, anchoring me to him. • My heart began to beat hard, I was afraid of the place, of myself, of the craving that possessed me to obliterate from my manners and from my voice the sense of alienation that I had discovered a few hours earlier. I wanted to return, and sink into that neighborhood, to be as I had been. I wanted to throw away studying, the notebooks full of exercises. Exercising for what, after all. What I could become outside of Lila’s shadow counted for nothing. • I had been unjust to her, I had wished to believe in an easy surrender on her part to be able to humiliate her as I felt humiliated when Nino left the reception; I had wished to diminish her in order not to feel her loss. • He revealed white jaws, a red tongue in the dark hole of his mouth: something in and around him had broken. • He was never Stefano, she seemed to discover suddenly, he was always the oldest son of Don Achille. And that thought, immediately, brought to the young face of her husband, like a revival, features that until that moment had remained prudently hidden in his blood but that had always been there, waiting for their moment. Oh yes, to please the neighborhood, to please her, Stefano had striven to be someone else, softening his features with courteousness, adapting his gaze to meekness, modeling his voice on the tones of conciliation; his fingers, his hands, his whole body had learned to restrain their force. • Is it possible that our parents never die, that every child inevitably conceals them in himself? Would my mother truly emerge from me, with her limping gait, as my destiny? • It wasn’t even his extreme thinness, which was accentuated by his height— he was at least three inches taller than the brothers, who were tall, too— and which suggested a fragility opposed to the virile strength that Marcello and Michele displayed with smug satisfaction. Rather, it was the indifference. While the Solaras’ arrogance could be considered normal, the haughty carelessness with which Nino had bumped into Marcello and kept going was not at all normal. Even those who detested the Solaras, like Pasquale, Enzo, or Antonio, had, one way or another, to reckon with them. Nino, on the other hand, not only didn’t apologize but didn’t so much as glance at Marcello. • It wasn’t just her skill with words that struck me, that I knew. What struck me was a new tone, a shrewd dose of impudence and assurance. There she was, her mouth flaming with lipstick. She made Marcello believe that she had put a seal on the past, made Michele believe that his sly arrogance amused her. And, to my great amazement, toward both she behaved like a woman who knows what men are, who has nothing more to learn on the subject and in fact would have much to teach: and she wasn’t playing a part, the way we had as girls, imitating novels in which fallen ladies appeared; rather, it was clear that her knowledge was true, and this did not embarrass her. • The whole time, even when he spoke of his own brutality, he used a dialect full of feeling, defenseless, like the language of certain songs. I still don’t know why he behaved that way. • Lila harbored a force that made her capable of anything, even of keeping her body from conceiving children, it seemed that he was attributing to me a beneficent power, one that could win over Lila’s maleficent one, and this flattered me. • I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever- increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. • They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. • I remembered when she told the rest of us about the murder, and the blood on the copper pot, and claimed that the killer of Don Achille was not a man but a woman, as if, in the story she was telling us, she had heard and seen the form of a female body break, from the need for hatred, the urgency for revenge or justice, and lose its substance. • I realized that, no matter how she struggled, worked, proclaimed, she couldn’t get out of it: since the day of her wedding she had been pursued by an ever greater, increasingly ungovernable unhappiness, and I felt pity. • Armando shook his head in disgust: Planning isn’t going to change the world, it will take blood, it will take violence. Nino responded calmly: Planning is an indispensable tool. The talk was tense, Professor Galiani kept the boys at bay. How much they knew, they were masters of the earth. • I struggled not to believe her. I felt she was truly hostile and capable of anything. She knew how to set the nerves of good people alight, in their breasts she kindled the fire of destruction. I felt that Gigliola and Pinuccia were right: it was she herself who in the photograph had blazed up like the devil. • I didn’t want to see Lila’s fury, I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to stay outside it, I was afraid of being dragged into her suffering, I was afraid of feeling obligated, out of long habit, to ally myself with her. • And in fact neither she nor I had ever heard that word- formula loaded with cultural and political contempt: shopkeepers. And in fact neither she nor I knew anything about taxes: our parents, friends, boyfriends, husbands, relatives acted as if they didn’t exist, and school taught nothing that had to do even vaguely with politics. • She told him that Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima were two things that couldn’t be compared, that Pearl Harbor was a vile act of war and Hiroshima was an idiotic, fierce, vindictive horror, worse, much worse, than the Nazi massacres. And she concluded: the Americans should be tried like the worst criminals, those who do terrible things to terrorize the living and keep them on their knees. • Pinuccia looked at her without reacting. Something passed rapidly between the two girls, their secret feelings darted invisibly, infinitesimal particles shot at each other from the depths of themselves, a jolt and a trembling that lasted a long second; I caught it, bewildered, but couldn’t understand, while they did, they understood, in something they recognized each other, and Pinuccia knew that Lila knew, understood and wished to help her, even with contempt. So she obeyed. • What drove me to act like that? Did I keep my feelings muted because I was frightened by the violence with which, in fact, in my innermost self, I wanted things, people, praise, triumphs? Was I afraid that that violence, if I did not get what I wanted, would explode in my chest, taking the path of the worst feelings— • Why, then, even when I advanced, was I so quick to retreat? Why did I always have ready a gracious smile, a happy laugh, when things went badly? Why, sooner or later, did I always find plausible excuses for those who made me suffer? • I called on poems and novels as tranquilizers. Maybe, I thought, studying has been useful to me just for this: to calm myself. • Nino’s love for Lila was an impossible love. Like mine for him. And only within that frame of unattainability did the kiss he had given her in the middle of the sea begin to seem utterable. • I suffered but, I have to admit, with a permanent undercurrent of disbelief that caused the suffering to come in waves. It seemed to me that I was watching a performance without substance: they were playing at being together, both knowing well that they were not and couldn’t be: • She speaks of him and in speaking of him she calls him here, she imagines him next to her, and since she has forgotten herself she perceives no violation or guilt. She confides, she tells me things that she would do better to keep to herself. She tells me how much she desires the person I’ve desired forever, and she does so convinced that I— through insensitivity, through a less acute vision, through incapacity to grasp what she, instead, is able to grasp— have never truly understood that same person, never realized his qualities. • she said that the spectacle of night frightened her, she saw no structure but only random shards of glass in a blue pitch. This silenced us all, and I was vexed: she had that habit of speaking last, which gave her time to reflect and allowed her to disrupt with a single remark everything that we had more or less thoughtlessly said. • There are moments when we resort to senseless formulations and advance absurd claims to hide straightforward feelings. • But Lila knew how to draw me in. And I was unable to resist: on the one hand I said that’s enough, on the other I was depressed at the idea of not being part of her life, of the means by which she invented it for herself. What was that deception but another of her fantastic moves, which were always full of risks? • “One way or another things are always found out.” • Their passion invaded me, disturbed me. I loved them both and so I couldn’t love myself, feel myself, affirm myself with a need for life of my own, one that had the same blind, mute force as theirs. So it seemed to me. • she knows how to wound, it’s written in her face, it’s enough to look at her forehead and her eyes.” • balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life. • I had a hidden me— I realized— that fingers, mouth, teeth, tongue were able to discover. Layer after layer, that me lost every hiding place, was shamelessly exposed, and Sarratore showed that he knew how to keep it from fleeing, from being ashamed, he knew how to hold it as if it were the absolute reason for his affectionate motility, for his sometimes gentle, sometimes fevered pressures. • She said that from the day of her marriage until those days on Ischia she had been, without realizing it, on the point of dying. She described minutely a sensation of imminent death: lack of energy, lethargy, a strong pressure in the middle of her head, as if between the brain and the skull there was an air bubble that was continually expanding, the impression that everything was moving in a hurry to leave, that the speed of every movement of persons and things was excessive and hit her, wounded her, caused her physical pain in her stomach and in her eyes. • He had above all brought back to life her sense of herself. Yes, brought to life. Lines and lines and lines had at their center the concept of resurrection: an ecstatic rising, the end of every bond and yet the inexpressible pleasure of a new bond, a revival that was also a revolt: he and she, she and he together learned life again, banished its poison, reinvented it as the pure joy of thinking and living. • But I chased away those thoughts and forced myself to respect the pact I had made with myself: to plan my life without them and learn not to suffer for it. To that end I concentrated on training myself to react little or not at all. I learned to reduce my emotions to the minimum: if the owner reached out his hands I repulsed him without indignation; if the customers were rude I made the best of it; even with my mother I managed to stay submissive. • I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured. • In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen, I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone. • Lila spoke in a tone I knew well, of determination, with which she strove to eliminate emotion, and she confined herself to rapidly and almost disdainfully summarizing events and actions, as if she were afraid that allowing herself merely a tremor in her voice or lower lip would cause everything to lose its outlines and overflow, inundating her. • How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done. • Yes, it’s Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers, in my less which is such because of her more, in my more which is the yielding to the force of her less. • The neighborhood, the neighbors, the grocery, the streets, the sounds of the trains, Stefano, Carmen waiting, perhaps anxious, slowly returned, but only as objects to be arranged hastily, so that they would not get in the way, but with enough care so that, piled up haphazardly, they would not suddenly fall. • That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelessness is what most frightened Lila in the course of her life. The loss of those boundaries in her brother, whom she loved more than anyone in her family, had frightened her, and the disintegration of Stefano in the passage from fiancé to husband terrified her. • Especially at night she was afraid of waking up and finding him formless in the bed, transformed into excrescences that burst out because of too much fluid, the flesh melted and dripping, and with it everything around, the furniture, the entire apartment and she herself, his wife, broken, sucked into that stream polluted by living matter. • Some, like the Solaras, like Pasquale, Antonio, Donato Sarratore, even Franco Mari, my boyfriend at the Normale, wanted us in ways that were different— aggressive, subordinate, heedless, attentive— but that they wanted us there was no doubt. Others, like Alfonso, Enzo, Nino, had— according to equally diverse attitudes— an aloof self- possession, as if between us and them there were a wall and the work of scaling it were our job. • Here, I thought sarcastically, is the use of history exams, classical philology, linguistics, and the thousands of file cards with which I drill myself rigorously: to soothe them for a few hours. They considered me impartial, without malicious feelings or passions, sterilized by study. And I accepted the role that they assigned me without mentioning my own suffering, my audaciousness, • “Infatuations,” I said, “have this good thing about them: after a while they pass.” • I recognized in them, father and daughter, what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn’t able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn’t reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful. • Was she afraid I would die, depriving her of my trophy existence? Was she afraid that, being ill, I would give in, be in some way demoted, have to return home without glory? • There was at the time a superstition— I don’t know if it still exists— that if you sweep the broom over the feet of an unmarried girl she’ll never get married. Ada saw her future in a flash. • How does one protect a child. Nourishing him. Loving him. Teaching him things. Acting as a filter for every sensation that might cripple him forever. • Then I imagined a dark force crouching in the life of the protagonist, an entity that had the capacity to weld the world around her, with the colors of the flame of a blowtorch: a blue- violet dome where everything went well for her, shooting sparks, but that soon came apart, breaking up into meaningless gray fragments. • There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar. • Language itself, in fact, had become a mark of alienation. I expressed myself in a way that was too complex for her, although I made an effort to speak in dialect, and when I realized that and simplified the sentences, the simplification made them unnatural and therefore confusing. • Feeling did not return to her; rather, a sense of alienation increased. • But Lila didn’t seem worried. The money she had had and had wasted were all one, in her imagination, with the poverty of childhood, it was without substance when it was there and when it wasn’t. • My head was crowded with all that I had studied and I wanted to display it, to demonstrate that even if I was a woman, even if you could see my origins, I was a person who at twenty- three, had won the right to publish that book, and now, nothing nothing nothing about me could be called into question. • Naples had been very useful in Pisa, but Pisa was no use in Naples, it was an obstacle. Good manners, cultured voice and appearance, the crush in my head and on my tongue of what I had learned in books were all immediate signs of weakness that made me a secure prey, one of those who don’t struggle. • I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that— in good faith, certainly, with affection— I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other. ...more |
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it was ok
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it was amazing
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did not like it
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really liked it
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★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can ch ★★★★☆ (4/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can change for better or worse. Today, the human body is changing in ways that have nothing to do with the “survival of the fittest.” Instead, we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution, was made popular by Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman, • Mouthbreathing causes the body to lose 40 percent more water. • Thirteen hundred years ago, an ancient Tantric text, the Shiva Swarodaya, described how one nostril will open to let breath in as the other will softly close throughout the day. Some days, the right nostril yawns awake to greet the sun; other days, the left awakens to the fullness of the moon. According to the text, these rhythms are the same throughout every month and they’re shared by all humanity. It’s a method our bodies use to stay balanced and grounded to the rhythms of the cosmos, and each other. • the nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions. • “What the bodily form depends on is breath (chi) and what breath relies upon is form,” states a Chinese adage from 700 AD. “When the breath is perfect, the form is perfect (too).” • the most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation. • “Even more foolishly I had assumed that a universal awareness of the importance of breathing existed. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.” • we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly. • That carbon dioxide in every exhale has weight, and we exhale more weight than we inhale. And the way the body loses weight isn’t through profusely sweating or “burning it off.” We lose weight through exhaled breath. • The lungs are the weight- regulating system of the body. • A last word on slow breathing. It goes by another name: prayer. • The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume. To breathe, but to breathe less. • “The yogi’s life is not measured by the number of his days, but the number of his breaths,” • I had expected this place to have a horror- show creepiness, but it never materialized. Instead, entering there, surrounded by remnants of all these ancient lives, there was only a long and heavy stillness, like the sound of a rock dropped in a well after the echoes fade away. • Societies that replaced their traditional diet with modern, processed foods suffered up to ten times more cavities, severely crooked teeth, obstructed airways, and overall poorer health. The modern diets were the same: white flour, white rice, jams, sweetened juices, canned vegetables, and processed meats. The traditional diets were all different. • Our ancient ancestors chewed for hours a day, every day. And because they chewed so much, their mouths, teeth, throats, and faces grew to be wide and strong and pronounced. Food in industrialized societies was so processed that it hardly required any chewing at all. • Maintaining correct “oral posture.” Anyone could do this, and it was free. It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck. When sitting or standing, the spine should form a J- shape— perfectly straight until it reaches the small of the back, where it naturally curves outward. While maintaining this posture, we should always breathe slowly through the nose into the abdomen. • That our noses and mouths are not predetermined at birth, childhood, or even in adulthood. We can reverse the clock on much of the damage that’s been done in the past few hundred years by force of will, with nothing more than proper posture, hard chewing, and perhaps some mewing. • Breathing, as it happens, is more than just a biochemical or physical act; it’s more than just moving the diaphragm downward and sucking in air to feed hungry cells and remove wastes. The tens of billions of molecules we bring into our bodies with every breath also serve a more subtle, but equally important role. They influence nearly every internal organ, telling them when to turn on and off. They affect heart rate, digestion, moods, attitudes; when we feel aroused, and when we feel nauseated. Breathing is a power switch to a vast network called the autonomic nervous system. • Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into a stressed state. It teaches us to consciously access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to turn on heavy stress specifically so that we can turn it off and spend the rest of our days and nights relaxing and restoring, feeding and breeding. • Take a sip of air through the nose or mouth. For this exercise, it doesn’t matter. Now hold it. In a few moments, you’ll feel a slight hunger for more. As this hunger mounts, the mind will race, the lungs will ache. You’ll become nervous, paranoid, and irritable. You’ll start to panic. All senses will zero in on that miserable, suffocating feeling, and your sole desire will be to take another breath. • Fears weren’t just a mental problem, and they couldn’t be treated by simply getting patients to think differently. Fears and anxiety had a physical manifestation, too. They could be generated from outside the amygdalae, from within a more ancient part of the reptilian brain. • They created acupuncture to open up prana channels and yoga postures to awaken and distribute the energy. Spicy foods contained large doses of prana, which is one of the reasons traditional Indian and Chinese diets are often hot. • Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent- Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer. And this helps explain why cancers develop and thrive in environments of low oxygen. • When a wave comes, it washes over you and runs up the beach. Then, the wave turns around, and recedes over you, going back to the ocean…This is like the breath, which exhales, transitions, inhales, transitions, and then starts the process again. • It’s the same thing the ancient people of the Indus Valley must have experienced 5,000 years ago, and the ancient Chinese 2,000 years after them. Alexandra David- Néel warmed herself with it in a cave in the Himalayas, and Swami Rama focused it on his hands and heart. Buteyko rediscovered it by a window in the asthma ward of the First Moscow Hospital, and Carl Stough taught it to dying veterans at the VA Medical Center in New Jersey. • Modern medicine, they said, was amazingly efficient at cutting out and stitching up parts of the body in emergencies, but sadly deficient at treating milder, chronic systemic maladies— the asthma, headaches, stress, and autoimmune issues that most of the modern population contends with. • The role of the modern doctor was to put out fires, not blow away smoke. • When yogis finish a meal, they lie on their left side so that they will breathe primarily from their right nostril. The increase of blood flow and heat via right- nostril breathing, yogis believe, can aid in digestion. • In each exhale, we expel about 3,500 compounds. Much of this is organic (water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases), but we also exhale pollutants: pesticides, chemicals, and engine exhaust. When we don’t breathe out completely, these toxins sit in the lungs and fester, causing infections and other problems. Breathing Techniques • THE PERFECT BREATH is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air. • WIM HOF’S BREATHING METHOD To practice Wim Hof’s breathing method, start by finding a quiet place and lying flat on your back with a pillow under your head. Relax the shoulders, chest, and legs. Take a very deep breath into the pit of your stomach and let it back out just as quickly. Keep breathing this way for 30 cycles. If possible, breathe through the nose; if the nose feels obstructed, try pursed lips. Each breath should look like a wave, with the inhale inflating the stomach, then the chest. You should exhale all the air out in the same order. At the end of 30 breaths, exhale to the natural conclusion, leaving about a quarter of the air left in the lungs, then hold that breath for as long as possible. Once you’ve reached your breathhold limit, take one huge inhale and hold it another 15 seconds. Very gently, move that fresh breath of air around the chest and to the shoulders, then exhale and start the heavy breathing again. Repeat the whole pattern three or four rounds and add in some cold exposure (cold shower, ice bath, naked snow angels) a few times a week. • RESONANT (COHERENT) BREATHING is a calming practice that places the heart, lungs, and circulation into a state of coherence, where the systems of the body are working at peak efficiency. There is no more essential technique, and none more basic. Sit up straight, relax the shoulders and belly, and exhale. Inhale softly for 5.5 seconds, expanding the belly as air fills the bottom of the lungs. Without pausing, exhale softly for 5.5 seconds, bringing the belly in as the lungs empty. Each breath should feel like a circle. Repeat at least ten times, more if possible. Several apps offer timers and visual guides. • BREATHHOLD WALKING Anders Olsson uses this technique to increase carbon dioxide and, thus, increase circulation in his body. It’s not much fun, but the benefits, Olsson told me, are many. Go to a grassy park, beach, or anywhere else where the ground is soft. Exhale all the breath, then walk slowly, counting each step. Once you feel a powerful sense of air hunger, stop counting and take a few very calm breaths through the nose while still walking. Breathe normally for at least a minute, then repeat the sequence. • 4- 7- 8 BREATHING This technique, made famous by Dr. Andrew Weil, places the body into a state of deep relaxation. I use it on long flights to help fall asleep. Take a breath in, then exhale through your mouth with a whoosh sound. Close the mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four. Hold for a count of seven. Exhale completely through your mouth, with a whoosh, to the count of eight. Repeat this cycle for at least four breaths. ...more |
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Jul 24, 2024
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| 1847741509
| 9781847741509
| 1847741509
| 4.76
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| Apr 13, 2021
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book · You are raised on the Day of Judgment with an angel that drives you out and an a ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book · You are raised on the Day of Judgment with an angel that drives you out and an angel that bears witness for or against you · each of us has only one shayṭān and four angels assigned to them; of the four angels, two of them protect you and the other two angels record your deeds · The Prophet (peace be upon him) warned: when you are reminded of Allah (glorified and exalted is He) when you are about to commit a sin, do not ignore your conscience (taqwa). · The mercy of your Lord (glorified and exalted is He) is such, that even as the angels on the left and right of you are recording your deeds at all times, Allah (glorified and exalted is He) shows leniency through the one on the left and says, ‘Hold your pen and see if my servant will turn back to Me, see if he will wake up in the midst of that moment and decide that this is not something he ever wants to do again’. · just by making wuḍū’, you have an angel that seeks forgiveness for you throughout the night and just by reciting Āyat al-Kursī, you have an angel that stands guard for you until the morning. In each case you have ended your night well. · As you say Bismillāh, they say in the name of Allah you’ve been guided, and when you say I’ve put my full trust in Allah (glorified and exalted is He), they say you’ve been defended against anyone that is going to try to harm you. And when you say there is no power or might except which belongs to Allah (glorified and exalted is He), they say and you’ve been protected from all harm for the day. At this point, the two devils that arrive to attack you ask one another, ‘what can we do with a person who’s been guided, defended, and protected?’ · So, as you leave your home each day and you state your remembrance, do not just mouth the words. Renew your intention to do good in the world and refresh it throughout the day so you can maintain the humility that is beloved of Allah · Imam Ghazālī said, ‘The greatest test of of good character, is how a person deals with someone with bad character’. That is when the flaws of the tongue come out, when the flaws of character, and the flaws of the heart manifest themselves · Prophet (peace be upon him) said, ‘Strength is not how you overcome another person, strength is actually how you overcome yourself’ · By covering all the different facets of dua for several people, at the same time, you are also covering these aspects of your life because when you are praying for health, wealth and family, the angel is saying, ‘amin’ for you as well. That is then written on your record, increasing your sincerity and your station with Allah · when you are sick and respond to your illness with patience, it is not just the reward of Allah (glorified and exalted is He) that is with you, but Allah (glorified and exalted is He) Himself that is by your side. · You are entering into prayer in your bedroom or living room or wherever else it is, thinking you are alone, when in fact there are angels the size of mountains that are praying behind you · Hadith-e-Qudsi: ‘I am as my servant expects of Me, and I am with him when he remembers Me. So if he remembers Me inwardly, I remember him inwardly, and if he remembers Me in an assembly, I remember him in a greater assembly’, meaning the assembly of the angels. · It is only logical that the love that originates from Allah (glorified and exalted is He) shows itself amongst the righteous people who love you for your righteousness. · As Ibn al-Jawzī (May Allah be pleased with him) said ‘If people are impressed by you, know that they are impressed by the hijab, the cover that Allah (glorified and exalted is He) has given you because they don’t really know you’ and the reality is that people have to love you for a righteousness that is actually true of you, not merely what is on the surface. Duas for Recitation · As you are entering into the world, say ‘In the name of Allah (glorified and exalted is He), I’ve put my trust in Allah (glorified and exalted is He) and there is no power or might except that which is with Allah (glorified and exalted is He) · “O Allah! Forgive Abū Salamah , and raise his station, make his station high amongst Your rightly guided servants, and expand his grave, and put light in his expansive grave, and take of the descendants whom he’s left behind, to make them pious, and take care of them.” ...more |
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • I could imagine how carefully he had done his searching. Not at all. He had no brain, an ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • I could imagine how carefully he had done his searching. Not at all. He had no brain, and in his heart he had only himself. • She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. • He was a being created out of some unidentifiable material, iron, glass, nettles, but alive, alive, the hot breath streaming from his nose and mouth. • When you haven’t been in the world long, it’s hard to comprehend what disasters are at the origin of a sense of disaster: maybe you don’t even feel the need to. • Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: • Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life. • I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. • Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us. • I suppose that that was my way of reacting to envy, and hatred, and of suffocating them. Or maybe I disguised in that manner the sense of subordination, the fascination I felt. • If, however, I came in second after Lila, I wore a meek expression of acquiescence. In those years I think I feared only one thing: not being paired, in the hierarchy established by Maestra Oliviero, with Lila; • Besides, she offered no openings to kindness. To recognize her virtuosity was for us children to admit that we would never win and so there was no point in competing, and for the teachers to confess to themselves that they had been mediocre children. Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. • That stammer, the pallor, the purple that had suddenly swallowed his eyes: how handsome he was, so languid, and yet how much I disliked his languor. • I was as if strangled by two agonies, one already happening, the loss of the doll, and one possible, the loss of Lila. • Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences. • We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat- stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart. But it was our book, we loved it dearly. • But she became less lively, especially in class, probably because she realized that the teacher had stopped praising her, and sometimes seemed irritated by her excesses of virtuosity. • Trained by our schoolbooks to speak with great skill about what we had never seen, we were excited by the invisible. • I felt as if she had everything in her head ordered in such a way that the world around us would never be able to create disorder. I abandoned myself happily. • And the uneasiness that the discovery of her fragility brought me was transformed by secret pathways into a need of my own to be superior. • On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn’t mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. • she had had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself. • Instead, in her absence, after a slight hesitation I put myself in her place. Or, rather, I had made a place for her in me. • I had never gone into my old school and I felt a strong emotion, I recognized the smell, which brought with it a sensation of comfort, a sense of myself that I no longer had. • Step by step Lila convinced me that one achieves security in love only by subjecting the wooer to hard tests. • There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it. • In other words everything was quivering, arching upward as if to change its characteristics, not to be known by the accumulated hatreds, tensions, ugliness but, rather, to show a new face. • I said no because if my father found out that I had gone in that car, even though he was a good and loving man, even though he loved me very much, he would have beat me to death, while at the same time my little brothers, Peppe and Gianni, young as they were, would feel obliged, now and in the future, to try to kill the Solara brothers. There were no written rules, everyone knew that was how it was. The Solaras knew it, too, since they had been polite, and had merely invited me to get in. • Also for the first time, I felt how, having to search for words on a subject where I didn’t have words ready, I tended to reduce the relationship between Lila and me to extreme declarations that were all exaggeratedly positive. • she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. • But above all, how, after our intense conversations about love and poetry, could she walk me to the door, as she was doing, far more absorbed in the atmosphere of excitement around a shoe? • I and Lila, we two with that capacity that together— only together— we had to seize the mass of colors, sounds, things, and people, and express it and give it power. • I felt fragile, exposed, I couldn’t spend my time following her or discovering that she was following me, either way feeling diminished. • it slowly became clear not only to me, who had been observing her since elementary school, but to everyone, that an essence not only seductive but dangerous emanated from Lila. • Stefano, having precociously understood that good business is based on the absence of exclusiveness, considered all the residents of the neighborhood potential clients who would spend their money in his store; • there are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit. • I hoped to detach myself from that sum of the misdeeds and compliances and cowardly acts of the people we knew, whom we loved, whom we carried— she, Pasquale, Rino, I, all of us— in our blood. • She said, “When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.” I don’t remember exactly how she expressed it, but that was the idea, and I associated it with our dirty streets, the dusty gardens, the countryside disfigured by new buildings, the violence in every house, every family. • Thus she returned to the theme of “before,” but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. • behind it were important meanings, that it was as if he were saying: before us some ugly things happened; our fathers, some in one way, some in another, didn’t behave well; from this moment, we take note of that and show that we children are better than they were. • So at 11: 30 P.M. on December 31st, after the New Year’s Eve dinner, various families— the family of the former carpenter, the family of the porter, that of the shoemaker, that of the fruit and vegetable seller, the family of Melina, who that night had made an effort with her appearance— climbed up to the fifth floor, to the old, hated home of Don Achille, to celebrate the new year together. • I also realized that she was staring at the shadow of her brother— the most active, the most arrogant, shouting the loudest, bloodiest insults in the direction of the Solaras’ terrace— with repulsion. It seemed that she, she who in general feared nothing, was afraid. But they were impressions I recalled only later. • if love is exiled from cities, their good nature becomes an evil nature. She asked me: “What does ‘a city without love’ mean to you?” “A people deprived of happiness.” • I felt bitterness. That image of power had passed in a flash, four young people in a car— that was the right way to leave the neighborhood and have fun. Ours was the wrong way: on foot, in shabby old clothes, penniless. • In other words, the last ten days of July gave me a sense of well- being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. • It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance. • but I was grateful to that hated father, who made me, and all us children, important, who gave us joy and peace that night at the Maronti. Suddenly I was glad that neither of the two was present on the island. • She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. • Would I know how to imagine those things without her? Would I know how to give life to every object, let it bend in unison with mine? • But even as I said that I realized how the idea of the riches girls dreamed of was changing further. The treasure chests full of gold pieces that a procession of servants in livery would deposit in our castle when we published a book like Little Women— riches and fame— had truly faded. Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. • I liked to discover connections like that, especially if they concerned Lila. I traced lines between moments and events distant from one another, I established convergences and divergences. • She spoke with a different sort of determination, calmer, as if it were no longer necessary to fight to the death for every little thing. • Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other. • But the most significant thing was that Ada and I, with different feelings, realized that in a public place, outside of our intimate, neighborhood relationship, we didn’t know what to say to Lila, how to treat her. • and she seemed to have discovered the joy of dipping into the inexhaustible well of her beauty, and to feel and show that no shape, however beautifully drawn, could contain her conclusively, since a new hairstyle, a new dress, a new way of making up her eyes or her mouth were only more expansive outlines that dissolved the preceding ones. • I knew— perhaps I hoped— that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again. • All that activity is the result of a whim of hers, celebrated by Stefano merely out of love. She’s lucky to be so loved, to love. Lucky to be adored for what she is and for what she invents. • What, instead, did she and Stefano have in mind, where did they think they were living? They were behaving in a way that wasn’t familiar even in the poems that I studied in school, in the novels I read. I was puzzled. They weren’t reacting to the insults, even to that truly intolerable insult that the Solaras were making. • Lila was right: with people like that, you had to fight them by living a superior life, such as they couldn’t even imagine. • I was no longer able to trace a coherent design in the division of our fates. The concreteness of that date made concrete the crossroads that would separate our lives. And, what was worse, I took it for granted that her fate would be better than mine. • “The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.” • That answer, as Lila’s answers always were, always had been, though intended to be conciliatory, had something arrogant, scornful, about it, which made Pinuccia even angrier. • whenever I didn’t know how to answer a question, I was lavish in setting out premises in the confident voice of someone who knows clearly where he wishes to end up. • The difference between you and me, always, has been that people are afraid of me and not of you.” • from the way she used me, from the way she handled Stefano, that she was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being, all her own, that was still obscure to her. • Pasquale, who ran into Lila one morning and, so overcome by his love for her that he could barely speak, seized on my adventure like a life vest, and told her about it. • As a child I had looked to her, to her progress, to learn how to escape my mother. I had been mistaken. Lila had remained there, chained in a glaring way to that world, from which she imagined she had taken the best. And the best was that young man, that marriage, that celebration, the game of shoes for Rino and her father. Nothing that had to do with my path as a student. I felt completely alone. • he used the word “literature” to be critical of anyone who ruined people’s minds by means of what he called idle chatter. • They would restrain their rage for love of Lila but at the end of the reception, when she went to change, when she came back, dressed in her beautiful traveling clothes, when she handed out the wedding favors, when she had left, with her husband, then a huge fight would erupt, and it would be the start of hatreds lasting months, years, and offenses and insults that would involve husbands, sons, all with an obligation to prove to mothers and sisters and grandmothers that they knew how to be men. I knew all the women, the men. • At that moment I knew what the plebs were, much more clearly than when, years earlier, she had asked me. The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. • He could enter and leave the neighborhood as he wished, without being contaminated by it. • I saw Lila lose her color, become as pale as when she was a child, whiter than her wedding dress, and her eyes had that sudden contraction that turned them into cracks. She had in front of her a bottle of wine and I was afraid that her gaze would go through it with a violence that would shatter it, with the wine spraying everywhere. ...more |
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it was amazing
| ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book · One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself tra ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book · One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. · “Getting up early all the time”, he thought, “it makes you stupid. You’ve got to get enough sleep. · “This is something that can’t be done in bed”, Gregor said to himself, “so don’t keep trying to do it”. · He told himself once more that it was not possible for him to stay in bed and that the most sensible thing to do would be to get free of it in whatever way he could at whatever sacrifice. At the same time, though, he did not forget to remind himself that calm consideration was much better than rushing to desperate conclusions. · Why did Gregor have to be the only one condemned to work for a company where they immediately became highly suspicious at the slightest shortcoming? Were all employees, every one of them, louts, was there not one of them who was faithful and devoted who would go so mad with pangs of conscience that he couldn’t get out of bed if he didn’t spend at least a couple of hours in the morning on company business? · it was money that should not really be touched but set aside for emergencies; money to live on had to be earned. · oppressed with anxiety and self-reproach, he began to crawl about, he crawled over everything, walls, furniture, ceiling, and finally in his confusion as the whole room began to spin around him he fell down into the middle of the dinner table. He lay there for a while, numb and immobile, all around him it was quiet, maybe that was a good sign. · He got into the habit of closely watching it for one or two hours before it was opened and then, lying in the darkness of his room where he could not be seen from the living room, he could watch the family in the light of the dinner table and listen to their conversation—with everyone’s permission, in a way, and thus quite differently from before. · Who, in this tired and overworked family, would have had time to give more attention to Gregor than was absolutely necessary? The household budget became even smaller; · They carried out absolutely everything that the world expects from poor people, Gregor’s father brought bank employees their breakfast, his mother sacrificed herself by washing clothes for strangers, his sister ran back and forth behind her desk at the behest of the customers, but they just did not have the strength to do any more. · Yet Gregor’s sister was playing so beautifully. Her face was leant to one side, following the lines of music with a careful and melancholy expression. Gregor crawled a little further forward, keeping his head close to the ground so that he could meet her eyes if the chance came. Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for. · He was determined to make his way forward to his sister and tug at her skirt to show her she might come into his room with her violin, as no-one appreciated her playing here as much as he would. He never wanted to let her out of his room, not while he lived, anyway; his shocking appearance should, for once, be of some use to him; he wanted to be at every door of his room at once to hiss and spit at the attackers; his sister should not be forced to stay with him, though, but stay of her own free will; she would sit beside him on the couch with her ear bent down to him while he told her how he had always intended to send her to the conservatory, how he would have told everyone about it last Christmas—had Christmas really come and gone already?—if this misfortune hadn’t got in the way, and refuse to let anyone dissuade him from it. On hearing all this, his sister would break out in tears of emotion, and Gregor would climb up to her shoulder and kiss her neck, which, since she had been going out to work, she had kept free without any necklace or collar. · He thought back of his family with emotion and love. If it was possible, he felt that he must go away even more strongly than his sister. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful rumination until he heard the clock tower strike three in the morning. He watched as it slowly began to get light everywhere outside the window too. Then, without his willing it, his head sank down completely, and his last breath flowed weakly from his nostrils. · They decided the best way to make use of that day was for relaxation and to go for a walk; not only had they earned a break from work but they were in serious need of it. So they sat at the table and wrote three letters of excusal, Mr. Samsa to his employers, Mrs. Samsa to her contractor and Grete to her principal. ...more |
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did not like it
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • He likewise had a beautiful natural scent, and his body would exude sweat which smelled ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • He likewise had a beautiful natural scent, and his body would exude sweat which smelled like an elegant form of perfume. Those who shook his hand testified that the pleasant smell from it would remain on their own hands for days. • smiling is an act of charity (Sadaqah), and the Prophet smiled towards members of his ummah as an act of generosity and in order to bring joy to their hearts. But at the same time, he would intensely weep to his Lord and pray for the joy and success of his ummah. • a person should not be treacherous with their eyes. This prohibits one from winking and making inappropriate facial expressions behind someone’s back in a way that betrays them. • He was endowed with the priceless gift of coherent language (hulw al-mantiq), where he would always speak in a beautiful and logical manner. He would directly address the point of contention when speaking • When being addressed by someone, the Prophet would not just turn his head towards the speaker. He would make that person the centre of attention by turning his entire body towards them, to let them know that he was fully listening to what they had to say • “Your wealth and children are only a test (fitnah).” • They described the Prophet’s crying during his recitation as being a form of humming from the chest, which resembled the sound of a boiling kettle pot. This is very similar to how the Prophet’s laughter was inaudible, but instead more of a wider smile. • the Prophet never sat in a gathering or session which totally lacked the remembrance of Allah, or contained anything sinful or objectionable • when discussing worldly matters, the Prophet would only bring up matters of benefit • bad dreams should not be narrated; instead, the person afflicted with one should seek refuge of Allah, and they will ultimately not be harmed • “The leader of the people is their servant.” • We also know that in respect to the Eid prayer, the Prophet would take one route to go to the place of prayer, and would trek another path when returning back home. The rationale for why he did so relates to motives based on spirituality (tazkiyah), as the use of a different route back home symbolises that one is adopting a new path in their life. Another explanation which the scholars have provided for this consistent prophetic practice is that by taking two paths the Prophet could issue his greeting (salam) to the inhabitants of the opposing sides (ahl al-ṭariqayn) of the neighbourhoods, regardless of which path they lived in. • the Prophet expressed to us a very serious warning when he said: “The worst feast is the one to which only the rich are invited and the poor are excluded.” • the greatest thing which the Prophet did for the newborn was to perform the tahnik process, where he would rub a chewed date against the palate of the newborn • the Prophet told Abu al-Dardah that if he wanted to have his heart softened and have his provisions fulfilled in life, he should do the following: “Bring the orphan near to you, caress his hair, and feed him from the food that you eat. That will soften your heart and fulfill your needs.” • perhaps the greatest virtue that the host derived was that the Prophet would bless their house by praying in it. By doing so, the owners of the house would feel a special connection with that specific location and take it as a place of prayer (musalla). • the ruling on a certain joke depends on your intention, how it is employed, and who you are joking with • The Prophet (S) would joke: o in order to solidify the bonds with family, friends, orphans, youth, and other members of the wider community o to relax anyone’s sense of nervousness o to enable them to form authentic relationships o as a means to defuse tensions and disputes o to explain a complicated or sensitive concept o to provide the ignored and overlooked members of society attention o to raise the people in value and honour • People who pray privately at night and give additional devotion to Allah are given a special lens to identify people who are in need, even if they do not verbally seek your help. Individuals who do not pray at night will not be blessed with this special form of intuition. • The Prophet provided the people relief in three matters: 1. he would never degrade or abuse people 2. he would never search for the hidden and shameful shortcomings of people 3. he would never speak except in circumstances which he hoped to be rewarded for. This means that he shunned any vain, harmful, or prohibited speech, such as backbiting or gossip. Likewise, he would never initiate conversations which would cause the other side to feel ashamed or embarrassed. • the anger of a typically cheerful person is significant, as it indicates a red line has been crossed. This is because such a person does not customarily become angry. • Despite the serious wartime context, the Prophet observed the bird and realised that it was facing a predicament. He turned to the Companions and asked: “Who has hurt this one with regards to her child?” Ponder upon how this question has been beautifully phrased. If you did not know the background of the story, you would think that he was talking about an actual human, not a bird. But this shows how much outraged the Prophet had become, and how much pain he felt after seeing this bird fly around in this manner. One of the Companions then mentioned that they had taken some of this bird’s chicks. The Prophet ordered that they be returned back to the mother’s nest, so that they would be relieved. • The Prophet had one golden rule: if you sought his forgiveness for a previous wrong, he would fully pardon you and let you begin with a fresh slate. It did not matter whether this wrong was a misdemeanor or a gross injustice. He would move on and fully commit himself to remembering his Lord during the night and seeking His forgiveness. • “You were sent to bring ease to the people, and you were not sent to bring hardship.” • On this matter, Anas ibn Mālik h said:“Not once did the Prophet have food for the next day.” This means that the Prophet lived his life on a day-to-day basis, without having any stable state of living. • “O Ibn al-Khaṭṭab, are you not pleased to know that the Hereafter is ours while the world is theirs?” • Regardless of whether one has lived in the past or in the present, they must always curb their perception of entitlement to this world by recalling how Allah’s most beloved person experienced severe poverty. • the Prophet meant that his emotional response was a form of mercy that Allah b put in the soul; his tears were a form of divine mercy that Allah inspired in his heart • Despite its metaphysical nature, the revelation would have its severe toll on the Prophet and press down upon him like a heavy weight. • different beings of nature, such as rocks and trees, would both adore and greet him. It was astonishingly beautiful that even nature had an attachment with him. Related to this point, remember how the Prophet mentioned that the student of sacred knowledge receives dua from everyone and everything in the world • The night prayer (al-qiyām) has a unique and eminent status in Islamic society. In fact, Ibn ʿUmar h stated that it will be the first act of worship to disappear from the Muslim community. Worship in the night consists of two fundamental ingredients: night prayers done after sleep (tahajjud), and raising the voice (raf al-ṣawt) during recitation • The ummah in its entirety was included in the dua of the Prophet, regardless of whether you lived in his time period or not. • As for the righteous person, Ibn ʿAbbās h mentions that when they die, the heavens cry when they leave this world. This is because the gate of the heavens which their good deeds used to pass through is no longer open. Likewise, their place of prostration (sajdah) on the earth weeps as well. • At this point, one of the Companions asked: “O Messenger of Allah! What about those individuals from your ummah who will not be afflicted with the loss of a child?” He said in response: “Then I am the loss for my ummah, for they will not be afflicted with a loss like mine.” • But he noted that on the Day of Judgement, he will be waiting by the Pool (Ḥawḍ) for them to come with a cup in his hand. He will ensure that all the generations of his ummah would be able to drink directly from his blessed hand. Longing for that moment is in fact an act of worship Duas for Recitation • “O Allah, I ask from you the ability to speak the word of truth in times of pleasure and anger.” • “O Allah, give us more and not less, honour us and do not disgrace us, give us and do not withhold from us, choose us and do not choose others over us, and please us and be pleased with us.” • “O Allah, I ask of you for faith that is not taken away, for blessings that do not expire, and the companionship of the Prophet in the Highest Eternal Garden (Jannah al-Firdaws).” ...more |
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| 1466886056
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really liked it
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it was amazing
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★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • People of taqwa, people of piety, are the ones Allah loves. • Allah created us not to bu ★★★★★ (5/5) A selection of my favorite passages from the book • People of taqwa, people of piety, are the ones Allah loves. • Allah created us not to burn in Hell but to go to the Heaven. • And so the fear of Allah is not the kind that would cause you to flee from Him but to come back to Him because that fear is not like the fer of anything else. • Taqwa isn’t praying long int the night, it isn’t fasting long into the day; it is that you abandon everything that is displeasing to Allah. Everything beyond that is Ihsan, is excellence. • Imam al Ghazali said something very profound “The greatest consequence of sin is not punishment that comes with it, but the distance that comes between you and Allah.” • The greatest way to be loved by Allah is to show we fear losing that love. • Allah didn’t create us to not sin. Allah created us to know how to deal with sin properly. • The word tawbah means turning back to Allah, not necessarily that we have remove all the effects of that sin. Realize that even the word “repentance” relates to our relationship with Allah. • It is beautiful, that in pairing sin and forgiveness together, in Islam there is no such thing as failure. • God-consciousness is the stepping stone towards excellence. • Taqwa is remembering that Allah sees everything so that we are deterred from doing anything that could compromise His love. Ihsan is honoring the sight of Allah upon us in a way that would encourage us to earn extra love from Allah. • Allah describes three types of selves in the Quran: the first the soul that commands itself with evil, that indulges in evil. The second, the soul that is accountable of trying not to do anything that disqualifies you from the love of Allah. And the third, the soul that is at peace with Allah, that is the self of ihsan, that’s the person of excellence, because they are at peace with the favour of their Lord. • Allah allows a human being to be elevated in His Sight, to a rank even above that of an angel. It is because an angel has no choice but to obey Allah whereas a human being goes beyond obedience, carrying out acts of voluntary praise, voluntary love, and voluntary worship. • When my servant ask of Me I am near, that nearness (qurb) of Allah is in itself, the biggest blessing that comes from our dua. • Therefore, how Allah answers that dua is secondary to the fact that we have a direct connection with Him and we have a Lord that loves to hear our voice. • Allah does not expect us to reach the peak of purification before we can be worthy of supplicating, Allah loves us just for trying. He loves us just for the effort and if we think about how beautiful and profound that is, then it helps us to repent and make duʿā’. • But think about all those times Allah saw you struggling to pray. Maybe you had an injury and praying became harder for you…We ask Allah to allow us to cry sincerely for His sake, not in a way that makes us feel hopeless but rather hopeful that the One Who sees our tears, our prayers doesn’t let them go in vain. • Firstly, Allah mentions that Allah loves those who put their trust in Him. Allah loves to be asked. Secondly, Allah removes distractions from Him in this process of trust. Thirdly, Tawakkul here allows us to have tranquility in this life and a sense of longing for the Hereafter. • He explained the third level of trust in Allah as being like the trust a dead person being washed has on those washing him. That is an absolute state of trust in Allah • we hold ourselves back and practice restraint because we see His pleasure rather than our own misfortunes, we see Allah’s goal for us rather than our immediate hardship. • Patience in the maintenance of those acts of worship are a form of expression that we are willing to stay the course for the sake of Allah because we want to see these good deeds accepted, done correctly and done with iḥsān, in a way that shows excellence. • we can play the role of iṣlāḥ, rectifying the situation, reconciling between the parties but most importantly maintaining a sense of justice • In terms of the notion of injustice, assess, “am I actually a source of injustice in someone else’s life?” Not am I being complicit in someone else’s injustice? Or, am I not standing up for someone when I should be? Or, am I being fair and equitable in a situation? But am I, myself, guilty of harming someone or oppressing someone? • It’s not the best of people that are the most beneficial but the most beloved people to Allah are those who are the best to other people. • they put a sense of inner joy into their brother’s or sister’s heart. They bring them inner peace. • They serve as a vehicle of Allah’s comfort to people in the emotional sense just as they seek that from Allah for themselves. • Allah uses us as a means of removing someone else’s hardship • We ask Allah to make us beloved to Him and to allow us to serve Him by serving other people and to make us the channels of rah˙mah and generosity and benevolence in people’s lives • strength of īmān, strength of faith, strength of resilience, strength of body and spirit: our faith informs us and empowers us • always pick yourself up, always try to be a person who is giving rather than receiving, always seek to be someone who comforts rather than being the one comforted. That’s what makes us beloved to Allah • The virtues of being in tests that are not self-inflicted are that a person tries their best to maintain their modesty, and as much independence as possible, even in dire poverty • our sense of nobility is not with the things that other people endow us with, it’s not with the awards that are given to us, it’s not with the recognition of this world. It’s in standing up in prayer at night and it’s in distinguishing ourselves in the sight of Allah and seeking honour in His sight • If we are competing for Allah’s favour then pride does have some good connotations at times, but it’s very limited and restricted to a few contexts. • Khuyalā’ is a kind of pride or boastfulness that at times is loved by Allah and at times hated by Allah; there is a type of khuyalā’ loved by Allah and a type of khuyalā’ hated by Allah. The Prophet (peace be upon him) said that Allah loves the type of pride that drives a person in battle or to give more in charity and the type of pride that Allah hates is when khuyalā’ enables oppression • Allah loves protective honour and jealousy that is based upon solid grounds; the type that He hates is all based on suspicion. • We are moved by something when we have ghīrah for religious symbols, for Allah and for his Messenger • By understanding the Sunnah in a holistic way we learn to appreciate that we don’t have to be loud, aggressive or foul to denote strength, rather those things are actually a sign of weakness • being humble amongst the believers and being dignified amongst the disbelievers: What is meant by dignity among the disbelievers is that we don’t relinquish our faith or our principles or our Islam in the presence of other people who do not share our faith • always deal with the believers with a great sense of humility • it cannot be that that humility leads us to disgrace ourselves amongst people without īmān • Imam Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (Allah’s mercy be upon him) said that the curse of the believer is that he excels in one good quality and so he tolerates the bad quality that comes with it. • Forbearance is when you are particularly patient with people, it’s about patience and holding yourself back. • If we have forbearance (ḥilm) we are able to exercise self-control. • “Haste is from the Devil.” But al-anāh (deliberation) is from Allah • They are making sure that they are always doing things properly, calculated, in a structured way, in a way that sustains progress rather than hinders it. • we as believers are taught to be intentional about the things that we do, so we seek to manifest forbearance and deliberation in our personality, in our work and in how we control the environment. • If we have itqān, due diligence in our work ethic and are detail-oriented, that speaks to a superior degree of motivation as well, to a greater level of iḥsān. • If a person is able to be consistent with a good deed, even if it’s small, then that’s a sign they are also consistent in their love of Allah, that they are maintaining the steady presence of Allah’s love and of concern for Allah’s love in their lives no matter what is happening to them, no matter what their emotional state is, no matter what’s taking place. • The Prophet (peace be upon him) said “Do the deeds that you are able to continue with. Take up things that do not exhaust you. Allah does not tire of your worship until you tire of worshiping Allah. The most beloved of deeds to Allah are the small ones, if they are consistent.” • Ibn al- Qayyim (Allah’s mercy be upon him) said, “Come to Allah— with a heart that is longing for Him”, with a heart that is in anticipation of Him. • they had Khuḍūʿ which is to humble yourself in a bodily fashion, namely, to stand before Allah in the proper way, to guard the physical elements of the prayer. So, they fell on their faces in prostration before Allah and they also had Khushūʿ or humility, which is the internal discipline that caused them to cry. • Taking care of those things is a means of generosity (ikrām) to those that are around us as well as to the angels, whom we can’t see, but most of all a means of demonstrating the anticipation we have of standing before Allah. • Every single believer, even a child, is meant to regard the house of Allah as the primary home in their own lives; the place that they go to for mercy, tranquility, and for nourishment and there is absolutely no replacing the role of a masjid in one’s life with anything else. • The Prophet (peace be upon him) also said that if we love someone for the sake of Allah, then we should tell that person that we love them for His sake…how much we love the other person for Allah’s sake is proportionate to how much Allah loves us for that love • some of the most beloved people to Allah are among the least noticed in our communities. The friends (awliyā’) of Allah, those closest to Him are the hidden gems (akhfiyā’) in our communities. • it’s a good habit for us to have obscurity and it’s part of modesty (ḥaya’) • May Allah notice us, may Allah allow us to seek recognition from Him and learn to practice humility, obscurity, modesty, silence • by our trying to be like the Prophet (peace be upon him) Allah will overlook our shortcomings and Allah is (al-Ghafūr) the One Who Covers and Forgives faults and Who Shows a Special Mercy (al-Raḥīm) because we are trying. • The Prophet (peace be upon him) tied that to Allah’s generosity too, for just as Allah loves to forgive us, loves to be generous with us, He loves that we accept His gifts when He gives them to us • there is something that is of ease embedded within the Sharia, within fiqh, within an act of worship, we should take that and thank Allah for it. • The Prophet (peace be upon him) also said, “If Allah has given you a blessing, Allah loves to see its effect upon you, so enjoy the blessing but don’t be extravagant.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 2024
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Jul 11, 2024
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Jul 01, 2024
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.74
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it was amazing
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not set
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Sep 28, 2024
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| 4.35
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really liked it
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Sep 27, 2024
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Aug 27, 2024
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| 3.82
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liked it
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Sep 17, 2024
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Aug 21, 2024
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| 4.01
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it was amazing
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Aug 11, 2024
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Aug 10, 2024
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| 3.55
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really liked it
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Aug 11, 2024
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Aug 09, 2024
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| 3.59
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really liked it
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Aug 10, 2024
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Aug 08, 2024
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| 4.45
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it was amazing
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Aug 27, 2024
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Aug 07, 2024
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| 3.39
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it was ok
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Aug 07, 2024
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Aug 06, 2024
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| 3.43
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it was amazing
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Aug 06, 2024
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Aug 05, 2024
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| 2.77
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did not like it
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Aug 05, 2024
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Aug 04, 2024
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|||||
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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Aug 05, 2024
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Jul 24, 2024
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| 4.76
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it was amazing
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Jul 24, 2024
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Jul 22, 2024
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| 4.05
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it was amazing
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Aug 04, 2024
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Jul 17, 2024
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| 3.96
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it was amazing
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Jul 23, 2024
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Jul 17, 2024
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| 3.87
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did not like it
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Jul 16, 2024
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Jul 16, 2024
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| 4.85
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it was amazing
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Jul 22, 2024
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Jul 09, 2024
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|||||
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| 3.09
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did not like it
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Jul 09, 2024
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Jul 09, 2024
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| 3.82
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liked it
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Jul 05, 2024
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Jul 04, 2024
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| 3.35
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really liked it
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Jul 04, 2024
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Jul 01, 2024
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| 4.75
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it was amazing
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Jul 11, 2024
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Jul 01, 2024
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