Switzerland had somehow become a bywordfor Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un- Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.
That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention. I explained that we would in the course of the semester read and discuss many different authors, but that one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness.
Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying: Beware, I am a monster? Doesn’t the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile?
There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.
I blame my generation for having neglected to teach our children that in life there are no safe places, that safety is an illusion. “Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark,” Baldwin said in an interview in 1961.
In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.
The fact is I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know if I am doing the right thing. I’ve always been told what is right – and suddenly I don’t know anymore. I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know what I want,′ she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.
I have two things to say to that, he said. First, none of us can avoid being contaminated by the world’s evils; it’s all a matter of what attitude you take towards them. And second, you always talk about the effect of “these people” on you. Have you ever thought about your effect on them?
Shouldn’t he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress?
Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
Love is love, but there are so many ways of articulating it.
Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy – even in the books, there were few men for her.
All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us – fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.
Education’s goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.
I once heard my father tell a friend that his relationship with my mother reminded him of a story by Attar, the twelfth-century Persian mystic poet, about a man who fearlessly rode a ferocious lion. When the narrator followed this brave man to his home, he was shocked to see how easily he was cowed by his wife. How could a man who was not afraid of a fierce beast be so intimidated by his own wife? His host shot back: If it weren’t for what happens at home I could never ride a lion.
That was the first time I experienced the desperate orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.
Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum.
Don’t go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.
It is obvious that she is more interested in happiness than in the institution of marriage, in love and understanding than matrimony.
Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world – not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.