|
296e1e8
|
We are all migrants through time.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2bfec88
|
If you have ever, sir, been through a breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh as if seen for the first time then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
312bc1a
|
We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. B..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
ae4f2fc
|
To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
7ab3ba5
|
when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
1a9a44a
|
Time only moves in one direction. Remember that. Things always change.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
3f6626b
|
It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6200f55
|
he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the tempora..
|
|
mourning
grief
loss
relationships
prayer
family
exit-west
mohsin-hamid
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
67443c2
|
As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my family, now facing war thousands of miles away.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
bbf4c50
|
Every time a couple moves they begin, if their attention is still drawn to one another, to see each other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8c74f77
|
And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.
|
|
nostalgia
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2cc1503
|
She was struggling against a current that brought her inside herself.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
d94cd68
|
It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class--in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding--but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.
|
|
life
ordinary-life
normalcy
dying
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
5a171f3
|
When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
|
|
past
uncertainty
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2c0c9b1
|
and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can't help it. We are all migrants through time.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9fa74ac
|
I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
caddd2d
|
You're a watchful guy. you know where that comes from?" I shook my head. "It comes from feeling out of place," he said. "Believe me. I know."
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
5fc60da
|
I commit her to memory. When I'm alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he's ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there's nothing I can do to stop her.
|
|
letting-go
cleansing
devout
fasting
yearning
hunger
hypocrite
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
8a35113
|
In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
348ecd9
|
But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6b836cd
|
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
4145ab9
|
The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame [...] The moth takes off again, and we both step back, because he's circling at eye level now and seems to have lost rudder control, smacking into the wall on each round. He circles lower and lower, spinning around the candle in tighter revolutions, like a soap sud over an open drain. A few times he seems to touch the flame, but dances off unhurt. Then he ignites like a ball ..
|
|
tragedy
love
star-crossed
insects
moth
smoke
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
d39840b
|
She attracted people to her; she had presence, an uncommon . Documenting her effect on her habitat, a naturalist would likely have compared her to a lioness: strong, sleek, and invariably surrounded by her pride.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
33a5c20
|
While they wished to look out for each other, and to keep tabs on each other, staying in touch took a toll on them, serving as an unsettling reminder of a life not lived, and also they grew less worried each for the other, less worried that the other would need them to be happy, and eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
41ec9b7
|
Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.
|
|
writers
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9326492
|
It has been said that depression is a failure to imagine a plausible desirable future for oneself, and, not just in Marin, but in the whole region, in the Bay Area, and in many other places too, places both near and far, the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
3a7c918
|
Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians.
|
|
civilisation
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
e4a63dd
|
And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me? As the days pass an..
|
|
happiness
love
pathetic
dependence
helplessness
sense-of-humor
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
6a9dc97
|
status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.
|
|
wealth
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
0ee6156
|
we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another,
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
e8d39ec
|
Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.
|
|
nostalgia
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
a72f234
|
You're never rude,' she said, smiling, 'and I think it's good to be touchy sometimes. It means you care.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9eed8e0
|
But you can always justify killing animals on the grounds that you want to eat them, or wear them, or that they smell bad, look funny, bother you, threaten you, and have the bad luck of being in your way. What about killing humans? Well aside from a few die-hard individualists on the fringe, the general consensus among people these days seems to be that eating and wearing other people is just not on. Wearing a suit which costs as much as a ..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
15af0de
|
And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
|
|
wonder
ecstasy
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
19f7805
|
What else is belief but direction?
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b246b9a
|
Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be.
|
|
relationships
self
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
b92fbad
|
The end of the world can be cozy at times.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
9637aca
|
It is the effect of scarcity; one's rules of propriety make one thirst for the improper.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
c23f571
|
It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals.
|
|
morality
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
60c6f51
|
Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguish..
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
2c71528
|
but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.
|
|
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
5611d93
|
Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out.
|
|
poverty
success
shit
school
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
f73679a
|
Slowly, even though I thought it would never happen, New York lost its charm for me. I remember arriving in the city for the first time, passing with my parents through the First World's Club bouncers at Immigration, getting into a massive cab that didn't have a moment to waste, and falling in love as soon as we shot onto the bridge and I saw Manhattan rise up through the looks of parental terror reflected in the window. I lost my virginity..
|
|
headache
liberal-arts
load-shedding
empty
manhattan
immigration
tired
party
drugs
new-york
|
Mohsin Hamid |
|
969a8cc
|
I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age: an almost childlike twenty-two, rather than that permanent middle-age that attaches itself to the man who lives alone and supports himself by wearing a suit in a city not of his birth.
|
|
being-young
corporate-life
feeling-middle-age
|
Mohsin Hamid |