bookmark_borderThurs. 22 April 2021; 03:14 – Bed

Earlier tonight I began reading Hisham Matar’s novel, In the Country of Men. In it, the narrator’s mother speaks of grief, a topic I have been reading about, experiencing, and thinking of quite a bit lately.

“Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.”

Spoken by the character Najwa in Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men

A thought occurred to me the other day. I had heard (or possibly read) the phrase “it’s what you do that matters” which is similar to the phrase “actions speak louder than words.” I thought about this for some time, and I began to wonder what if saying something took as much effort as doing something. What would the world look like if it took as much effort to speak as it did to perform an activity?

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bookmark_borderA Bit of World Building in Hisham Matar’s The Return

“We entered the unexpected silence trees create by the sea. The changed light. The moistness in the air becoming slightly more material.”

Hisham Matar, The Return, Pg. 26

I’m currently making my way through Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return. When I came across this passage I was struck by how poetic it was, and by how simply Matar was able to construct a space in my mind, a sensation of a place, with so few words. It reminded me of the concept of world building I had learned last year.

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