"The Book of My Lives"

[fiefoe]

Aleksandar Hemon is older than Tea Obreht by some years, and through his eyes I got a much better idea about the Balkan conflicts in the 90s.
The very last essay was very hard to read.

• My joke was supposed to be about the flimsiness of difference- as we belonged to the same raja.. the sweater established a momentary, evanescent difference... But the moment you point at a difference, you enter, regardless of your age, an already existing system of differences, a network of identities, all of them ultimately arbitrary and unrelated to your intentions, none of them a matter of your choice.
• The moment you other someone, you other yourself.
• Part of growing up is learning, unfortunately, to develop loyalties to abstractions: the sate, the nation, the idea... You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences.
• Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a difference place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation.
• Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiate the conditions of our selfhood under perpetually changing existential circumstances. The displaced person strives of narrative stability -- by way of systematic nostalgia.


• And whoever they may be, we need to win the war against them so that we can triumphantly be alone in the world.
• A few of us who stayed pooled our realities together.
• the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.
• In the seductive glow of inevitable catastrophe, the city appeared more beautiful than ever.
• the world that could be conquered by reading


• In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.
• From the lightless shafts of corporal memory, my body had recalled the action of turning to see what was playing.
• War is the most concrete thing there can be, a fantastic reality that levels both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.
• Vast as it is, Chicago ignored the distinction between freedom and isolation, between independence and selfishness, between privacy and loneliness.
• I wanted from Chicago what I'd got from Sarajevo: a geography of the soul.
• The tall ice ranges along the shore when the winter is exceptionally cold... the process exactly replicated the way mountain ranges were formed hundreds of millions of years ago, tectonic plates pushing against each other. ('Reasons Why I Do Not Wish To Leave Chicago')
• I understood, for the first time since my arrival, that it was possible to live in this country and still have a past shared with other people.
• After the sermons, his flock would play and he would referee. ('If God Existed, He'd be a Solid Midfielder')
• the rare moment of transcendence that might be familiar to those who play sports with other people; the moent, arising from the chaos of the game, when all your teammates occupy an ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours; the moment that perishes
• the world in all its hackneyed, stubborn concreteness


• perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality
• I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision.
• To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world.
• Inoculated against speechlessness, they had no access to the unspeakable.
• Even if you could imagine your child's grave illness, why would you? ('Aquarium')
• The child has to construct imaginary narratives to try out the words she suddenly possesses.
• I'd witness their rapidly receding to the distant horizon of their own lives, where entirely different things mattered.
• Isabel's illness overrode any kind of imaginative involvement on my part.