"Reading Lolita in Tehran"

[fiefoe]

The time-line isn't too easy to follow, but with a Culture Revolution overlapping with a war with Iraq that lasted eight years, it's pretty much the title of a Dickens novel.

• In those days, people really talked that way. One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.
• We intellectuals, more than ordinary citizens, either play scrupulously into their hands and call it constructive dialogue or withdraw from life completely in the name of fighting the regime.
  
• The next night it was announced that Iraq would accept a cease-file if it could fire the last missile. It was like a game played between two children-what mattered most was who would get the last word.
  
• This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.

[Henry James:]  The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and now we are confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking,  with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.

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