every day for me

“I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day for me is like the beginning of a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it.”

i dream in both

“With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.” – london review of books, edward said

gods always fail

“What strikes me as much more interesting is how to keep a space in the mind open for doubt and for the play of an alert, skeptical irony (preferably also self-irony). Yes, you have convictions and you make judgments, but they are arrived at by work, and by a sense of association with others, other intellectuals, a grassroots movement, a continuing history, a set of lived lives. As for abstractions or orthodoxies, the trouble with them is that they are patrons who need placating and stroking all the time. The morality and principles of an intellectual should not constitute a sort of sealed gearbox that drives thought and action in one direction powered by an engine with only one source of fuel. The intellectual has to walk around, has to have the space in which to stand and talk back to authority, since unquestioning subservience to authority in today’s world is one of the greatest threats to an active, and moral, intellectual life.

It is difficult to face that threat on one’s own, and even more difficult to find a way to be consistent with your beliefs and at the same time remain free enough to grow, change your mind, discover new things, or rediscover what you had once put aside. The hardest aspect of being an intellectual is to represent what you profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or method. Anyone who has felt the exhilaration of being successful at that and also successful at keeping alert and solid, will appreciate how rare the achievement is. But the only way of achieving it is to keep reminding yourself that, as an intellectual, you are the one who can choose between actively representing the truth to the best of your ability, or passively allowing a patron or an authority to direct you. For the secular intellectual, those gods always fail.” – gods that always fail, edward said (from the reith lectures)