Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.

Andre Aciman

Categorized in : People Self Identity Shadow

Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to.

step own dreams small

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

day great future time

We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own.

us own just things

In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.

jewish streets names home

There comes the time at every Passover seder when someone will open a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares into the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us.

door moment time way

Take away our things, and something in us dies.

away us something things

The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.

period egypt trust problem

I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

write everything place writing

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

more nothing difficult work

The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'

i-am problems see reality

'Almost' is all about gradations and nuance and about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, 'almost' Bordeaux.

think purple red wine

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

live history people past

I was born into a Turkish family that had acquired Italian citizenship. Many members of the family subsequently became British, French, Brazilian, and German, so there was a bit of everything. It was not uncommon for people in the family to speak seven languages: English, French, Ladino, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, and even Greek.

born family speak people

I flew on a plane the week after 9/11.

plane after flew week

Rituals are magical.

rituals magical

I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.

me writing forget past

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

change time beauty love

Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn't die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

die home life father

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

loved like meant-to-be genius

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

nothing feeling life facts