Azar Nafisi
The book's job is to make the reader sensitive to ideas that they may have overlooked. What role does literature play in our lives, is the central question in Nafisi's Reading Nabakov in Tehran. Those words, Nabakov and Tehran, they seem evocative in a single phrase. This might be the central tenet of literature, to hold things together that do not seem like they belong together.
To make room for thinking and feeling. To make room is to make time feel like time, not just an accumulation of things but an intensity.
Offense and the emotions that it closes off for us. (On comedy onslaught in India) How much are we willing to feel and think?
resentment and the problem of violence (Nafisi's narration of Iran).
Intensity and incrementalism. Time of the mind and time of the work. The inside time and outside time. The time of bombay evenings.
life of the mind.
I flip through this book's pages and a sense of comfort is on me. To know yourself as a person, to feel yourself as a thinking, living being. It gives me a sense of self that I didn't even realise that faded in these rushed weeks of grad school.
It makes me think: You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Pay attention to the forms. they have more value than you think they do.