REFUSING TO CANNIBALIZE MY LIFE
story: “The Watch”
author: Elie Wiesel
year: 1964
where: NYU Abu Dhabi Library
note: rereading to teach on Sunday
a line: “The glorious masters of our municipality were jubilant: they were rid of us, there would be no more kaftans on the street.”
story: Come Running
author: Tim Raymond
year: 2017
where: Al Reem, post-bath
note: a Glimmer Train read
a line: “It’s like God took a big ice cream scoop and scooped out the place in my stomach where all the invisible butterflies live. Then God said, ‘You don’t even know what butterflies are. That’s my point.'”
story: Train to Harbin
author: Asako Serizawa
year: 2016
where: Abu Dhabi, my gold chaise lounge
note: This is a story both epic and intimately personal about a Japanese doctor stationed in Pingfang (now Northern China, then the Japanese puppet-state Manchukuo) during WWII, where terrible war crimes, including human experimentation, were committed.
a line: “Perhaps it is simply the mind, which, in its inability to accept a fact, returns to it, sharpening the details, resolving the image, searching for an explanation that the mind, with its slippery grasp on causality, will never be able to find. Most days I am spared by the habits of routine. But when the air darkens like this, turning the windows inward, truncating the afternoon, the present recedes, its thin hold on consciousness no match for the eighty-two years that have already claimed it.”
*If you want, follow me on Instagram (samantha.neugebauer) for more on what I am reading and doing.
story: Spring in Fialta
author: Vladimir Nabokov
year: 1936 (English 1947)
where: Dubai, Al Habtoor Polo Resort
note: sometimes on an ordinary day, you need to read a masterpiece
a line: “And regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all its atoms were recombined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium, which was measured not by the lengthy separations but by those few meetings of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed. ”
story: Dance in America
author: Lorrie Moore
year: 1994
where: bedroom, taxi, a couple places
note: homesick
a line: “’We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,’ explains Simone.”
