In our ISRME book club, we just finished discussing Naguib Mahfouz's Children of the Alley this week. It's an interesting book, and it might help you to know that it is an allegory before it starts. I didn't figure that out for over 150 pages. Then things started making more sense.
The book considers a variety of themes related to life and religions (and their similarities and differences). These include our human addiction to numbing ourselves against reality and a regular returns to the question of injustice and why the Almighty does not intervene with it more directly. As well, the book seems to me to have a special focus on the human desire to 'return to Eden', though of course that's not the way it's labeled. In the quotation below, 'the mansion' is that allegorical equivalent for an Edenic closeness to beauty, rest, and the divine.
If the past could be forgotten, the present would be wonderful, but we will keep on staring at that mansion, which gives us the only glory we can claim, and causes all the misery we know.
There is also an interesting progression of thoughts about the nature and place of work in human life:
Working to eat is the worst curse of all.
...
Then [Adham] yawned more deeply. “Work is a curse!”
“Maybe so,” whispered Umaima, “but it is a curse that can only be defeated by more work!”
...
Arafa’s eyes were bright and he spoke intensely. “But leisure isn’t the ultimate goal! Imagine spending your life free and at leisure. It’s a beautiful dream, but it’s so ludicrous, Hanash. It would be so much better to be freed from work so that we could work marvels.”
...
“So why are you so hard at work?”
“Because work is all I have,” Arafa sighed.
One final tidbit...
"But every tragedy, however great, eventually becomes a mere fact of life."
No comments:
Post a Comment