Certain silences are harder
to take back than words.
Yahia Lababidi’s new book, What Remains to be Said, masterfully sculpts words that peel through multiple layers of meaning. Deceptively brief and simple, these words spread out on each page, gently convincing the reader to stop and think, question, reflect, and perhaps understand. For example, he writes:
All languages are rough translations
of our native tongue: the Spirit.
In passing, I tend to forget what I have just read, but the words return with a new force when I begin to translate what I see around me. How do I translate this aphorism? What does it mean to me and what does it mean when I translate or communicate that to others? How do we connect? What or who is “Spirit” for me? How does it connect me with you, and how do we write, read, or speak in “our native tongue?” This one sentence fills my mind with a long series of thought processes that bring me closer to the one who wrote these eleven words on one single page.
All through the book you will find such beautiful aphorisms — brief lines in verse or prose. “It’s difficult, in times like these,” he writes, “not to become radicalized—”
the question is: will it be
by all consuming hatred
or compassion?
I hold Yahia’s book in my hand and open it, knowing that each page will give me something to feel and think about. It is made for book lovers — small enough to fit into the tiniest space and large enough to spread into the hearts of our natural, compassion-filled worlds of the “Spirit.” It makes us reflect on how artists — “like mystics”— can “… lower their/ buckets deep into our communal well to/ retrieve what we thirst for.” And how we might ourselves search for meaning and depth from words and their formation.
