Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. Soren Kierkegaard I The Europeans left with a vengeance, what I said to Lia. Now a new political atmosphere marred our lives with land masses falling apart and going into the ocean, it seemed […]
Categories
Prose
Good never breaks back, and never puts much effort into the fight.
Selection of aphorisms from Yahia Lababidi’s forthcoming book, Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality and Spirit – Unbound UK / Penguin Random House, 2018 The danger of cynicism is getting what you believe in: nothing. In the same way that […]
He could hear them in the night as they shuffled and whispered, their murmurs a prelude to the shrieking that he knew would finally erupt and the wave of pain it heralded that would swallow him.
It is as if she had come to me in her old age, dressed in black, to tell me the dangers she faces and how she is coping with them, and as if I were meant to be her messenger.
Getting into her white coat, she glanced at the list of people to whom she had given an appointment over the telephone during the weekend.
“She is a liar and a cheat. She is an elephant. She is my wife.” And it was the end of an almost perfect day. She thought of her beautiful daughters and her grandchildren. She counted on her fingers […]
Part I This country’s fathers’ paramount desire was this – pursuit, unlimited, of wealth. But Jefferson, whose land and slaves were surely wealth enough, wrote “happiness” instead and not because he’d had his fill, but since he thought […]
Their love was banned. He was secular and she was religious. Mais l’amour était profond comme un puit dans le desert, un puit avec tous les permutations de l’eau qui coule. . . Lui et elle/l’amour/les gens qui voyagent/qui traversent […]
If you observe a mappemonde carefully you will notice a large body of blue water surrounded by land on all sides. Well, almost all sides, except for some straits that allow whales in, vessels out and the back-and-forth of water […]
My sister, all of four years older than me, kindly informed me very early on that Santa Claus didn’t exist, thereby converting me into a life-long skeptic. She also let me know in no uncertain terms that I had been […]
What will the traveller see on the horizon? – From the meaning of Inuit place names This place is not favourableThe land is very flat and looks like ice There are lots of caribou antlers in the area This place […]
Communist Hot Dogs, In Pursuit of Petula, and A Kiss from Marlene Dietrich The fortieth anniversary of the opening of Expo ’67 unleashed a flood of memories for me. As soon as season passes became available, passes which took […]
CASEMENTS (after Charles Baudelaire) Through this doubled pane, the city spreads before me like a jeweled necklace. Strings of lights delineate throughways. Pinpoints of light shunt the length of them, lives encased in molded squares of metal that accelerate […]
We left San Juan Del Sur early this morning, heading for Rivas. The bus waited on the side of the road with a small cafe selling gallo pinto and eggs. There was an old beat up car across the street […]
