What Are You Doing Here Between The Promised And The Forgotten, Between The Hoped For And The Imagined?

“What are you doing here between the promised and the forgotten, Between the hoped for and the imagined?”

— Yehuda Amichai, from “Lying in Wait for Happiness,“ Poems of Jerusalem & Love Poems (Sheep Meadow Press, 1992)

“I loved hearing you talk. It focused and soothed me. You had the radiant certainty common to people who’ve found God and found God for real, people who don’t even care if you believe, because they know they’ve got a direct line to the truth.”

— Meg Charlton, from “To the Woman with the Restraining Order,” Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, ed. Colleen Kinder (Algonquin Books, 2022)

Masjid Al-Aqsa, Palestine.

“Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manet, verba volat—which has come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air”—used to express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to the silent letter, the scripta, and to allow them to become, in the delicate biblical distinction, verba, spoken words—spirit. The primordial languages of the Bible—Aramaic and Hebrew—do not differentiate between the act of reading and the act of speaking; they name both with the same word.”

— Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

Fez, 1994.

Photographs by Bruno Barbey

– Faraj Bou al-Isha (b. 1956), “Wait” translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa in: “Poems for the Millennium. Book of North African Literature”, edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour