words I liked: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This was just an engaging story from start to finish, and I loved the author’s use of language.

A couple of broad quotes on life:

Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated.

Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy.

You couldn’t do that with soul-learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing.

And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same.

…whenever people asked him how his poems were going, he’d answer that he was just “living the poems he wasn’t writing.”

Expendable may seem a bad word to use to describe your own life, except I actually find it liberating. The way it vents away all pressure to become. How it asks only that you be.

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good.

That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.

That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.

My life was a painting I’d been staring at upside-down up until that moment…

“I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they’ve gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That’s what I am. An artist. I make art.”

She paused for a moment.

“It’s what time doesn’t ruin.”

Living life passionately, searching for moments of beauty:

…his whole life had been a steady procession of him passionately loving what other people merely liked, and struggling, mostly failing, to translate to anyone else how and why everything mattered so much.

Imagine how that might contribute to your sense of amongness. To your sense of earth maybe actually being the right place for you.

…there was a word for this: sonder. “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

But we still don’t really know what we’re doing in life most of the time:

He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that. He read once about a Sufi prayer that went “Lord, increase my bewilderment.” That was the prayer in its entirety.

This one was on somebody trying to overcome addiction:

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well”

There was so much on thought and language that I loved:

Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying - briefly - what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom.

…including the idea that language is a tool that gives shape to thoughts:

It was like the language in the air that night was a mold he was pouring around his curiosity.

…that there can be a speed to language and thought, and how it works when they are running at different speeds:

I used to think slow, slower than language moved. By the time I settled into an idea about anything, the moment for me to say something had passed. Roya used to say I was a good a listener. Mostly, though, I was just a bad talker.

There was also a lot of beautiful words around the concept of moments. This one describing moments as having a current, like water:

Something in her seemed to have relaxed a little, conceded to the moment’s current.

…and that moments can have texture:

…trying to be better about noticing these moments, about feeling grateful for the texture and specificity they lent his life.

…similarly silence having a texture that can be measured:

They sat there for a few seconds, then a full minute, each quietly measuring the texture of the silence, the history between them.

…and looping back towards how silence relates to moments.

The silence was a mercy for which each felt grateful as their hearts calibrated to the moment, to the day’s wild and vertiginous revelations.

There was also much that related to being present in a moment that exists:

Whatever pretensions and high purpose he’d once held for his future gave way to the delicious primacy of the present.

“We won’t grow old together, Cyrus. But can’t you feel this mattering? Right now?”

“I had a friend too, a novelist,” she said. “And one time I asked her about whether she plots out her books in advance and just fills in the details, or if she moves through the story as she writes it.

She looked at me and without skipping a second, she answered like an oracle: ‘Behind me is silence, and ahead of me is silence.’ And that was it. That was her whole answer. Isn’t that perfect?”

Clever use of language is not always clear though:

“And I feel so inadequate. Like, just the writing of it, trying to put it into language. It feels so damned.”

The only people who speak in certainties are zealots and tyrants.

I thought there were some great uses of language to describe, to invoke an image of something. This to describe a physically large, but not particularly intelligent person:

…waddling around inside our house inside his muscles, inside a body grown two sizes too large for his brain.

…and invoking particular occupations to give shape to the image of a person’s physical features:

Zee’s thumbs were like miniatures of Zee himself, compact but muscular, sturdy and strong. They could have belonged to a masseuse or a sculptor, a seamstress or a carpenter.

This use of analogy to help the reader envision an emotion:

Shame flooded him immediately, like seawater filling a lung.

This was just a powerful description:

…it was a hate that made nothing happen.

It was something I’d come to love about her, in time. It wasn’t narcissism, the way she was always looking at herself. I recognized later there was a kind of wonder in it, running her fingers over her smile lines, the skin of her forehead, as if to say, “Where did you come from? This skin, what a strange envelope!”

A description of what it’s like when sharing a substantial story about the past with a new person goes well:

Orkideh had held that conversation so carefully.

Related to nothing else, the last few quotes are just words that I enjoyed and wanted to be able to refer to later:

Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.

…they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty.

…the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you…

Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.