He can only produce out of their armoury the sophism, ‘that you can neither enquire into what you know nor into what you do not know;’ – Meno by Plato Come, go with me into mine armoury. – Titus Andronicus Act IV. Scene I, William Shakespeare That there, shouldered against the wall is your best sword.It […]
Elie was fifty-eight years old when she began to lose language. She told Hiroji that the first occurrence was in St. Michael’s Church in Montreal, when the words ofthe Lord’s Prayer, words she had known almost from the time she had learned tospeak, failed to materialize on her lips. For a brief moment, while the […]
One My God, how old is this driver? And how old is this car? I couldn’t believe my eyes when I sat down next to him. The wrinkles on his face were as many as the stars in the sky, and every wrinkle pressed gently against the next, to make the kind of Egyptian face […]
It begins so simply: a smiling young woman hands my 92 year-old mother a clutch of tiger lilies at her back door. “I can’t stay,” she says apologetically. “Got a meeting in ten minutes, but I just wanted to bring these.” The woman pats my mother’s arm affectionately. “Miss seeing you,”and then turns back to […]
A note from Jimo Zhang, the translator: The following poems are selected from a book of poetry entitled Rejuvenation, which is compared to a Chinese version of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. As China has achieved economic success over the past decades, new problems have cropped up, posing a challenge or threat to its long tradition, with […]
“Come on, Josh! You can do it! Go go go!” While the boy in light blue T-shirt and black shorts half-ran, half-stumbled his way toward the finish line, far behind his peers, the woman next to me cheered as if he were a split second away from becoming a world champion. Her friends beside her […]
All we want on a Saturday is one day in our own benign custody.No, I am not her. She is my mother. If you want, I can get her. No?I have to go to the patio, through the French doors where outsidefeels busier or sweatier, like the whole world is in behind-the-scenesproduction. My father has […]
1. Sitting by the Yulung River, waiting for a late lunch of braised pumpkins and garlic at the Mountain River Retreat and watching the rafts of tourists floating lazily by, I was pricked to wakefulness by the approaching strains of a song coming from upstream. Fellow resident writer Roberto from Mexico had just joined me […]
I met Bina in Sokolo, a village of about 3,000 inhabitants in the western part of Mali, close to the border with the desert state of Mauritania. To the south, the Niger River; to the north, the haunting desert: a huge yellow blank, slowly progressing south. A little flag on the Michelin map still indicates […]
IT WAS STILL dark when he gave up on the possibility of sleep. A restless nightit would be,then, as he had always expected: tossing and turning, pondering outcomes and eventualities and wondering how brave he might be, when the time came, what he had within him in the way of forbearance or strength. Hecouldn’t beat […]
