Syed Karim

“in a world where vast geographical spaces could suddenly shrink to the dimensions of a coffin,”
― Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth

“On the train we swapped seats, you wanted the window and I wanted to look at you.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“How could I long so for someone whose existence I’d only just become aware of? But wasn’t it always like this? Some things we never know we need until we find them.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna