Nabila Chowdhury’s Reviews > Study for Obedience > Status Update

"In the bowl of the lake, my voice came back to me, and it sounded closely – it was more intimate than ever. I spoke and listened to myself at length as I watched the dark shapes move under the thinning ice."

"Over the course of my life, so much of which I had spent in solitude, I developed a habit of speaking aloud, to myself or to my surroundings: at times this was to offer encouragement, some kind word to help me carry on, in spite of it all; at others to offer observations on the passage of time."

"And yet there it was: presence and absence twisting together."

"And so although I walked in the forest nearly every day of the year, I felt perpetually estranged from it, as indeed I had felt estranged from most of the settings in which I had found myself over the course of my life."

"It was as if I had been living my life against the backdrop of a roaring noise that I had not known was there and that had ceased suddenly and absolutely. My perceptions turned outward."

"to my teachers, in whose presence I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies each Friday afternoon. It was the one act of defiance I allowed myself in childhood, and it came to define me, no matter how hard I worked to be good, so long as I persisted in this unaccountable refusal to join in, the light of grace was and would continue to be withheld from me."

"For my part I learned that nobody got what they deserved."

"I learned early on that money could clean you up and make you anybody."

"The work of family, the domestic order. A problem. I went back to the beginning, starting the process again. Over and over. It was my practice and I repeated it often, particularly at such times as there was no one to remind me of that crucial and fundamental thing, the void at the centre of the work."

"The problem, I felt, was that I had, at a certain point, without noticing it, departed from the basic principle of my own wrongdoing on which my practice of doing good ought to have been based."