Читать книгу Neomedievalism. Reflections on the Post-Enlightenment Era онлайн

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I loved him a lot, like any good son can love a good father. But a son never loves as much as a father does. It takes a whole lifetime to come to this realization; some, even, need two lifetimes to understand it and one more to begin to accept it. So, you can go about discovering other meanings in old memories, each one more profound than the last.

For example, in several political elections, the old man listed himself on the ballot for his party. I never voted for him. I remember my first time, at the end of the 1980s, I voted for an emerging ecological party. When I arrived home I told my father that I had not voted for him. As always, he took the news with a smile and told me that I had done well.

Now that he has died, I ask myself what in the hell was the point of all my idealistic honesty on that one election day. What was the purpose of all that petty cruelty? What good was that petty truth, that questionable honesty?

What was the point of any of it? I ask myself this while I stare at a pile of a hundred letters written in Arabic that his parents wrote and received almost a century ago. I don’t know what they say. I can only suspect that they are stories of love and heartbreak, of encounters and disagreements that my father never knew about because his family also hid from him their own frustrations, just as they hid from him all the secrets of a language that they only used in the depths of their two privates lives in a small earthen house, in the middle of a field that belonged to someone else and barely provided for survival.