This is my Department Head being arrested. He now sits in a jail and awaits sentencing tomorrow along with 45 other intellectuals, human rights activists and lawyers. What a joke!
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There is utter confusion here. Rumour quickly followed up by counter-rumour. Feverish speculation followed by a non-plussed attitude. Hope and then resignation: "what else do you expect in..."
I don't have my Kadare with me but I do remember this: power depends on indeterminancy, the enigmatic, on the inability of anyone to predict anything, so that we are forced to hang on every word, every gesture, every shred of possible meaning established by the Great Leader, as if these were a portent of our eternal destiny. Texts are scrutinised, analysed and re-examined over and over again. This has to make some sort of sense.
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This is absurd. This is absurd because it is so real.
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Knowing the secrets of everybody around you was indisputably a blessing, but not knowing them was close to being sublime. He'd only recently come to understand that, and it left him in a state of great calm.
---Kadare.
3 comments:
Good Lord - this is a great picture. I never thought that we will have to put up with this crap in the twenty first century..alas this is real, while being so unreal..
And, Ali C is the most harmless of persons in this country while monsters such as the Maulana Fazlullah have been given a free hand to behead people in Swat and parade them!
these are awful, depressing times -
It's strange I don't know anything about your dept. head or you and yet I feel so sorry. Please continue your struggle till he comes back. I am afraid what will happen if he too becomes one of the "disappeared". Can any family personal or professional, survive that?
Yes, Raza, mighty strange, isn't it. No wonder the Chinese used to say:" may you live in interesting times" was a curse.
We expect to learn the verdict sometime in the afternoon.
Thanks, astarte, for your expression of solidarity and your well-wishes.
Let's hope that it doesn't come down to that..
Salaams,
K.
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