The Road to Damascus
The teeming enormity that is Istanbul and the intensity of my encounters had imparted to that visit a particular aura of necessity.
From ‘The Road to Damascus’ by Claire Messud in Granta 118: Exit Strategies. You can now buy the issue or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.
Boston, MA
9 February, 7 p.m., Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
With Granta editor John Freeman, Claire Messud discusses her essay ‘The Road to Damascus’, memory, loss and the search for the Beirut of her father’s childhood.
Photo by Riccardo Venturi/Contrasto.
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Elia S
Thu May 31 23:19:06 BST 2012
Messud searched for her father's memories in a physically and mentally reconstructed Beirut, reconnecting to her father's yellow note only through old ruins and mostly imagination of what it must have been like.
On a similar journey on the life of my own father the force of re/construction of urban landscapes became quite apparent.
On the one hand I could not but feel fortunate, that the places I was seeking in Sardinia had hardly changed, all streets the same, most houses the same, the same people, sharing their memories.
On the other hand, in Bratislava the only "reconnection", as in Messud's essay, was a utterly modern 70s area, with some vague matching of the street plan, and only imagination left to fill the gaps.
We live In an era when we have overly detailed video/photographic memories of most days of most recent years of most people around us, And yet we have made our memories of the not so distant past shorter, vaguer and emptier, by erasing city plans, buildings, inadvertedly moving communities, their relationsips and their memories.
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