Khan Al-Khalili Read Online Free Page A

entitled “Poverty’s Crime Against Talent,” but it fared no better than its two predecessors. When that happened, he set about writing with all the dogged stubbornness of someone who sees it as his final hope, all his previous efforts having been destroyed on the frozen rocks of cruel neglect. He rewrote most of them and sent them out to a number of different journals. However, none of them showed any mercy toward his tortured aspirations or seemed ready to rescue him from the pit of despondency. The last article he wrote was on “The Triviality of Literature,” and it too sank without a trace. Shattered in spirit and deeply hurt, he abandoned any further attempts. Bad luck—his enemy of old—had conspired against him yet again, and malicious intent had done the rest. Not for a second did he doubt the value of what he had written about literature. Indeed, he believed it was better than anything al-Manfaluti himself had written, not to mention the effusions of any number of contemporary writers. It was all a question of malice and evil intent. All his dreams had come to nothing. How utterly constricting and unfair life was! Discarding his pen, he now allowed his anger, sorrow, and recalcitrance free rein and finally gave up all aspirations for prestige and authority. His heart was full of anger and resentment,against the world in general and people, especially men with social renown and power. How could you define prestige, he asked himself, particularly its Egyptian form? He answered his own question with a single phrase: favorable circumstances. He was devoted to the memory of Saad Zaghlul, but even so he noted that it was Saad’s father-in-law who had paved the way for his successful career; but for that, he would never have become the figure we know.
    “Behind every high-level position in Egypt,” he would often say, “there’s always a tale to be told. If you want to get ahead in this society of ours, then make sure you use deceit, hypocrisy, and impertinence; and don’t forget a fair dose of stupidity and ignorance to go with it!”
    Either that sort of thing, or else, “Who are these literary types, the ones who write for newspapers and journals? How can it be real literature if the only way to succeed is to meddle in politics and party feuds? Is it only a person of honor who is incapable of achieving the phony prestige they have earned?”
    “By God,” he would say angrily, “I couldn’t be a person of prestige in Egypt now, even if I wanted to … but may God Himself launch a campaign against the very idea of dignity!”
    This anger kept burning away inside him until all that was left was an unholy flicker of flame and a pile of ashes. However, life cannot endure anger on a continuing basis; there have to be some intervals of calm, even if the calm involved is actually more akin to resignation. Thus, whenever his anger got the better of him, he would resort to despair.
    “What’s the point of stubborn persistence in this world of ours?” he would tell himself. “If we’re all going to die likeanimals and rot in the grave, what’s the point of thinking like angels? Just suppose I’d filled the world with writings and inventions. Would the worms in the grave respect me? Would they instead devour me like some common murderer? No! The whole world consists of lies and vanities; in such a context the quest for glory is the acme of lies and vanities.”
    Therefore, he surrendered himself to a bitter isolation of mind and heart. He despaired of life in general and fled from it. But, even as he was turning his back on it in impotent despair, he was still arrogant enough to imagine that he was in fact the one who was depriving life of the benefits of his own personality. For that reason he did not give up reading, the idea being that books were the things that provided man with the kind of life he wanted. He used the world of books as a way of looking down on the ordinary world and adopted them as a