Known and Strange Things

Doran highlighted the political aspect of the play, and this was to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past.

ostinato?

objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life.

Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.

His poems contain a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are, alone with Truth. In a Tranströmer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.

old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.”

Things that would not have merited a second glance are now unquestioningly, almost automatically, recorded. The doors of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: cheap photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and a

We enjoy, with him, the satisfactions of coincidences, and (to put it as he might) of dreaming of pasts in which we dreamed of the future from which we are now dreaming of the past.

I am half-asleep, and therefore more awake than if I were completely awake.