The Emerald Archive

The Emerald Archive

Notes for a Novel

Gary Freedman
The purpose and character of the use of paraphrases and quotations of copyrighted
material in this book is transformative, see Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.,
510 U.S. 569 (1994) and its progeny, and/or de minimis and is therefore
noninfringing. 17 U.S. Code § 107(1). No copyright infringement is intended.

Copyright ©2015 Gary Freedman. All rights reserved.

Published by Gary Freedman / Lulu
ISBN 978-1-312-80433-3
In The Well-Tempered Clavier – a collection of 48 preludes and fugues –
Johann Sebastian Bach wanted to show why certain combinations of notes are
able to make music while others make noise.
Boredom in the Library
___________________________________________________________________

If I were in New York City, I would be seated at a computer terminal at

the Mid-Manhattan Library located at 455 Fifth Avenue, near Bryant
Park. Oscar Berg, the head librarian, would be eyeing me suspiciously. I
always seem to attract the notice of paranoid head librarians. Oscar is
clearly gay, in his mid-40s, and wears glasses that have a distinctly ladies
style. Yes, he is wearing ladies glasses. It’s the first thing I noticed about
him – that and his quirkily aloof and humorless manner.

Oscar lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in an apartment

building whose rents have not yet been inflated by gentrification. Oscar’s
preferred stomping grounds, Park Slope is out of the question on his
limited librarian’s salary. Oscar takes the M train from Brooklyn every
morning. He doesn’t own a car.

Oscar started working as a librarian in his mid-twenties, following a

lengthy stretch of unemployment after college. He majored in Forensic
Anthropology at Queens College, but upon graduating no police
department in the New York area would hire him. Oscar is blind in one
eye and near-sighted in the other. He started as a volunteer at the Far
Rockaway Library on Central Avenue and was later hired as a library
associate, working there for ten years. He sometimes steals time from his
duties as librarian to work on a treatise he is writing about the last Czar of
Russia titled: The Romanovs: Forensic Identification of the Grave of Czar
Nicholas II.

Oscar Berg is an individualist. He used to eat lunch alone on a park

bench a short distance from the Far Rockaway Library. He would loll in
the sea breeze and sometimes take a solitary stroll down to the beach, just
wandering with no particular aim other than exploring his own thoughts.
In 2004 he was transferred to Manhattan and, for the first few years of his
new assignment, he continued to live in Queens. Oscar used to take the A
1
train from Queens every morning. He’s never owned a car. He now eats
lunch in Bryant Park.

I am seated next to another patron, a young man, apparently a student. I

heard him say to Oscar Berg: “You have a couple of books on reserve for
me. My name is Ben Shirazi.” Oscar Berg nods when Ben Shirazi says,
“Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph Lash and The Lives and Works of the English
Romantic Poets.”

So I am seated next to Shirazi. In fact, he studies accounting at New York

University. He is athletic. In high school he lettered in track and field
and medaled in the men’s 400-meter race and in the 4 × 100 meter relay.

Ben Shirazi plugs away as a grocery store check-out clerk when he’s not
working on his degree. His father is Ezra Shirazi, a wealthy dentist who
lives in a spacious house just blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. The elder Shirazi was born in Iran. He left the country in January
1979 at the same time the Shah left Tehran, ostensibly “on vacation.”
Neither the Shah nor Dr. Shirazi ever returned. It was the start of the
Revolution.

Dr. Shirazi considers his son a good-for nothing who married a shiksa. Dr.
Shirazi refuses to contribute to Ben’s living expenses or his college tuition.
Ben and his wife support themselves on Ben’s grocery clerk salary and her
earnings as a stripper. Ben’s wife works at a club in Manhattan. She is
employed three nights a week. She tells people she is working on a career
“in the entertainment industry.”

This evening the elder Shirazi and his wife, Esther will be having dinner
with their son, Ben and his shiksa wife. Mrs. Shirazi was born into a
wealthy Jewish family in Tehran. Her father, Daniel Dehpour was a
walnut importer. Mrs. Shirazi’s younger brother, Avram is an
accomplished pianist who lives in upstate New York, in a house by a lake.
He does consulting work, advising clients on Islamic extremism.

2
Later this afternoon the Shirazis’ Turkish cook, Hanife will begin to
prepare a meal of Khoresht Fesenjan — a dish of chicken with walnuts
and pomegranate molasses — an Iranian specialty popular with Persian
Jews. Hanife learned how to make Fesenjan from Mrs. Shirazi. Hanife is
a devout Muslim. A silk shawl protects her modesty in this home of
Iranian Jews.

Mrs. Shirazi was crushed by her son’s decision to marry outside the faith.
Ben is her only child. The Shirazis had dreamed of the day when Ben
would marry a girl from the Iranian-Jewish émigré community. But that is
what happens in America, she says painfully. “America gives us freedom
but it corrupts our children.”

Mrs. Shirazi started seeing a psychiatrist shortly after Ben married, a

psychoanalyst named Leonard Shengold. She saw him five days a week at
his office on Park Avenue. She took a cab to see the doctor every morning
after she had her fill of Good Morning America. She stayed in analysis for
several months, but terminated when Dr. Shengold told her she needed
to examine issues from her childhood. Esther Shirazi insisted that her
Iranian childhood was idyllic. Mrs. Shirazi feared she had a “fragile ego,”
a term she learned on the Internet. Her memories of a privileged
childhood in Iran were all that sustained her. She could not risk what
analysis had to offer if it meant tainting the cherished memories that
haunted her “inner garden.” At her last consultation Mrs. Shirazi told her
analyst about her “inner garden.” At that, Dr. Shengold had cleared his
throat and said that perhaps psychoanalysis was not the treatment of
choice.

3
I Live in a Silent World

I live in a silent world in the dimmed light

of an essential flame that is caught, meshed, and contravened.

I live a good deal by myself, to myself, reading,

passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying

to lay hold on life, to grasp it in my

own understanding. My active living is suspended, but underneath, in

the darkness, something seems to be coming to pass. If

only I could break through the last integuments! Still I

have a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to

come. I lay down my book and look about me.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.

5
Finding Something I Had Not Looked For

I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for

something to attach myself to – and I found nothing. But

in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach

myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless

found something I had not looked for – myself. I found

that what I had desired all my life was not

to live – if what others are doing is called living –

but to express myself. I realized that I had never

the least interest in living, but only in this which

I do now, something parallel to life, and beyond it.

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller.

6
How I Write

I write every morning as soon after first light as

possible. There is no one to disturb you and it

is cool or cold and you come to your work and

warm as you write. You read what you have written

and, as you always stop when you know what is

going to happen next, you go on from there. You

write until you come to a place where you still

have your juice and know what will happen next and

you stop and try to live through until the next

day when you hit it again. It’s a never ending cycle.

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from George Plimpton’s Interview of Ernest Hemingway.

7
My Literary Forebears

Who would I say were my literary forebears — those I

have learned the most from? Philip Roth, Sartre, Kafka, Bach,

Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Amos Oz, Joseph Heller, Petrarch,

the good

Hesse, Thoreau, Camus, Shakespeare, Wagner, Saul Bellow, Chekhov,

Boris Pasternak,

the withdrawn and introspective Beethoven, Henry Miller, D.H.

Lawrence, Vincent

van Gogh, the scandalous Oscar Wilde — it would take a

day to remember everyone. I put in a painter because

I learn as much from painters about how to write

as from writers. What one learns from composers and from

the study of harmony and counterpoint is an obvious fact.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases from George Plimpton’s Interview of Ernest Hemingway.

8
Accumulating Notes for a Novel

I always wanted to write a novel. I have in

my head two or three to write before I die.

Just now I’m spending my days at the library, where

I’m accumulating notes. The library is a refuge from the

world, an escape from personal woes. I search there for

ideas. Some of my ideas come from the books I

read. Others come from watching the to-ings and fro-ings of

the library staff and coffee-addled patrons. I create identities for

the anonymous people I see sitting at tables or looking

through books in the stacks. These people become my characters.

9
The Facts about the Tehran Dehpours

Returning from the library one afternoon I had an epiphany.

I came to see that day that everything besides my

fantasies is useless. Even my desperate existential thoughts, which do

nothing but frighten me. For me only the imaginary counts.

In one of my flights of fancy I created a

story about a family, a large family, out of which

diverse but related stories, emerged. The family was Iranian and

Jewish and the setting was contemporary. The stories I imagined

paralleled my recollection of historical events just as Homer’s Odyssey

was a parallel for Joyce when he was writing Ulysses.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by
Yann Martel.

10
Notes for a Novel

The country estate would offer respite from Daniel’s tiresome customers.

His daughter, Esther spent many happy days at grandfather’s villa.

In early afternoon the family left the capital for Lavasan.

Lavasan on the Jairood River near Mount Damavand beckoned them.

Apples, pomegranates and walnuts were packed for the day’s journey.

Esther played with her younger brother Avram in the backseat.

The Dehpours arrived at the Jairood tributary by late afternoon.

They awaited the ferry which gleamed in the afternoon sun.

The ferry’s slow drift in the sun’s incandescence delighted Esther.

The rhythm of time was suspended in the amber glow.

11
The Ferry Ride to Lavasan

Into the huge flood of the river, the ferry boats

agilely launched themselves, like floating seed-pods, heavy with their

burdens.

It took thirty minutes to cross the Jairood by ferry.

The river was thick with mud at its edges, and

as the ferry gracefully slipped its bonds and set off

into the flood, it ferociously churned behind gray and brown.

We were on the deck of the boat. Behind us,

the land sank back, with its load of cars, trucks

and coaches, the stevedores preparing for the next ferry ride.

River birds followed, shrieking, in the wake of the boat.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Scenes from Early Life by Philip Hensher.

12
Daniel Dehpour Remembers His Father’s Villa in Lavasan

My father transacted his vague business for decades, then fortune

made, he retired to Lavasan, where he bought a villa.

The property was wooded and sloped to the river bank.

There was a lovely rose garden surrounded by hemlock hedge.

The house wasn’t large and it was in poor repair;

the fields had been neglected for years, the fences were

down, and the outbuildings required immediate attention by a contractor.

But the expansive view of the Jairood River was majestic.

Within a year the house was put in proper order.

Relatives would soon spend summers at the villa in Lavasan.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography FDR by Jean Edward Smith.

13
Grandfather Dehpour’s Vague Business

In the almost fifty years since grandfather Dehpour’s wealth had

begun to accumulate, it seemed that everything he did had

been carefully calculated in advance to confuse the Tehran merchants

and make fools of them. He undertook enterprises that everyone

predicted were doomed to disaster; instead they turned out to

be gold mines. He bought property on the deserted outskirts

of the city, but in no time at all a

building boom started and he sold the land for ten

times cost. He purchased stock in near bankrupt companies, and

made a fortune. He was always doing what seemed strange.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

14
The Dehpour Family Makes its Way to Lavasan

The country through which we drove was certainly not picturesque.

Field after field stretched right up to the broad horizon.

Monotonous hills gently sloped upwards, then monotonously slanted

down again.

In some places woods were visible, then winding ravines that

were planted with low scrubby bushes, reminiscent of old prints.

We passed by little streams with hollow banks and ponds.

We saw small villages with low huts under dark and

often crumbling roofs, and crooked barns with walls woven out

of dry twigs and with gaping doorways opening on to

neglected threshing floors; and mosques, some brick-built with stucco

walls.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.

15
Avram Dehpour Drinks Water from a Gourd

Grandfather and Esther are sitting on the shaded veranda. Grandfather

is tilting snuff from the lid of his snuff box

into his lower lip, holding the lip outdrawn between thumb

and finger. They look around as I cross the veranda

and dip the gourd into the water bucket and drink.

When I was a boy I first learned how much

better water tastes when it sets a while in a

cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot

July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set

at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

16
Esther’s Inner Garden

“Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his

finger to me.” Papa sipping a cup of jasmine tea

in the sitting room of our house with Avram asking

questions: question after question. Why is this garden greener than

all other gardens? Because it is the garden of the

Empress, which is like a sea of emeralds, the Empress

who saved the books of the Jews from Haman’s dark

plot, Haman who wanted to annihilate the Jews like the

Pharaohs in Egypt when Jews, captives in the land of

their captors, were saved by the arm of the Almighty.

____________________________________
Quotation from Ulysses by James Joyce.

17
Esther Remembers Her Grandmother

In my grandmother’s lair in Lavasan, I sensed the experiences

and passions of all the people whose lives were depicted

in the novels she read. Her bedroom was rather plain.

She slept, as I did, on a single bed, hers

covered by a yellow spread on which she heaped plaid

blankets in the winter. There were portraits on her walls,

but her bedside table rarely held anything besides a lamp,

a book, a clock, and an ashtray. Yet, this was

the place, smelling of cigarette smoke and perfume, that seemed

to me a passageway to adventure, the lobby of adulthood.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.

18
Esther Remembers the Portraits in her Grandmother’s Room

Portraits of the major Russian writers lined the wall in

my grandmother’s room. I never liked Tolstoy’s portrait. I didn’t

like Chekhov’s portrait either. There was something suspicious about his

grin and his pince-nez. What if he knew something that

I didn’t want him or anybody else to know? What

if he even knew about my aunt’s favorite vase, which

I accidentally broke, disposing of the shards and then pretending

not to know anything about it? Pushkin . . . well, Pushkin was

okay, but he didn’t look serious enough for a writer.

Dostoevsky was the one whom I loved. Dostoyevsky was inspiring.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Memoirs of a Muse by Lara Vapnyar.

19
Avram the Playful Pianist

Avram Dehpour as a little boy was small and fearful.

His father slighted him, while hovering over his sister, Esther.

Desperate to win father’s attention, Avram devoted himself to piano.

He covered over his sensitivity with a carapace of arrogance.

But never entirely: his humility was always a saving grace.

Avram was allowed to be a child, and his piano

playing forever remained an impish frolic and a disciplined exercise.

When sitting down to perform he would first sometimes squirm.

Irritated by an ill-mannered listener, he might make a face.

Concerning music he was a little boy in his enthusiasms.

_________________________________

Paraphrases from the biography Robert Kennedy: His Life by Evan Thomas.

20
Esther Remembers Avram

Avram would play the piano for hours — not familiar pieces,

but God knows what they were. However I could listen

to him for hours. He was old Yurovsky’s favorite pupil.

My brother told quite fantastic stories — and finally began to

believe his own fantasies. (My mother did not like this

trait, and was inclined to blame it on grandmother Dehpour.)

One year when he failed all his general subjects in

the last spring examinations, the only punishment he feared was

to be forbidden his vacation with grandmother in Lavasan. Grandmother

interceded for him and begged our mother for another chance.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music by Sergei
Bertensson, Jay Leyda, and Sophia Satina.

21
Yurovsky the Old Piano Teacher

Young Avram Dehpour awaited the arrival of his piano teacher.

The old Russian, Yurovsky, held out great promise for Avram,

whose precocious musical talent was nurtured by close, unwearied

practice.

Short pieces were Avram’s métier in childhood – especially Schumann’s

Kinderscenen.

Träumerei pleased the old Russian, while Avram played softly, nervously.

Yurovsky, with his huge Rachmaninoff hands, frightened the young boy.

The old man was murderous in discipline, a true fanatic.

“I can play Schumann’s Kinderscenen.” – “All of them?” Yurovsky asked.

“I can play all of the pieces of Opus 15.”

“What? What?” – “It’s all over, Avram. The lesson is over.”

22
Old Yurovsky Dazzles Young Avram with his Virtuosity

Avram Dehpour watched wonderingly as the fingers of Yurovsky’s left

hand crawled like a powerful and menacing scorpion up and

down the keyboard. Avram saw the tendons moving and rippling

beneath the skin, and then he saw that a symphony

of expressions was passing over Yurovsky’s face; at times serene,

at times suddenly furious, occasionally smiling, from time to time

stern and dictatorial, and then coaxing and gentle. Transfixed by

this, Avram realized suddenly that there was something about music

that had never been revealed to him before: it was,

to those who understood it, an emotional and intellectual odyssey.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

23
Young Avram Dehpour Thinks about Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations

Young Avram tried to find patterns, even an overall grid

or structure for the huge, diverse Diabelli Variations of Beethoven.

What Avram was certain about was that the work begins

with a simple, rather commonplace musical idea, transforms it in

many radical ways, and ends with a sequence of variations

or elements that, in the final analysis, embody a design.

The theme has ceased to reign over its unruly offspring.

The variations decide what the theme may have to offer.

Instead of being confirmed, adorned and glorified, it is improved,

parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and

finally uplifted.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations by Alfred Brendel.

24
The Void Becoming Eloquent

All great deeds and great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.

Great works are often born on a street corner or

in a restaurant’s revolving door. So it is with absurdity.

The absurd world more than others derives its nobility from

that abject birth. In certain situations, replying “nothing” when asked

what one is thinking about may be pretense in

a man. Those who are loved are well aware of

this. But if that reply is truly sincere, if it

symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void

becomes eloquent then it is the first sign of absurdity.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the essay The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.

25
Oscar Berg Creates a Diversion

Oscar Berg sensed an absurdity at the core of his

life as a librarian. The library administration represented a mindless

bureaucracy where officious desk-jockeys made decisions for him day after

day. At times he felt like an inmate in a

mental asylum: a man whose freedom had been taken away.

To cope with the lumbering boredom of his fatuous duties

he invented a continuous novel in his head, a salutary

diversion of thought that channeled his subversive ideas about the

library bureaucracy into an imagined conflict between an idealistic

Russian

insurgent and the functionaries of a notorious Soviet-era psychiatric

hospital.

26
The People’s Commissariat of Mediocrity

It’s an old story. In October 19–, V.I. Lyuzhin overturned

the government, seized power and set in motion the Dictatorship

of the Mediocre. Thereupon, the regime set up the People’s

Commissariat of Mediocrity headed by the harsh, combative Igor Segal,

who, with his corps of conscious, deliberate, and dedicated agents,

set about to dethrone exceptionalism and propagate the middling and

second-rate. The Krinskyites believed that all mediocrity had a purpose

and that the purpose of the Party was to ensure

the continuation of the mediocre state. Individualists, from the

inconsequential

Vladimir Zelenyi to the illustrious Victor Gruzhin, would be purged.

27
Zelenyi Is Arrested

Arrest! It is a bolt of lightning, a breaking point.

It is an inassimilable spiritual earthquake, driving one to insanity.

The Universe is shattered, fractured when they hiss at you:

“You are under arrest!” “Come with us!” “Do not tarry!”

The darkened mind can only gasp out, “Me? What for?”

This question, often repeated, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an explosive thrust from one state into another.

And suddenly the fateful gate swings quickly open; we are

dragged in like a laundry sack and the gate to

our past life is slammed shut once and for all.

_________________________
Paraphrases from The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

28
Two Individuals in a Room

Vladimir Zelenyi spent hours one afternoon detained by the authorities.

Plainclothes agents had arrested him in the capital’s far suburbs.

He awaited a forensic examination at the Central State Hospital.

J. Raben, the forensic psychiatrist, escorted Zelenyi into his office.

“We have heard rumors about you, Comrade.” – “Rumors about me?”

“We’ve heard about your damnable book. Anti-state propaganda is

proscribed.”

“My book is of no consequence to the state, doctor.”

The allegations were serious and might result in criminal charges.

“Sit alone in silence and remember the past, Comrade Zelenyi!”

“Moan about the loss of things you’ll never see again!”

______________________________________
Paraphrases from Sonnet no. 30 by William Shakespeare (Modern English Version).

29
Literature under the New Dogma

As the sonnet was the quintessential form of the Elizabethan

poet, packing distilled and dazzling language into its sleek fourteen

lines and challenging every virtuoso of the day, so the

quintessential form of the contemporary writer is the interrogation: two

individuals in a room, one of them the insurgent and

the other the agent of the New Dogma. Here we

have the essence of drama. We know that the stakes

are high: anti-State activity is at issue. The setting is

stark; the language is almost purely dialogue, with the unpredictable

swerves of actual life and none of its rambling asides.

________________________________________________
Paraphrase from “You Will Get Yours. A Novel of Rage and Revenge in the
N.Y.P.D.” by Joyce Carol Oates.

30
Forensic Report

Zelenyi was brought to the maximum security ward of the

Central State Hospital, having engaged in anti-government agitation and

propaganda.

Agents discovered, in a friend’s home, a book written by

Zelenyi that was critical of Krinsky and the New Dogma.

Its bourgeois pseudoscience constituted a grave crime against the state.

Covert investigation disclosed that Zelenyi had a stormy adolescence,

during

which he pursued the study of history, literature and art.

Teachers described a “stubborn, oppositional youth, obsessed with his

ideas.”

The principal depicted him as “far too sensitive and intense.”

He was negative about everything our glorious country stands for.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from DSM-III-R Casebook by Robert L. Spitzer.

31
The Interrogation

As if prearranged Raben sprang to action upon seeing Neerovsky.

A cryptic, mute language prevailed at the Central State Hospital.

“Deal with this troublesome man, Raben, see that he conforms.”

The order was unspoken, communicated only with Neerovsky’s furtive

nod.

Raben, the forensic psychiatrist, promptly challenged the detainee.

“Your loyalty is suspect, Comrade, we have been watching you!”

Question, answer, question, answer: a duet ensued between the two.

Raben was as glib as his superior, Neerovsky was taciturn.

The cynical Raben offered the man a cup of tea.

The leery prisoner understood the gesture; he was not naive.

32
Imprisonment!

The guard steps away from Vladimir Zelenyi and opens the

door. Zelenyi enters. Standing in the dim room, hearing the

pleading voice of a detainee being questioned somewhere nearby, Zelenyi

feels the Central State Hospital (a prison, really) as a

tangible place — made of concrete and steel, where people wake

up, eat, use the toilet, and sleep, their tedious routine

interrupted by the terror of interrogations. For most people, he

thinks, the notion of death is no more than wallpaper —

present but rarely seen. Prisoners, who have little to distract

them, have no choice but to stare at this wallpaper.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer.

33
Oscar Berg Imagines his Life as a Prisoner

I live like a prisoner for life in my solitary

world. Can you imagine what that’s like? Your dreams turn

into nightmares and your castles to ashes, all you think

about is fantasy and in the end you turn your

back on reality and live in a contorted imaginary world,

you refuse to accept the rule of fellow-mortals and make

ones that will fit in with your own little world, there

is no daylight in this world of the “life,” it’s

all darkness, and it’s in this darkness that you find

peace and the ability to live in a make-believe world.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from “Prisoner of Durham” in Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony
Storr.

34
Oscar Berg’s Sense of Alienation

Oscar Berg worked under the close supervision of a hierarchy

of managers who did most of the important thinking for

the branch librarians. High level managers at the Central Library

divided the complex work processes of their underlings into simple,

repetitive tasks which library employees performed in rote, machine-like

fashion.

The rhythm of work in the branch libraries was dictated

by quasi-military discipline. Oscar Berg secured no fulfillment as a

cog in a gigantic and impersonal apparatus of municipal bureaucracy.

It was as an amateur photographer that he gained inner

satisfaction. For Oscar, photography was inherently meaningful and

immanently engaging.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from Marx: Capitalism and Alienation by Anonymous.

35
The Black Only Policy

The library bureaucracy insisted that all official documents be signed

in black ink. Oscar Berg assiduously enforced the black-only rule

among his several subordinates. There was the widespread perception in

the library central administration, right or wrong, that black was

simply the more professional ink color. Oscar buried himself in

his office one hour every Friday afternoon to review his

branch’s official documents to ensure adherence to the library’s black

ink protocol. Oscar knew that the supervising authorities at the

central administration would detect any deviation from the library’s

policies.

Oscar needed to protect himself from censure by the authorities.

36
The Mindless Bureaucrat

Raben harbored special affection for Ivan Neerovsky because Neerovsky

was

one of the very few people who made the other

psychiatrists at the Central State Hospital look bright. Though he

would quote (without having read) The New Dogma faster than

a waterbug could cross a cup of coffee, he was

an autocrat interested in instilling fear, not a theoretician capable

of learned discourse. Though he had never read J.S. Mills,

he knew by heart the work of most anti-American Bolivian

poets. Though he railed against capitalism in his dyspeptic articles,

he couldn’t muster a convincing argument in favor of Krinsky.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin.

37
The Official Papers

Once each month Neerovsky met with the Comrade from the

Ministry and the Comrade from the Department to sign the

Official Papers. Under the New Order there were always Official

Papers to sign. One day a dispute arose between said

envoys about what color ink Neerovsky should use to sign

the Official Papers. The Comrade from the Department said that

under Rule 42 only black ink was allowed. The Comrade

from the Ministry said that blue ink was acceptable. Raben

suggested that the matter be referred to the Commission of

Experts. Neerovsky suspected that Raben was being ironical in meaning.

38
The Thirteenth Department

The 13th Department placed Raben under investigation for engaging in

ironic innuendo. He was accused of contravening Rule 101 which

barred veiled allusions. Press releases were issued warning the proletariat

that accusations against citizens were assumed to be true until

proven false except in cases where they were demonstrably false in

which case they were considered undeniably true. The Director of

the Central State Hospital sat at his desk dealing with

the constant influx of mail and phone calls about the

allegations. One name in particular kept surfacing again and again:

Vladimir Zelenyi. Raben had implied that Zelenyi was decidedly sane.

39
Root Canals

It’s all very well to look at a thing close

up; to look at it dead straight between the eyes;

an unflinching and honest stare, a meticulous inspection that would

go beyond the heart of the matter to its marrow,

beyond the marrow to the root — but the question is

how far back do you want? How far will do?

The old American question: what do you want — blood? Most

probably more than blood is required: whispered asides; lost

conversations;

letters and photographs; old library books; yellowing paper bearing the

imprint of forgotten signatures. Back, back, back to the beginning.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

40
A Transformational Experience

From the beginning, I longed for a transformational experience. It

is something I hungered for as long as I can

remember. I yearned for the Great I Am: a sense

of merging with the universe. I thought that a transmuting

experience would include some alteration of consciousness, some sudden

illumination,

perhaps about the nature of the world. I wanted some

visible proof that I was special. It would be enough

for me if some enlightened soul had chosen me as

his pupil. I longed for merger with a great man.

I was a disciple-in-waiting who sought union with a Master.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir My Father’s Guru by J. Moussaieff Masson.

41
Krinsky: The Great Man

Krinsky, the expatriate, spent his days at the British Museum.

He scoured the learning of the ages, devouring ancient tomes.

He eagerly sought after the solution of life’s eternal mysteries.

He would uncover what had eluded earlier scholars. After all,

he was Karl Krinsky, a descendent of rabbis and philosophers.

He deciphered the latest scientific theories, disentangled their arcane

truths.

He would formulate a New Dogma that would enlighten mankind

and conclusively reorient civilization, long embroiled in the Old Order.

He would proclaim with fervor and fine enthusiasm — repeatedly,

unhesitatingly:

“Philosophy, science, and the springs of wonder I have essayed.”

___________________________________
Paraphrase from the dramatic poem Manfred by George Gordon, Lord Byron.

42
Krinsky Writes The New Dogma

Most of Krinsky’s writings bear the traces of his life.

They are entangled in important, but unobtrusive ways, with his

private conflicts and his political strategies. The New Dogma is

an outpouring of self-revelations pressed into the service of economics.

The case study of the Romanian Revolution is a public

wrestling match between emotional needs and professional inquiry.

Krinsky’s personal

needs, strategic calculations, and excitement about economic theory

reinforced one

another. Beneath the polished surface of The Elimination of Want

some unfinished, haunting psychological business was at work in him.

“Every class struggle gives rise to some biography!” Krinsky wrote.

________________________________
Paraphrases from Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay.

43
Krinsky at the British Museum

Krinsky walked deliberately into the hushed main reading room.

Nine grand windows rose to a height of two stories.

All this soaring space was entirely wasted on architectural effect.

On the walls, between towering bookcases, hung many somber portraits —

haughty parliamentary lords and princes and kings in ermine-lined robes.

He had never had time to look at them carefully.

As he passed through the heavy doors, Krinsky saw that

his favorite place in the reading room, by the central

window, and another which he found convenient, were both occupied.

He signed the visitors’ book; the librarian nodded at Krinsky.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Lenin in Zurich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

44
Krinsky’s Future Eden

Krinsky, the Utopian dreamer, had a poet’s sense of future

possibilities. He imagined a paradisaical someday, a future Eden, that

would vanquish misery. Persuaded for a long time that the

human species was infinitely perfectible, he regarded the task of

hastening progress to be one of the sweetest occupations, one

of the first duties to man who has fortified his

reason by study and meditation. For Krinsky, the normal state

of man was guided by Truth. He failed to see

that human nature was the ineluctable serpent in our garden,

with its darker side shaping the world we live in.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from Utopian Moments: Reading Utopian Texts, edited by Miguel A
Ramiro Avilés and J.C. Davis.

45
“The Proletariat” (From the Collected Writings of K. Krinsky)

We see the Proletariat as a precarious class, which is

in twofold dangers: from market forces and from the severity

of the ruling class. Exposed to anxieties corresponding to these

dangers, the Proletariat has been a beleaguered, far from omnipotent

negotiator earnestly trying to mediate among economic forces that

threaten

it and that war with one another. The Proletariat labors

to survive in the face of the pressures of the marketplace

and of the ruling Bourgeoisie. Since it stands midway between

the ruling class and capitalist markets, the Proletariat exists in

a state of perennial servitude that only Revolution will cure!

_______________________________

Paraphrases from The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud.

46
Raben Studies Krinsky at the University

Raben cleaned his glasses and wrote everything down in his

notebook — he was a conscientious student — but refrained from asking

questions. Some weeks earlier, he’d read several chapters of The

New Dogma in the school library and he didn’t like

Karl Krinsky: he felt that there could have been an

exclamation mark after almost every sentence, and that put him

off. Krinsky claimed, so it seemed to Raben, that economic,

social, and historical laws were as clear and immutable as

the laws of nature. And Raben, always skeptical, had his

doubts even about the immutability of the laws of nature.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Between Friends by Amos Oz.

47
“The Elimination of Want” (From the Collected Writings of K.
Krinsky)

It may be doubted whether it is possible at all,

or at any rate as yet, at the present stage

of our control over the means of production, to set

up regulations that will eliminate want among the masses! It

may be asked where the number of superior, unswerving and

disinterested leaders are to come from who are to act

as educators of the future generations, and it may be

alarming to think of the enormous amount of coercion that

will inevitably be required before these intentions can be carried

out! But the grandeur of the plan cannot be disputed!

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud.

48
Fragments of Lived Experience

I ceremoniously pour myself a small beaker of wine and

set it on a table and now I lift a

pen to my notebook and sip away further into the

book I am writing. The book has gaps of plot

like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing

incidents as if plaster on the ceiling had peeled away.

My past, my memories are much like that. Some phases

of my life cannot be entered because the rubble of

memory, fragments of my lived experience, have crowded in on

each other leaving many periods inert and lost to reminiscence.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

49
Ezra Shirazi Studies at the University

Ezra Shirazi had pictured the University of Tehran as a

sort of Greek temple basking in the sun of knowledge,

and was amazed to find an unprepossessing jumble of dark,

dilapidated buildings. Despite his disenchantment he studied hard.

Lectures and

laboratories kept him busy from early morning until three in

the afternoon. Most of his professors were renowned scholars, and

listening to them brought home to him the depths of

his ignorance. He wondered if he would ever acquire the

knowledge necessary to practice his chosen profession. He dreamed of

the security and respect that came with an estimable career.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Chekhov by Henri Troyat.

50
Ezra Shirazi the Chemistry Student Speaks of the Poetry of Distilling

Students of chemistry like to say that distilling is beautiful.

It is a slow and silent occupation, which keeps you

busy but gives you time to think about other things.

It involves a metamorphosis from flowing liquid to invisible vapor,

and from this once again to liquid, but in this

double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous

and fascinating condition, starting with chemistry and going very far.

When you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of

repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries, almost a religious

act, in which from imperfect material you obtain the spirit.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from The Periodic Table by Primo Levi.

51
The Young Ezra Shirazi as Outsider

When I first joined the University of Tehran, I experienced

some appreciable disappointments. Above all, I found that I was

expected to feel myself inferior and an alien because I

was a Jew. I refused absolutely to do the first of

these things. I have never been able to see why

I should feel ashamed of my descent or, as people

were beginning to say, of my race. I put up,

without much regret, with my non-acceptance in the community; for

it seemed to me that despite this exclusion I couldn’t

fail to find some place in the framework of humanity.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from An Autobiographical Study by Sigmund Freud.

52
The Young Ezra Shirazi Drinks Tea in Tehran

A quartet of amateur musicians plays Beethoven in Shahyad Square.

The first violin openly expresses a previously hidden subordinate theme.

The cello heralds an ominous quiet, darkening into C minor.

A cafe server offers Ezra a cup of tea, gratis.

Wary of sudden favors, Ezra assents to the unanticipated tender.

He peruses Onegin, Pushkin’s novel in verse, in Farsi translation.

“It’s all in the book. Here, here in the book.”

“I am bored here. I am ever weary of life.”

There is no long-term future for me here in Iran.

“I have found nothing to which I could devote myself!”

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel in verse Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin.

53
Ezra Shirazi Studies English at a Café

As tedious as rote memorization was, Ezra Shirazi was finding

an odd pleasure in it — like memorizing the periodic table.

He found it quite satisfying to zip through four pages —

one hundred verbs, or nouns, or anything for that matter —

and not miss a one. When he got one wrong,

or missed a pronunciation, he went back to the beginning

and punished himself by starting over. He had conquered three

hundred verbs when his tea and sandwich arrived. He took

a sip, went back to work as if the food

was much less important than English vocabulary and verb conjugations.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Broker by John Grisham.

54
Ezra Shirazi Dreams a Life

Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to

be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be

civilized — that was the dream of his life. What the

qualities of such a life were he could not have

articulated when he left his father’s house in northern Tehran.

His plan was to travel all the way to New

York to find out. He knew for sure what he

didn’t want, and that was to live like a common

man. His own father, Jacob, was a humble shop owner.

His mother was a hard-working woman with a slavish nature.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel When She Was Good by Philip Roth.

55
Life is a Multiplicity

From the beginning, the idea, the central legend that I

wished my book to express was that life is a

multiplicity. How can it be defined? No definition will do

justice to it. The definition depends on you. The definition

is always going to be your definition, how you conceive

life, it will not be the definition of life. For

the money mad, life will have the sound of money,

of solid gold. For the power mad, the power maniac,

life will have a different taste. For the poet, of

course, life will ever have something of poetry in it.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from The Story of a Novel by Thomas Wolfe and The Book of Wisdom: The
Heart of Tibetan Buddhism.

56
The Amateur Photographer

Oscar Berg was an amateur photographer with a poet’s eye.

His small Brooklyn apartment was stacked with boxes of pictures.

The artistry of visual discrimination was preserved in his compositionally-

refined photos.

A gallery might be interested in his quirkily original images.

But Oscar the librarian seemed abundantly content with humble obscurity.

Photography was an amusement, a local wayfarer’s record of observations.

He saw the city’s sundry streets through a Neo-Impressionist lens.

A café window or a mirror provided a shimmering focus.

His unique take was glancing and indirect but softly tender:

the fond regard of a lover who cherishes every flaw.

___________________________
Paraphrases from Hidden Depths by Vince Aletti

57
Oscar Berg Struggles with the Transience of Life

Oscar Berg thought that fear of death was perhaps the

root of all art, perhaps also of all things of

the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability,

we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again,

and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know

that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When

artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate

thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the

great dance of death, to make something that lasts

longer than we do. Men eventually trickle away and dissolve.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse.

58
Franz Berg Recalls his Brother’s Early Writing Ambitions

Ever since his school days Oscar had dreamed of composing

a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives,

the most striking things he had so far seen and

thought about. But he was too young to write such

a book; instead, he took photographs and wrote captions for

them. He was like a painter who was always making

sketches of miniatures for a big canvas he had in

mind. He was indulgent toward these immature works on account

of their vigor and originality. These two qualities, vigor and

originality, in his opinion gave reality to his earliest art.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.

59
Oscar Berg Keeps a Journal

I started keeping a journal in which I wrote down

my dreams, ventured to interpret them, spun reveries around them.

Because I did not want to miss even the faintest

whisper or echo of my dreams, I determined to discontinue

the habit of crowding my mind with the printed dreams

of others. One day I cleared my room of most

of my books and donated them to the public library.

I retained as souvenirs some high school textbooks on the

inside of whose covers classmates had scribbled various affectionate or

insulting messages. I also kept a bible and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Benefactor by Susan Sontag.

60
Oscar Berg at Lunch

I worked from nine till one at the Mid-Manhattan library.

I got Chapter XII started and all that concerns Rasputin.

This work is finished: I’ll put it aside for now.

Until the final revision there is nothing more to write.

It is one-thirty. I’m eating a sandwich in the cafe.

Everything is more or less normal. I am modestly content.

Anyway, everything is always normal in cafes and especially here.

The manager strolls among the tables and speaks volubly, confidently:

“Is everything all right, Oscar?” I smile at seeing him.

There are still about twenty customers left, bachelors, office employees.

_____________________
Paraphrases from the novel Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre.

61
Oscar Berg Fears Nothingness

Oscar Berg wasn’t a morbid person. As a child, he

had worried about death the way most children do, trying

to comprehend the idea of his own nonbeing. The idea

was too complicated and depressing and so he mostly forgot

about it. He had a period in his mid-teens when

he feared that he would die a virgin, but after

Anna O— took care of that he stopped thinking about

nothingness. Now, lying in the dark Oscar began to contemplate

the prospect of his own nonexistence. He wasn’t afraid of

dying so much as the pain that would precede it.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Body of Lies by David Ignatius.

62
Oscar Suffers from Acute Bodily Illness

Oscar Berg, aged twenty-two and struggling to become a writer,

had saved but a very small sum of money from

the wreck of his fortunes, but it was sufficient to

provide him with sustenance for some months, and in the

meantime he hoped to procure some respectable employment at the

public library. The interval was, consequently, spent in inaction; his

grief only became more deep and rankling when he had

leisure for reflection, and at length it took so fast

hold of his mind that at the end of three

months he lay sick in bed, incapable of any exertion.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

63
The Young Oscar Berg Struggles to Make His Way

In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find

in Manhattan, so I had to move to Flushing, Queens.

Two decades ago my youth was at its lowest ebb.

At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer,

I found the creative heat had flickered out to a

dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow.

It was not that I no longer wanted to write.

I still yearned passionately to produce the Great American Novel.

But I was out of a job, had very little

money, and was self-exiled to Queens, just another lonesome fellow.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Sophie’s Choice by William Styron.

64
Oscar Berg Imagines the Face of his Friend

Oscar Berg imagined the face of his friend, like the

phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head,

crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair

as by an iron crown. It was a priest-like face

and Oscar, remembering how in past times he had told

his friend of all the tumults and unrest and longings

in his soul, day after day and night by night,

only to be answered by his friend’s listening silence, would

have told himself that it was the face of a priest

who heard confessions of those whom he could not absolve.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

65
Oscar’s One True Friend

I met Horatio — my only true friend — in college not

long after my father died. I had just gotten over

a serious illness that I won’t bother talking about, except

that it had something to do with the feeling that

everything was dead. With the coming of Horatio began the

part of my life you could call my anchored phase.

Before that, during my teens, I lived in a dream

world, without any certain ambitions. Horatio was the perfect friend

for me. He had a more sensible disposition. He gave

me one piece of advice: you can’t hesitate in life.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

66
Horatio Receives a Letter from Oscar

Oscar Berg had been one of my boon companions in

college; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting.

A letter, however, had lately reached me from Queens, New

York — a letter from him — which, in its wildly importunate

nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply.

The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. Oscar spoke of

acute bodily illness —of a mental disorder which oppressed him —

and of an earnest desire to see me, as his

best and indeed his only personal friend, with a view

of attempting, by my cheerfulness, some alleviation of his malady.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

67
Oscar’s Melancholy Letter to Horatio

I have seen a letter to a friend in _________

which is dated “Queens” and which in matter and manner

is all but unintelligible. The lines are rambling and unconnected

and the whole appearance of the composition struck me as

if it had been penned by a blind man: the

tremulous signature, in particular, — O. Berg — is thus abruptly

terminated,

as if the power of holding the pen had ceased

with the formation of the last letter. The address is

in another hand. I grieve that I cannot give the

substance of the letter in question, but it is melancholy.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography The Life of Sir Walter Scott by John Macrone.

68
The Fascination of Writers

Writers and the way they work hold a fascination for

ordinary chaps like me. It’s a mystery to me where

they get their ideas from, apart from constructing the

thing and creating characters and making their characters talk and

so on. But good fiction writers can do it all

right, and set the whole lot in nineteenth-century London or

in Tsarist Russia or what not. What’s truly amazing about

writers is that in their personal lives they are often not

not very interesting people. Many of them have little to

say. Yet they fill their books with so much drama.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “People Don’t Do Such Things” by Ruth Rendell.

69
The Young Avram Dehpour

Extremely intelligent, he was uncompromising on questions of faith and

of morals, where his convictions were dogmatic and positively clear.

The boy’s heart was smitten with the absolute, utterly loyal

to his passions and capable of a charming tenderness, but

it was because he was so different, his charm being

truly exotic, that he was irresistibly drawn to adventurers and gamblers.

He was willing to go along but would not abase

himself, and finally he was never without a sure confidence,

yes, a certainty, since he was guaranteed he would achieve

everything he desired; nothing would ever be impossible for him.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir The First Man by Albert Camus.

70
The Young Avram Dehpour Studies Piano

Scales, scales! Avram Dehpour tried to be patient with the

tedium of “fingering.” Except there was no end to scales.

You learned the major keys, then came the minor keys.

Didn’t your fingers know what to do, if you didn’t

interfere? And why was timing so important? The formula was

so prescribed Avram could hear every note before his finger

depressed it. Even worse were the study pieces which provoked

his fingers to swerve out of control in derision and

mockery. He would play pieces by Beethoven and Schumann one

day. He would be a real pianist on a stage.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Gravediggers’ Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates.

71
The Piano Competition

Avram sat at the grand piano; the expectant audience gawked.

The fifteen-year-old boy was the youngest entrant in the competition.

Three jurors sat behind a screen, protecting the boy’s anonymity.

Avram could feel the music pulsate through his nimble fingers.

He attacked the Bach fugue with mastery, belying his youth.

The manifold intertwined voices sounded with clarity, in animated

rhythm.

Themes spoke out one-by-one like a novel’s gallery of characters.

Political intrigue would envelope the judges as they cast votes.

The Jewish judge preferred Avram’s skilled performance over the others.

Cries of favoritism haunted that judge at the competition’s end.

72
The Dehpours Go into Hiding

Avram was a product of the rich intellectual tradition and

ferment of ideas that stirred middle-class Iranians before the Revolution.

He welcomed the Revolution, enjoying its dream of universal justice.

But in college, when the regime started telling him how

to live and how to think, Avram rebelled. He and

his family left Tehran for Lavasan, beyond the Alborz mountains,

where the Dehpours owned a villa. Government agents there placed

the family under surveillance. The Dehpours’ nonacceptance of the

Revolution

made them suspect. A dossier prepared by the Revolutionary Guard

heaped scorn on Avram’s father, calling him a malevolent Jew.

________________________________________________________
Paraphrases from a New York Times obituary: “Pasternak Is Dead; Wrote ‘Dr.
Zhivago.'”

73
My Private Dossier

I once read something that Freud told an aspiring writer:

“Get it out, produce it, make something of it — outside

you, that is; give it an existence independently of you.”

I remember being much impressed. It was as if Freud

was addressing me. I took that piece of advice as the

impetus to begin recording my ideas. I created a private dossier,

a collection of my writings that contained scraps of notepaper

overrun with my hand-script, jottings to myself about fictional characters,

the conduct of life, art and artists, drafts of poems,

dreams, childhood and fatherhood, my own nature — and unsent letters.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Sigmund Freud and the Art of Letter Writing” by
Martin Grotjahn and the biography Clifford Odets: American Playwright: the Years from
1906 to 1940 by Margaret Brenman-Gibson.

74
The Secret Dossier

J. Raben, born February 19–, grew up in southern province.

Studied political theory in the north: gifted student, honors graduate.

Professors held out high hopes for a promising state-approved career.

Attained diploma in the New Dogma: subject of thesis unknown.

Attended state-approved medical school, interest in infectious diseases and

epidemiology.

Associates with writers, intellectuals and other persons of dubious character.

Possible revisionist tendencies, known to read books on The List.

Occasionally slips into Old Order Thinking; suspects Krinsky of plagiarism(?).

Neerovsky put the dossier down and gazed out the window.

Pigeons huddled in the courtyard of the Central State Hospital.

75
Raben Questions the Revolution and Party Teachings

Unlike most of my friends, I loved going to the

All-Union Pioneers when I was a boy. It gave structure

to my life. And it had lots of rules. I

was always good at rules. It wasn’t until I was

in college that I started asking the hard questions about

the rules. I’ll never forget the look of pride on

my father’s face when I told him I was going

to join the party. Then later, I’ll never forget the

look of disdain when I told him I had reservations

about the Revolution, the party and the writings of Krinsky.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Special Circumstances by Sheldon Siegel.

76
From the Uncensored Writings of J. Raben

The New Dogma has produced some of the finest manifestations

of the human spirit in art, literature, and philosophy. Strict

adherence to Krinsky’s teachings, a scrupulous commitment to absolute

economic

equality in every aspect of life and rules on the

elimination of capitalist exploitation form the essence of its appeal.

Yet the Krinskyite regime is a human organization, subject to

the same infections as any other — infections often borne on

the winds of history. The paranoid theme is neither specific

to nor characteristic of the New Dogma, but it does

appear there. No institution is safe from the paranoid bacillus.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred by Robert S. Robins
and Jerrold M. Post.

77
Gruzhin

Gruzhin lived in a furnished room near the train station.

He subsisted outside the law and outside society: an exile.

At age 22 he had been awarded the Glinka prize

for his epic poem Hannibal, written in a new form.

The ecstasy and depth of the poem amazed the jurors,

and the nation’s literary journals hailed the poet’s rare ingenuity.

At age 27 he was condemned by the Revolution’s leaders.

The press vilified him as a “purveyor of bourgeois trash.”

Copies of his novel Korsakov were burned; he was imprisoned.

He now lived in a silent world, watched by authorities.

78
Excerpt from Gruzhin's Banned Novel Korsakov

The state apparatus of our forebears has vanished forever and

our people are left with an ill-omened creation that oversees

the administration of violent repression and the dissemination of

ideology,

which, being the fantasy of a madman's brain, can in

reality be nothing else than a figure out of a

nightmare seated upon a monument of fear and oppression. Spectral

it lives and spectral it will one day disappear without

leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a

single service rendered. Other despotisms there have been, but none

whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its cruel baseness.

Editor's note: Gruzhin's novel Korsakov depicted the creation and later collapse
of a Utopian state. On the evening of October 7, 19—, the fifth anniversary of the
Revolution that installed the Dictatorship of the Mediocre, enraged students –
supporters of the Krinskyite regime – gathered in the University courtyard in the
capital to torch hundreds of copies of Gruzhin’s banned novel beneath a statue
erected to the memory of Karl Krinsky.
______________________________________

Paraphrases from the essay "Autocracy and War" by Joseph Conrad.

79
Letter to an Italian Publisher

To Giangiacomo F.:

I commenced work on my novel Korsakov before the crimes

against humanity committed by the Krinskyite regime were exposed in

the writings of A.S. After briefly considering setting aside the

typescript, I chose to complete it as originally conceived, as

though the tragic reality of the internment of our citizens

had not yet occurred in the imaginary world where my

characters live and work. The similarities between the real and

fictitious are entirely coincidental. I take no pride in my

prescience. I only wish that the failed utopia of the

Krinskyite state lived solely on the pages of my story.

Victor Gruzhin

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the Foreword to the novel The Black Widow by Daniel Silva.

80
Het Achterhuis

I live in a secret annex far from earthly cares.

My suite of rooms is concealed behind a hidden bookcase.

The world’s clichés lie elsewhere; they do not threaten me.

I project my infinite imagination onto a padlocked, bounded dimension.

Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence all. I must be silent.

Even muffled footsteps would threaten to betray my undisclosed presence.

I record the daily to-ings and fro-ings for future reference.

Notepads and manuscript pages are strewn on the clapboard floor.

Humdrum procaism will inevitably force its entry someday, I fear.

I will die in another room, my notions snuffed out.

81
The Two Minutes Validation

Once every day the Party Secretary and his subordinates met

for the Two Minutes Validation. The Party Secretary together with

the Comrade from the Ministry and the Comrade from the

Department shared their thoughts about suspected counter-

revolutionaries and other enemies

of the state. Raben admired Gruzhin, and, therefore, according to

the Comrade from the Ministry, must be a counter-revolutionary. But,

interjected the Comrade from the Department, Raben also extolled

Krinsky.

The Party Secretary surmised that Raben extolled Krinsky cynically to

conceal his counter-revolutionary inclinations. “I agree,” said the

Comrade from

the Ministry. “I concur,” said the Comrade from the Department.

82
Truth under The New Dogma

The Party Secretary and his subordinates could not see the

fallacy intrinsic in the fact that their logic worked too

well. The party leadership lived in a narrow corridor of

reality that they manufactured for each other to share. The

reasonableness of the reality went far beyond what ordinary reality

could produce, but then — the reality was made to order.

The energy normally available for free exploration of ideas was

sapped by this process. Explorations beyond the Party corridor of

accepted reality were not admitted to any response from other

members of the inner circle, except to validate The Truth.

_____________________________
Paraphrases from the article “On the Dynamics of Narcissism. I. Externalization and
Early Ego Development” by Warren M. Brodey.

83
J. Raben Is Exiled

On the morning of January 7, 19–, the leadership of

the New Order convened to draw up battle plans against

a grave threat to Krinskyite ideology and power — a forensic

psychiatrist and his insinuations. The General Secretary of the Party

sat at the head of the conference table and opened

the meeting. “Comrades,” he began, “according to our sources, J.

Raben has questioned the originality of Krinsky. He has slandered

all that is dear to us.” The Minister of Internal

Paradox issued his decree. Raben would be exiled for life.

His crime? Ironic innuendo. The hooligan was out of control.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “The Exile Returns” by David Remnick.

84
I Fly, in Dream, to Any Altitude

A characteristic of my dreams is their vastness, their quality

of infinite space. I move in mighty landscapes, among tremendous

depths and expanses and with unlimited views to all sides.

The loftiness and airiness of the dream come out again

in its color scheme of rare, luminous blues and violets,

and mystically transparent browns — all of which I promise myself

to remember in the day-time, yet there can never recall.

Long perspectives stretch before me, distance is the password of

the scenery. At times I feel that the fourth dimension

is within reach. I fly, in dream, to any altitude.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novella Shadows on the Grass by Isak Dinesen.

85
Avram Dehpour Learns English

Every day I tried to learn a little more English.

I took to carrying verb conjugation charts in my pocket.

As my English became less elusive, my Farsi was jealous.

Farsi is a language of emotions — varied shades of feeling

can be mixed like primary colors on an artist’s easel.

Farsi is a poet’s language: there is a word for

what happens when your grieving heart is silently shedding tears.

English is an all-devouring language that moved across America like

the biblical plagues that darkened the skies of Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Raised in Farsi, I partook of English, a mongrel feast.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the essay “Two Languages in Mind, But Just One in the Heart” by
Louise Erdrich.

86
Ragtime

When Esther and Ezra married they moved in with her father.

And then Brother too had joined the household in Lavasan.

Now in New York she struggled with waves of nostalgia.

The waves swept through her without warning day and night.

She fled to the garden of her home for solace.

It was late September and all the heavy swaying flowers

were in bloom: marigold, salvia, and chrysanthemum – gold and purple.

She walked along the borders of the yard, hands clasped.

From an upstairs window Hanife, in white shawl, watched Esther,

who searchingly read from a letter that made her weep.

_____________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.

87
The Emerald Archive

A triumphant ceremony inaugurated The Jeweled Throne of medieval

Persia.

The date was chosen by astrologers and was doubly auspicious.

It coincided exactly with Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan.

Nowruz, the Persian Spring festival, occurred on the same date.

The emperor and the court were returning from Kashmir, abroad.

The third day of Nowruz would be the most propitious.

That day the emperor would sit on the royal roost.

The emperor’s favorite poet was chosen to compose twenty verses.

The verses would be inscribed in emerald on the throne.

The poet was given six gold pieces for each stanza.

88
The Classic Poetry of Hafez

Hafez cradled the soul in golden dreams in his poems.

Brevity and apparent lack of structure define his compositional models.

Extremes meet to an extent previously unknown in Persian poetry:

here the audaciously ornate and the sublime felicitously rub shoulders.

Phantasmagorical whims materialize amidst transcendent lyrics of the

empyrean spheres.

Perpetual variation collides with the virtual motionlessness of repeated

rhyme.

Matter is progressively broken up and scattered into the ethereal.

A quixotic procession of miniatures merge into a monumental fresco.

The poems seem to be at once many small pieces

and one large one, connected by a shrouded interior drama.

________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Beethoven by Maynard Solomon.

89
The Prince

The Shah, long dead, had left Reza an ebony desk.

It was the only royal gift passed down to Reza.

Treasured by the Prince it traveled everywhere with his entourage.

It was fringed with lacquered rosewood, and featured mahogany inlay.

Reza smoothed out a new parchment scroll with ritualistic flourish.

He savored the parchment’s scent, then reached for a quill:

Dearest Amireh, my Shahdokht, we will live in Lavasan, and

you shall be my queen, and we shall love openly.

Together we shall breed majestic Arabian stallions and they shall

be purple and gold with manes of the finest silver.

______________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Witches of Cologne by Tobsha Learner.

90
Esther’s and Ezra’s Honeymoon

They left Tehran at once after the wedding and drove

to Lavasan, to the Imperial Hotel, where the manager met

them on the steps. Minions scurried round to the back

of their car for suitcases. There was much bowing and

scraping, much bestowing of compliments. They were Mr. Shirazi, Mrs.

Shirazi, and were to make themselves completely at home. It

was the first time that Esther had heard herself addressed

like that, Mrs. Shirazi, tied for life in one way

or another to this man at her side, who seemed,

for that moment her beloved Ezra, for now and evermore.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Glass Room by Simon Mawer.

91
Oscar Berg’s Alter Ego

Solitude and lonesomeness reigned in Oscar Berg’s inner world. It

was an inert golden-green region, enchanting to his gaze. To

his colleagues he was withdrawn and aloof. But he had

another, covert side. Unbeknownst to others he was exquisitely sensitive,

deeply curious about people, hungry for love, envious of others’

spontaneity, and intensely needy of involvement and commitment. Alone

in

his awkwardly narrow apartment the languorous Oscar Berg imagined

another

life. He harbored a secret affinity with the roguish adventurer.

His alter ego was wild, savage. The near-celibate Oscar Berg

madly fantasized about debauchery in The Land of the Fuck.

_______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Schizoid Personality Disorder: A Synthesis of
Developmental, Dynamic, and Descriptive Features” by Salman Akhtar and the
novel To the Last Man by Zane Grey.

92
Oscar Writes a Despairing Letter to his Brother

Franz,

I have one want which I have never yet been

able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of

which I now feel as a most severe evil. I

have no friend: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of

success, there will be none to participate in my joy.

If I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavor

to sustain me in dejection. I desire the company of

a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would

reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear

brother, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend.

Oscar
Brooklyn, New York

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

93
While I Think on Thee, Dear Friend

Sometimes when I find the key and climb deep into

myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the

dark mirror, I need only bend over that dark mirror

to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my

brother, my master. Within me there is something I love

and venerate, I have an ideal, life is rich with

intimations of mystery and legend and a feeling of dawn.

I crave mirroring acceptance, the merger with ideals, the sustaining

presence of others like me. — Howls the sublime, and softly

sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Demian by Hermann Hesse, the essay “Summarizing
Reflections” by Heinz Kohut, and a quote from the novel Martin Chuzzlewit by
Charles Dickens.

94
Lost Youth

The saffron streak of the four o’clock sun streamed across

Esther’s living room, illumining the room with an amber glow.

She gazed at her wedding album, passing from photo to

photo taken at the Imperial Hotel in Lavasan. How the

years had changed her. She felt old as she compared

her former self with the middle-aged woman she had become.

Her hands! How they now reminded Esther of her grandmother’s

hands. She sighed: “My dear hands … Farewell, my poor hands.”

Were her hands the key to her suffering? Surely, she

thought, they signaled the cruel passage of time. Lost youth.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “The Diagnosis of Art: Rachmaninov’s Hand Span” by
Manoj Ramachandran and Jeffrey K Aronson.

95
Mrs. Shirazi Consults a Specialist

“How do I know depression is the most underdiagnosed illness

in the Western world? Nobody who has ever taken the

M train from Brooklyn for even fifteen minutes could dispute

it. But I want to get back to you. You

mustn’t be afraid to be diagnosed as depressed, or as

having been depressed. If you’re ashamed or afraid of the

label we’ll have to break that down as quickly as

possible because that denies you even the possibility of relief,

as for that matter does ignoring the mitigating facts in

your apparently flawed decision not to accept your daughter-in-law,

Fiona.”

_____________________
Paraphrases from the novel Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman.

96
Fiona, The Talented Shiksa

Ben’s heart was captured by a shiksa beauty with talent.

Fiona was head drum majorette of the high school band.

Her genius was being able to twirl not just one

but two silver batons simultaneously – to pass them over her

shoulders, glide them snakily between her legs, and then toss

them fifteen and twenty feet into the air, catching one,

then the other, behind her back. Oh, Fiona, Oh my!

Fiona, in her tiny purple skirt with the gold bloomers.

Oh, Legs Dembosky in all her dumb, blond, goyishe beauty!

Fiona, the talented shiksa, caused endless grief in Ben’s household.

___________________________

Paraphrases from the novel Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.

97
Ben Shirazi’s Parents’ House

My parents’ house is not far from Fifth Avenue, with

art on the walls, painstakingly spaced, and small bronze pieces

on tables and bookshelves. My mother sees the living room

as serenely self-possessed, and so what if it is a

little intimidating. What she loves most is a still-life on

the north wall, by Behjat Sadr. It is a spread

of food: smoked fish, bread, caviar, fruits and vodka, darkly

colored. The Farsi term for still-life seems more bold than

it has to be, ominous, even. Let the latent meanings

turn and bend in the wind, free from authoritative comment.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Falling Man by Don DeLillo

98
Esther’s Private Museum

Can a lost past that has slipped out of reach

be reclaimed by means of nostalgia? Should it ever be?

Esther’s home in Manhattan was a place in which “the

clocks stopped at the hour of exile.” She had conceived

cozy spaces crammed with memory items to create a place

of survival that was beyond any dream of return. Exile

was a trauma that could not be dwelt on, and

non-return became a psychological need. Esther’s home was a private

museum that allowed intimacy and reflection. She re-created the space

of escape that her bygone home in Iran had provided.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the essay “Memory and Nostalgia” by Stephen Legg and the
obituary “Svetlana Boym, 56, Scholar of Myth and Memory, Dies” by Margalit Fox.

99
Dr. Shirazi Talks to his Teenage Son at Dinner

Dr. Shirazi did not let the family see the anguish

he felt as he watched the apparent estrangement grow between

him and Ben, and he would have recoiled at even

the appearance of currying his son’s favor. He had no

leisure time during the day to spend with Ben but

sometimes at meals he would banter with him amiably, with

just a hint of sternness. “Well, my boy,” he said

as he sat down beside him at the dining table,

across from Esther, “how are things going? What have you

been up to? Studying? — Oh, and running? That’s fine, Ben.”

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann.

100
An Accretion of Meaningful Images

If novelists think, perhaps we think through a frenzy of

metaphor-making and analogy-building, an accretion of meaningful

images juxtaposed in

ways that seem to us fruitful, although to someone else

they might seem baffling. On different days (or sometimes on

the same day, when I was feeling particularly lost), I

read about the ebb and flow of historical events — revolution,

the plight of political prisoners, the fierce passions of revenge

excited by class antagonisms. I read these things because it

is the only way I could deeply inhabit a world

other than the limited one of my own narrow experience.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the essay “The Sea of Information” by Andrea Barrett.

101
Old Yurovsky’s Secret Crime

It was a dark autumn night. Old Yurovsky was walking

up and down his study and remembering how, years earlier,

he had given a party one autumn evening. There had

been many clever men there, and there had been interesting

conversations. They spoke about the execution of the Tsar. The

majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and

men, disapproved of the execution. They considered that form of

punishment immoral. In the opinion of some of them the

Tsar should have been imprisoned for life. Yurovsky had remained

silent, giving no hint of his secret and undiscovered crime.

______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov.

102
Yurovsky’s Checkered Past

A brief sojourn in the Ural Mountains had ended badly.

Many years later Yurovksy was haunted by his deadly confrontation.

But the New Dogma had prevailed over the Old Order,

and vestiges of bourgeois frippery had to be swept away.

He had been caught up in the Revolution’s tick tock.

For appearances he went along, but polemical fervor baffled him.

Yurovsky remained an artist at heart; Beethoven was his god.

Now, years later, a silent metronome sat atop his piano.

The clavier cast a long shadow on the parquet floor.

Guests gathered to hear old Yurovsky perform the marcia funèbre.

103
A Trip to the Mountains

A convoy escorted the family east, to the Ural mountains.

The children rode together in a separate slow-moving vehicle.

Tatiana played with her younger brother, Alexei in the backseat.

"Papa told me to sit with you, Alyosha, my brother."

Ipatiev House had been made ready for the family's stay.

Alexei grew bored with his confinement and longed for freedom.

He wanted to enjoy the sun and gaudy spring’s bloom.

What adventures lay in store for him in the mountains?

Olga read Pushkin and remained silent throughout the long journey.

Had the trip tired her perhaps, or was she indifferent?

104
Alexei Romanov Writes in his Diary

Yekaterinburg, January 20, 1918. Snow. Cold. Boredom. The whole day

was just like yesterday. Played cards with Papa, Tatiana and

Anastasia. I am a prisoner but full of road dreams

and the constant anticipation of adventures. At night, I pore

over maps and imagine every highway and hill and out

of the way town. I approach big cities in my

mind. I explore every back street and alley. From the

tops of tall buildings I enjoy crystal views of streets

spilling into the country. Sometimes the streets are filled with

traffic and sometimes they are deserted and I am alone.

__________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Lake Effect by Rich Cohen.

105
The Tsar Writes in His Diary

We are held prisoner in a house in Yekaterinburg that

looks across the river and the plain to the mountains.

In the bed of the river there are pebbles and

boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water

is clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

Troops go by the house and down the road and

the dust they raise powders the leaves of the trees.

Sometimes in the dark we hear the troops marching under

the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There

are many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.

106
The Tsar Dreams a Dream

When I managed to go to sleep, my dreams were

disturbed. My usual mash of Arctic ice at first, then

rooms of something like the Winter Palace, but almost see-through,

barely holding together, with ill-fitting doors and hoarfrost on the

doorjambs. I saw myself in one of these rooms. Then

Alix came to visit me, and sat down on the

erect me, and started moving so sweetly, but then complained

I was so abrasively cold, just like a stick of

frozen salmon. Then a slow easing out of sleep. A

sound assurance that my bad dreams were just that — dreams.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Age of Ice by J. M. Sidorova.

107
A Clock Chimes

Alexandra completed a sentence in her diary: “God put us

here to bear time, and how we do it makes

all the difference.” At that moment Nicholas entered the room;

he tried to embrace her. She said: “You cannot hold

on to me, because you cannot hold on to time:

Sooner or later, our captivity will end — and who knows

how it will end?” A clock chimes. Alexandra confesses to

Nicholas: “Sometimes I can actually hear the time flowing. Sometimes

I get up in the middle of the night and

stop every clock. Still — one shouldn’t be afraid of time.”

________________________________________________

Paraphrases from the blog post “Rosenkavalier Stops Time” by W. Scott Smoot.

108
My Own Private Winter Palace

We must all create a world of fiction in which

we alone can live. We strain to fashion a private

narrative to contain the teeming fantasies that occupy our inner

nature. A writer creates a world we can all visit,

like paupers touring a palace, wondering, as we explore its

splendors at the remarkable differences with our own more ramshackle

abode while struck by the persistence of human nature and

emotion that makes us feel that we, too, could live

in such a mansion. On lonely days I lose myself

altogether in solitary reflection in my own private Winter Palace.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter.

109
Nicholas and Alexandra

It was their last night at the Ural Mountains retreat.

Upon opening a door in the house, they found food —

smoked fish, bread, caviar, fruits and vodka — set out on

a table. They sat and ate dinner across from each

other. She noticed how much older her husband seemed. She

was aware of how his clothes looked loose on him

now, although he still appeared a youthful man, precise as

a utility in the way he talked sparingly at the

table. He remained mostly laconic and silent about the landscape

of his thoughts. Who could have foreseen the approaching end?

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje and the novel Zugzwang
by Ronan Bennett.

110
Yurovsky’s Crime is Revealed

At that moment they heard neighing horses and men shouting.

There was stridency in the tones rising from the courtyard.

Yurovsky’s voice was shrill when he broadcast the barbarous crime.

“The Czar, Nicholas, is dead,” he hollered. “It’s all over!”

Yurovsky was unusually tall, with large hands and small head.

All stood by, watching. “I am no traitor,” Yurovsky cried.

“Search every corner of the house, try every floorboard and

probe every chimney as if it were a maid’s skirt.”

The men fanned out across the house while the Imperial

family lay dead in the basement, their bodies savagely brutalized.

__________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Tutor by Andrea Chapin.

111
Remembrance of Things Past

I fight against my depression. I am not well, but

I am not mad. I’m after something. Memory, yes. A

reel. More than just time. I summon up remembrance of

things past: surely, more than just time. But what is

the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past

is just illusion? Is there any reason to trust a

man in his late fifties, who speaks of his “child’s

memory” as if it existed, unintruded upon by intervening experience,

like an old movie reel, waiting only for a projector?

Nobody can really say for sure, because nobody really knows.
_______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from Sonnet no. 30 by William Shakespeare, Einstein’s Dreams by Alan
Lightman, The Memory Thief by Philip Gourevitch, Risks of Overclocking the Processor by
Charles M. Kozierok, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries and Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the
Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford.

112
Eleanor Discovers Herself

Her shyness set her apart from others in the family.

Diffidence aside, she had known what she wanted from life.

Marriage to Franklin had opened new broad vistas for her.

Eleanor discovered she shared Franklin’s enthusiastic devotion to public

service.

She eagerly savored discussing and debating topical issues with him.

Eleanor was raised to believe men knew more about politics.

Now she started to question those views, with Franklin’s persuasion.

Eleanor’s outspoken opinions could serve as trial balloons for Franklin

as he tried to determine the direction of political winds.

She lived her own life with her own confident resolve.
_____________________
Paraphrases from the biographies Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery by Russell
Freedman and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Photographic Story of a Life by Kem Knapp Sawyer.

113
The Shrewd Rubenstein

Rubenstein, the gallery owner, was ambitious, shrewd and recognized.

He featured Iranian artists to draw wealthy Iranian émigré clients.

Behjat Sadr normally drove galleries nuts with hanging and rehanging.

But Rubenstein was happy to oblige the celebrated Iranian artist.

Behjat Sadr’s work was sure to attract desirable, well-heeled clientele.

Rhythm and innovation were very important to her celebrated work.

She would selectively scrape black paint away to develop shapes.

She often mixed oil painting with photographs, figures with abstractions.

The final product ingeniously blurred distinctions between painting and

sculpture.

“Welcome, Mrs. Shirazi,” Rubenstein said, “something here will interest

you.”

114
The Great Rubenstein

Rubenstein’s professional reputation in the art world was firmly

established.

Philadelphia-born and educated, he was regarded as the most sought-after

art dealer in the world — a man so powerful he

could move markets with an offhand remark or a sneer.

His knowledge of art was legendary, as was his wealth.

Rubenstein no longer had to troll for clients; they came

to him, usually on bended knee, promising his gallery vast commissions.

The secret of Rubenstein’s success lay in his unfailing eye.

Rubenstein never betrayed a confidence. Rubenstein never gossiped or

engaged

in double-dealing. Rare in the art trade, he was honorable.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva.

115
The Work of the Artist

The artist is the creator of beautiful and enlightened things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner

or a new material his ardent impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral book. Books

are well written, or badly written. That is all. Period.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

116
Rubenstein Romances a Client

Esther’s interest in abstract expressionism set her apart from Ezra.

She knew her tastes in art, while Rubenstein tutored her.

Association with Rubenstein had opened new broad vistas for her.

Esther discovered she shared Rubenstein’s enthusiastic interest in

contemporary works.

She eagerly savored discussing and debating aesthetic issues with him.

Esther was raised to believe men knew more about art.

Now she started to question those views, with Rubenstein’s persuasion.

Esther’s opinions could serve as a guide post for Rubenstein

as he tried to gauge the direction of artistic trends.

She pursued her own interests in her own unshakable way.

117
Oscar and Reeva

Reeva was seated, sipping her vodka tonic and staring masklike.

The empty white plate that Oscar placed in front of

her served as a blank screen on which she projected

images and memories. Her best moments with Oscar rose before

her mind: then, thoughts about their recent quarrel. She was

conscious that their relationship was no longer the same. He

was cold toward her and she remembered all the cruel

words he had uttered. He sat across from her, mostly

laconic and silent about the landscape of his thoughts. They

bedded down after dinner. It was their last night together.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje.

118
The Runner and His Lover

I have thought about that last night a hundred, no,

a thousand times, but I have never written it down

before. And I find I like the permanence of the

words upon the page. The runner and his lover are

cradled safely in my words, caught up in paper dreams.

I could leave memory aside and slide into fiction. There

is nothing to prevent me from writing them a whole

other story, the one I wished for them. But I

don’t and I steal away, returning to the clamor of

the present, a dismally fallen world remote from their own.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons.

119
Reeva’s Final Moments

Slowly, painfully, Reeva stood. She edged out of the narrow

space described by the chair, the bed, and the table,

and she went into the windowless bathroom. She hit the

light and hid her eyes for a moment, then stared

at herself in the mirror. She was wan, distraught. Then

she realized that was exactly what she was looking for,

evidence that Oscar’s denunciations had undone her, and she turned

from the sight of herself and wept. She eased herself

onto the closed toilet and sobbed at her own self-pity,

and she sobbed at it all. Her spirit was broken.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Songs Without Words by Ann Packer.

120
O me, what hast thou done?

I stand cloaked behind a curtain. I am a witness,

silent and unseen. And yet, am I not also a

player? Beyond my breath I see the flames of candles,

like mocking tongues. Two lovers have at each other in

a bedroom. The woman is I. Or is it she?

He holds a mirror up to her, where she espies

what’s deep inside. She cries out: “Help, help!” I cry:

“Help!” Alarmed, he charges at the curtain. My eyes fail.

I am neither living nor dead, and I know nothing,

looking into the heart of the light, the silence.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

121
Chaos is Come Again

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The

world repeats itself precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people

do not know they will live their lives over. Ill-fated

lovers making love the first time undress shyly, show surprise

at the supple thigh, the fragile nipple. How would they

know that each intimate betrayal will be repeated again and

again, exactly as before? Then too, men in rage will,

time and again, strike those that wish them the best.

These are the people with unhappy lives; they sense that

their misjudgments have all happened before and will happen again.
_________________________________________
Paraphrases from Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman and Othello by William
Shakespeare.

122
Death’s Dateless Night

I squeezed the trigger and fired four times. Four bullets.

Two in the belly, and the other in the head.

When I broke down the bathroom door the face of

the woman I’d just killed kept its look of surprise —

big, round eyes and grotesquely contorted mouth. I remember the

look in her eyes. I recoiled with panicked shock and

horror. When you kill someone, there’s a part of you

that immediately starts devising an explanation, making up an alibi,

putting together a version of the facts that washes your

hands clean, even though they smell of gunpowder and sweat.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud.

123
The Dying Itself

When it comes to dying, I am scared. Not of

being dead, that I cannot comprehend, to be nothing is

impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared

of, but the dying itself I can comprehend, the very

instant when you know that now comes what you have

always feared, and you suddenly realize that every chance of

being the person you really wanted to be, is gone

for ever, and the one you were, is the one

those around you will remember. Then that must feel like

someone’s strong hands slowly tightening their grip around your neck.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson.

124
Oscar Berg’s Hero

Socrates was Oscar Berg’s hero. He’d first discovered the philosopher

when he was a boy of sixteen, a lifetime ago.

Already blinded in his right eye and yearning for a

higher knowledge, a knowledge not of the body but of

the spirit, craving not religious faith but faith in reason.

Know thyself! Socrates taught. And through knowing the self, knowing

the world. He was sentenced to death, aged seventy. Yet

it was a death of Socrates’ own choice, for he

refused to flee into exile. The philosopher is one who

practices dying, practices death, continuously, but no one sees it.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates.

125
Avram Dehpour Falters

Avram Dehpour was beset with panic because his right hand

had frozen up, grown heavy, during a Schubert sonata, missing

several notes during the Andante, sending a soft murmur — accompanied

by hard biting coughs from angry throats — through the audience.

All was suddenly asunder, his command faltering, the normal alliance

between his skill, his talent, and what might be called

genius, broken. The audience settled into a stunned silence. An

aural black hole from which emerged a few more tight

coughs. As most everyone already knows, his grand celebration, his

triumphant return from Moscow, was ruined. His fingers grew heavy.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the story collection The Secret Goldfish by David Means.

126
Avram at his House by the Lake

The setting sun had disappeared entirely behind the Great Range.

The lake was black, and the temperature was dropping fast.

Outside on the deck Avram rolled and lit a cigarette.

In the west, the sky faded from lemon to gray.

The air was still smooth, Avram noted, clear and dry.

The blue-black eastern sky was cloudless with swatches of stars.

Over the treetops behind the house a half-moon was rising.

Avram smoked his cigarette and made his way in the

gathering darkness down the narrow path to the black lake.

He walked along the shore, on the rocky platinum beach.

______________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Reserve by Russell Banks.

127
Avram Dehpour Beset by Panic

I walked into the house, now in darkness. I struck

a match, and the little yellow-papered music room frightened me.

I lit a cigarette, and, as always happens, when one

turns in a circle of inextricable contradiction, I began to

smoke. I smoked cigarette after cigarette to dull my senses,

that I might not see my contradictions. All night I

did not sleep, and at five o’clock, when it was

not yet light, I decided that I could stand this

strain no longer, and that I would sit at the

piano. The piano was my refuge, my solace, my escape.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Kreutzer Sonata” by Leo Tolstoy.

128
Insomnia

I suppose it’s natural that in writing about loneliness I

should find myself a bit depressed. Coming to this evening,

the day lost, I lay in bed as dusk saturated

the room, falling in and out of sleep. Awakening in

the dark, there is always that moment when the room

is any room and no room at all. Sometimes it’s

just a shiver, this feeling; and there are also times

when one must choose slowly what is what, picking substance

from shade, as if choosing one’s life anew. There are

those times when you begin to doubt your own mind.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Singer by Ira Sher.

129
The Little Father

Czar Nicholas II was a dedicated autocrat, exercising unlimited powers.

He could issue any order, assured of his Imperial prerogatives.

Nicholas sacrificed everything for the long suffering people of Russia.

He expected nothing in return, except their fealty and devotion.

Perhaps, if anything, Nicholas was too good to his people.

He was blameless in the nation’s growing estrangement from monarchy.

Subversive factions had taken hold in the cities, demanding change.

Workers dedicated to propagandizing the New Dogma sowed discontent.

Outside agitators, with treasonous designs on the State, espoused

revolution.

The Czar, the “little father” of his people, endured impiety.

130
Ben Writes a Letter to his Father

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am

afraid of you. If I now try to give you

an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete.

As you see it, you have worked hard all your

life, have sacrificed everything for me, above all for me,

consequently, I have lived high and handsome, have been completely

at liberty to study whatever I wanted, and have had

no cause for material worries, which means worries of any

kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for

this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, and so on.

________________
Paraphrases from Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka.

131
Almost Too Serious

Young Alexei was spoiled by the servile flattery of servants.

Greatness was expected if not demanded by his doting parents.

He was papa’s pride and joy, worshiped by his sisters.

Precocious brightness enhanced the aura of early promise and possibility.

In childhood he was treated more like a little adult.

His fancies and whims emerged as strong, sometimes overwhelming

others.

The prince grew up alternately too infantile and too grown-up.

Alexei could be willful and demanding but also captivatingly sweet.

He once removed the shoe of a female dinner guest,

returning it later with a ripe strawberry in the toe.

____________________
Paraphrases from Soul Murder Revisited by Leonard Shengold.

132
Ben Writes to his Father

You have demanded my deference and some sign of sympathy.

Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room.

I hid among my books, my crazy friends, my delusions.

I never talked to you frankly or openly, did I?

I never showed any family feeling at all, did I?

I never came with you and mother to the synagogue.

On no occasion did I take interest in your work!

I never lifted a finger for you — I did nothing.

Why, I never even got you an off-Broadway theater ticket.

Wasn’t that always your judgment of me, Father? Wasn’t it?

_________________________

Paraphrases from Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka.

133
Only Sentence Fragments Remained

The book was savagely slammed shut on the Romanov family.

Death came in 1918 as Russia plunged into civil war.

The Romanovs ended up in unmarked graves in the Urals.

Almost ninety years after the Imperial family was brutally murdered

a small horror awaited the skilled team of forensic anthropologists

sent to search for the Romanov children, Anastasia and Alexei.

The killers disfigured the bodies with both fire and acid

to conceal the victims’ identities after their cruelly-inhuman massacre.

All that remained for analysis by experts were DNA fragments:

like sentences of a book instead of intact, coherent chapters.

134
Ben Writes to his Father

You don’t charge me with anything downright wicked, I suppose.

Well, perhaps, you do consider my marriage to Fiona wicked.

You charge me with coldness, with estrangements and with ingratitude.

But there is more to it than that, isn’t there?

It is my fault. It is truly always my fault.

You make it appear that I could have done something.

There was something I might’ve done to change my circumstances.

And, of course, you’re never in the slightest to blame.

Oh, yes, of course, you’ve been too good to me.

You “spoiled me.” I’m sure that mother spoiled me too.

______________________
Paraphrases from Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka.

135
Rachmaninoff Hands

Silent leaden shadows moved all over the expanse to Helsinki.

Rachmaninoff wanted to escape the ravages of the ongoing Revolution

and fled in haste to Finland in an open sled.

The New Order had confiscated his estate, leaving him penniless.

He departed Petrograd with his notebooks: sketches for an opera.

He would recreate his old way of life in style.

There was an offer of a Steinway grand awaiting him.

A fortune was to be made in a concert career.

Rachmaninoff possessed an infallibly clean, precise and virtuosic piano

technique.

Scattered arpeggios glistened through the fingers of his huge hands.

136
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Soloist

The musical conversation of the orchestra, tuning up rather like

athletes running-on-the-spot and shadow-punching, before performance; it

even includes the

pitch of anticipation in the low interchange of human voices.

A diminuendo from this audience, as the musicians, including piano

soloist, come from the wings, and a rallentando when the

guest conductor appears to bow, turn his back, mount the

podium and settle his shoulders in readiness to enter the

concerto with raised baton. The sonority of wind, strings and

keyboard calms all, the following tempest of brass sweeps away

all reactions but the aural; they ravishingly invade and transmute.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from Loot and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer.

137
I, Daniel Dehpour

Permit me to give a brief account of myself.

I was born in Tehran near the large Jewish ghetto.

My father was pious like the men of his station.

The rhythms of Shabbat and the holidays marked my childhood.

Early on I attended Yeshiva, then the local Ozar Hatorah.

Though I doubted religion, I did not stray from Jewry.

On the contrary, I drew vitality from my Jewish origins.

My community saved me like an oasis in the desert.

I tried to convince Jews of the necessity of Zionism.

I eagerly took up collections in front of old synagogues.

___________________

Paraphrases from the autobiography Portrait of a Jew by Albert Memmi.

138
Daniel Dehpour, Walnut Importer

Daniel Dehpour was not a scholar, not a lettered man,

but he loved studying the Torah and seeking after knowledge.

Although he had been successful in business he regretted that

he had not become a rabbi or a learned scholar.

While he could easily make out a page of Gamara

when he wrote in Hebrew, it was riddled with errors.

Daniel Dehpour had one aptitude — for trade, for making money.

He had become a partner in a walnut importing firm.

He easily obtained credit, established connections and made lucrative

contracts.

With his fortune he bought many books, holy and secular.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Shadows on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

139
Daniel Dehpour’s Torah Studies

I was devoted to Torah study when I was young.

I read this tale of the Jews as a novel.

I was enthralled by the enigmatic biblical texts written in

a language without vowels or punctuation: supernatural in their origins.

I was fascinated by this hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs,

relationships, laws of the universe, sins, and days of reckoning —

this scissors-and-paste job that is in its original form so

terse, inconsistent, defiant of common sense, and cryptically inattentive to

the ordinary demands of narrative as to be attributed to

a divine source drunk with metaphor, mystical symbol and allegory.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel City of God by E.L. Doctorow.

140
Daniel Dehpour of Haim & Dehpour

He looked more like a tired scholar than anything else.

No one would have taken him for a man of

business. His soft, lustrous black eyes, his whimsical smile, conveyed

the impression of a bookish intelligence. But there are always

dreamers in every walk of life. At dawn he recited

his morning prayers and then had an hour or so

to himself. He always took his breakfast alone, with a

book of poetry at his elbow. At 8 in the

morning he was in his office, meeting customers (“tiresome people,”

he called them), balancing accounts, supervising the workers, inspecting

merchandise.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novels O Pioneers! by Willa Cather and Les Misérables by Victor
Hugo and the biography The Mendelssons: Three Generations of Genius by Herbert
Kupferberg,

141
Moses Haim Reminisces

Daniel Dehpour was like an older brother to me. I

fail to see how we can have been so much

to each other: he an Iranian Jew and I a

descendant of Iraqi Jews and our first meeting put off

till he was in mid-life. The closest I ever came

in friendship with anyone anywhere in the world was, I

think, with Daniel Dehpour. He more than anyone else was

an accessory to what I had done and was doing.

We were together to the exclusion of every other person

and interest all through 19—. In that year we partnered

and set up the Baghdad office of Haim & Dehpour.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from “Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken: Childhood, Psychoanalytic
Symbolism and Creativity” by Jules Glenn.

142
The Darwinian Imperative of the Marketplace

Daniel Dehpour was a quiet-mannered man, whom you would have taken

for anything in the world but a cut-throat businessman. His

speech was simple and informal — he could not understand why

anyone should get excited about the walnut trade. But Dehpour

knew that in business affairs, life was a struggle for

existence, and the strong overcame the weak, and in turn

were overcome by the strongest. Haim and Dehpour were merchants,

and the decision to merge their firms was the expression

of their will to survive. The grim vicissitudes of the

marketplace made it imperative that they consolidate or be exterminated.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

143
The Safety of Phantoms

Esther yearned to return to Iran to recapture for a

moment the self that she had been long ago. She

wanted to enter the house and garden in which she

used to live in her youth. But that would have

been a most hazardous pilgrimage, which might end in disappointment

as in success. It is in ourselves that we should

rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different

years. We cannot escape reality but we can only

know reality in ourselves. Inside our minds. It was Esther’s

fate to pursue phantoms. Truly, phantoms prove safer than reality.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

144
Oscar Berg Pursues the Phantom of Artistic Fame

I think with honesty, with few evasions of human frailty.

I secretly yearn for fame — do I not deserve it?

But I believe no less in the purity of art.

I remain uncompromising with my talents, few as they are.

I muse about cutting corners, about selling out, but I

shunt these seductions aside and stay true to the belief

that no real connection exists between artistic and worldly success.

I await the day when others see that my photographs

are masterpieces. Ambitious as I am, I feel that there

is no alternative but to wait for that distant day.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of
Writing by Steven J. Zipperstein.

145
Ben Reads the English Romantic Poets

From my youth upwards my spirit walked through life alone.

I did not look upon the world with mortal eyes.

The thirst of other people’s vain ambition was not mine.

The aim of other people’s self-satisfied existence was not mine.

My joys, griefs, passions, and powers made me a stranger.

Though I was human I had no sympathy with society.

I held but slight communion with the thoughts of men.

My joy was in the wilderness, to breathe the difficult

air on the heights of Olympus, where the birds dare

not build, where insects do not flit through moist breezes.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the dramatic poem Manfred by George Gordon, Lord Byron.

146
Moses

He sought a moment of transcendence on the mountain top.

Or perhaps the moment sought him like a desert scorpion.

The visioning of his ancestors coalesced in his afflicted mind.

Resolute aspirations of an unnamed destiny haunted his disillusioned

spirit.

His range of view emerged out of his inner sensations.

He was companionless, alone with thoughts about past and future.

The others would not believe him; he scarce believed himself.

He took off his shoes and approached the imminent void.

Ideas with crystal-like symmetries guided him into the unknown.

He was who he was. His book’s preface was written.

147
Ben on the Mountaintop

What astonished me was the contrast between father and son:

the honest old man, talented and hardworking; the lazy kid.

Ben never cut grass or washed cars like other teenagers.

I don’t think privileged rich people raise their kids right.

Ben always had his head in the clouds, an Olympic dreamer.

A house full of medals and trophies, that’s Ben Shirazi.

“How like a God!” old man Shirazi used to say.

But you can’t feed a family with medals and trophies.

He won races, so he thinks he owns the world.

A young man with no money and no sound prospects!

____________________________
Paraphrases from the collection Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories by Paul Theroux and the
play Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets.

148
A Trip to Dr. Shirazi Delayed

I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.

My teeth are rotting but I refuse to see Shirazi.

I know better than anyone that I am injuring myself.

If I don’t consult a dentist it is from spite.

I am absorbed in cold, malignant, and, yes, everlasting spite.

My teeth are bad, well — let them get even worse.

Even in toothache there is enjoyment, the enjoyment of pain.

The sublime enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in moans.

I have no enemy to punish; I punish only myself.

My aim is to make you uneasy out of spite.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

149
A Dental Practice is a Business, Isn’t It?

I encourage my patients to floss; they should always floss.

“You must floss, please floss, flossing makes all the difference.”

Flossing prevents periodontal disease and can extend life by years.

Non-flossers struggle with rotted teeth, swollen gums, and loathsome

infection.

Dentists are half-mortician: boring teeth, clearing rot, and filling pits.

Streptococcus mutans must be smoked out, put on the run,

and never allowed any space to cultivate its nefarious enterprise.

We call it a practice, never a business, but successful

dentistry is very much a business—an unquestionably lucrative business.

I began in Chelsea; eventually I moved to Park Avenue.

_________________________
Quotes and paraphrases from the novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua
Ferris.

150
Meditation at the Lake

At mid-day I take a walk high above the lake.

The flush of sparkling sun at noon is a consolation.

From the top of the hill I am deeply spellbound.

The ring of snow-capped mountains suggests a mysterious, unmoving

dance.

My spirit hears the music of higher beings: supernal emanations.

The transience of all individual existence, the eternity of the

whole, is reflected in the blue mirror of the lake.

I pass through a narrow gorge; I arrive at the summit.

The ways part; the richest prospect opens in different directions.

I linger momentarily and consider which way I should turn.

________________________
Paraphrases from The Diaries of Cosima Wagner, the memoir Jarhead: A Marine’s
Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swafford, and The
Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.

151
The Athletic Genius

The early connection between possession of athletic skill and the

granting of sexual favors was not lost on Ben Shirazi.

With a thick mop of curly black hair and a

physique that soon added muscles to gangling height, his manhood

was swift. By the time he went to New York

University, where he spent a great deal of time studying

and fucking interspersed with briefer periods running, he easily

consolidated the reputation of genius. The mantle was waiting. In

the absence of other takers, Ben slipped it on as

if it had been ready. Ben had the competitive edge.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Edge of Pleasure by Philippa Stockley.

152
The Ferry Ride to Manhattan

I boarded the ferry as the sun was setting. We

saw in front of us an infinite carpet of white

fog, and, above, a translucent sparkling mist and a sky

of royal blue. We broke through the fog at tremendous

speed and came upon open water. Then a shiver took

hold of me as I saw the city: a rampart

of buildings on a great narrow island, windows reflecting the

golden light, towers, bridges that stretched over the fog like

long doubled harps. The reflecting windows of a thousand buildings

were a leafy bronze color that crawled across gleaming facades.

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from Ellis Island and Other Stories by Mark Helprin.

153
The Private Life of a New York Professional

For thirty-two years Ezra had been a high-earning dental surgeon.

His undergraduate work had been in chemistry and molecular biology.

He had a private, professional life apart from his wife.

Esther wasn’t sure of Ezra’s work-hours; they seemed to vary.

She wasn’t quite sure who his associates were any longer.

Still, she wanted to think she knew her husband intimately.

Ezra felt he knew Esther intimately, finally, beyond any shadow.

Nothing was secret in her life — (she didn’t think so).

Their life together had been worn smooth as the brownstone

steps of the entryway of their Upper East side townhouse.

_________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Lovely, Dark, Deep by Joyce Carol Oates.

154
Ezra’s Library

Except for the laying down of a few Persian rugs

and the hanging of sherry-colored velvet curtains Ezra had not

allowed Esther to a lay a finger on the library. The

high molded ceiling was still smoke-dimmed and the paneling that

showed between the bookcases was pickled black with smoke and

age. The room was steeped in its own unchanging and

unchangeable smell; the wood smoke and tobacco smoke of decades

and the smell of old leather. The sunlight in this

room was always liquid amber; the shadows strange and soft

as the numberless feathers of a vast, ghostly, night-dark bird.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge.

155
Ezra and Esther Attend the Opera

The finale of the act came, the curtain fell. Light,

applause, general exit. Ezra and Esther sat as silent and

remote in the taxi going home from The Metropolitan Opera

as they had sat in their opera-box facing the stage —

almost, one might say, in the same atmosphere. Nothing was

there which could alienate them from that extravagant and stormily

passionate world which worked upon them with its magic power to

draw them to itself. The taxi stopped; they did not

at once realize where they were, or that they had

arrived before the door of their house on 82nd Street.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “The Blood of the Walsungs” by Thomas Mann.

156
Dinner at the Nussbaums

They ate dinner: Ezra, Esther and the Nussbaums. Ezra, though

a big man, ate sparingly, just picking at his pot

roast with potatoes and carrots, bell pepper and garlic. A

bottle of wine sat on the table, too, but Ezra

only sipped occasionally from his glass. It was as if

eating and drinking were private pursuits that couldn’t be enjoyed

fully while others were watching. Ezra talked over dinner about

his rare-book collection, and about the opera, in a pleasant,

singsong monologue. When the dinner dishes were cleared, he got

serious and spoke of son Ben — his studies, his running.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Bloodmoney by David Ignatius.

157
Ben Shirazi Remembers his Father

My father seemed disconnected from his past. He couldn’t call

up any of those little incidents from childhood that my

mother specialized in. He spoke only rarely of his own

memories of childhood or youth, and then never at length.

And I don’t think he used his personal memories in

coming to understand himself. In that sense, in the sense

we mean it in the contemporary post-Freudian world, I don’t

think he did understand himself. He jokingly said to me

once that he was a prime example of what repression could accomplish.

His energetic, virtually nonstop professional life was all that mattered.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir The Story of My Father by Sue Miller.

158
Ezra Shirazi’s Friendships

Ezra’s relationships seem to have been less intimate than Esther’s,

although his passion for privacy makes it difficult to be

sure. What is certain is that he had considerable charm,

and that this brought him many enduring friendships which were

important to him. His marriage gave him security; his financial

success supported his self-esteem. But, like Esther, Ezra was prone

to depression which made him shy away from introspection. His

work was based on external observation, owing as little as

possible to self-examination. One might say that Ezra evaded

introspection,

deeming it an unhealthy endeavor that only fostered morbid self-

obsession.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from Solitude: A Return to the Self, by Anthony Storr.

159
Ben Medals in the in the 4 × 100 Meter Relay

Winning! Oh, you can’t say enough good things about it.

There is nothing quite like it. Win hands down, win

by accident, win by a nose, win without deserving to

win – you just can’t beat it, however you slice it.

Winning is the tops, winning is the name of the

game. Winning is what it’s all about. Winning is the

be-all and the end-all, and don’t let anybody tell you

otherwise. All the world loves a winner. Show me a

good loser, and I’ll show you a loser. Name one

thing that losing has to recommend it. You can’t. Period.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Great American Novel by Philip Roth.

160
The Athletic Director Is Defamed

New York University’s track and field program was under investigation.

NYU was accused of breaking NCAA rules in recruiting runners.

Press releases were issued reassuring boosters that the accusations were

false, just a means of taking down NYU’s track program,

which was beginning to rival the powerhouse of Syracuse University.

The athletic director sat at his desk dealing with the

constant influx of mail and phone calls about the allegations.

One name in particular kept surfacing again and again: Benjamin

Aaron Shirazi, the program’s undisputed star, the so-called Persian

Antelope.

Allegedly, NYU payed $25,000 to a recruiting service for Shirazi.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Between the Tides by Patti Callahan Henry.

161
The Persian Antelope

Ben Shirazi was unlike most track-and-field athletes, even talented ones.

Young Shirazi was splendidly graceful, deftly swift and uncommonly

unflappable.

Local sportswriters had taken to calling him “the Persian antelope.”

Most middle- and long-distance runners aren’t notably beautiful to watch.

You can admire the stamina of a great distance runner.

But you can’t really enjoy watching someone run 25 laps.

Shirazi, in contrast, brought joy to the crowds that gathered

when he competed; his races became events to revel in.

Shirazi had come to New York University gifted but raw.

Now he was gifted but invincible, a phenomenon to notice.

_____________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s
Olympics by Jeremy Schaap.

162
Narcissus’ Reflection

Narcissus’s reflection glistened in the blue mirror of the lake.

He had fallen in love with his own glorious image

and proudly disdained those who loved him, forsaking genuine

friendship.

The charming, gracious and eternally mysterious boy found himself

peerless.

Rapturous enchantment led to a devastating, consuming longing for

himself.

Narcissus wanted to be nothing but the admired, beautiful youth.

His suffering was ended in a fatal and irrevocable chastening.

Transformed into an extravagant flower he found bridled content within

the high walls of a paradisiacal verdant enclosure, the inner

garden of an Empress who mourned her own sorry fate.

163
Ben Shirazi Consults Dr. Shengold

A troublesome – aren't they all? – new patient, twenty-two years old.

His father had a typical petty bourgeois Jewish Orthodox background.

He is highly intelligent, a compulsive talker, narcissistic and

exhibitionistic.

A façade of ironic self-deprecation hides his pervasive intellectual

arrogance.

His diarrhea of talk conceals his inability to reveal himself.

The tirade against his parents, especially his father, is uninterruptible.

He thinks psychoanalysis is a self-serving rattling off of complaints.

He permits no one, including me, to question his life.

Even his self-criticism is meant to display his shrewd honesty.

This patient has read much about psychoanalysis while understanding

nothing.

_______________________________

Paraphrases from the humor piece Portnoy Psychoanalyzed by Bruno Bettelheim.

164
Eleanor Remembers Franklin

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then

there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to

the promises of life, as if he were related to

one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand

miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that

flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of “reactive

temperament.” — it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic

readiness for adventure, a sincere concern for others such as

I have never found in any other person and which

it is surely not likely we shall ever find again.

___________________________________
Paraphrase from the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

165
Eleanor Tills her Produce Garden

Eleanor stood up in the garden from tilling a plot.

She was cultivating early lettuce; she delighted in fresh produce.

Shaking her hands, she stuffed them into her sweater sleeves.

The wind was up; it blew dirt from the cottage

into the newly hoed ground, and shook the pea pods.

She walked towards the house, and climbed the brick steps.

Opening the door, she walked past the stove, her hands

still nestled in the sleeves and turned into the bedroom

which she no longer shared with Franklin — (not since Lucy).

Cucumbers and onions would make a nice salad, she thought.

_____________________________
Paraphrases from the historical novel Changing Light by Nora Gallagher.

166
Ben’s Illimitable Potential

Mrs. Nussbaum telephoned the grocery store to order fresh produce.

“Three heads of garlic and four bell peppers,” she said.

Ben Shirazi knew that Mrs. Nussbaum was a good tipper.

Ben knew a lot of things. He was extremely smart.

His teachers told him so when they pulled him aside

to say that he wasn’t working up to his potential.

He had promise, and this mattered more than his grades.

His illimitable potential comforted him more than any A could.

He held a secret belief that he could, if he

really really wanted to, become President of the United States.

___________________________
Paraphrases from the story “All You Have to Do” by Sarah Braunstein.

167
The Early Days of Zelenyi’s Confinement

Early in his confinement the conviction took root in him

that he was going mad. It was as though there were

a quantity of dark yet vivid personalities in his mind,

some of them familiar, some of them strange and terrible,

held in check by a little monitor, who sat aloft

somewhere and looked on. The thing that worried him was

that the monitor was sick, and holding out with difficulty.

Should he give up, should he falter for a moment,

out would rush these intolerable things — only Zelenyi could know

what black state might prevail should his consciousness roam unchecked.

________________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

168
Zelenyi Retreats Into the Darkness

I closed my eyes and lay in a darkness of

my own. Why not die and put an end to

all the torment? I invoked Nirvana or death. I wanted

to enter a sphere where there was no anguish, no

yesterday, no tomorrow. I wanted to retreat into a part

of the elements of which I was constituted. As I

dozed off, I dreamed about things for which there are

no words or concepts. I became a creature who stretched

like rubber; I was partly an elastic spring, partly intangible

spirit, partly fear, partly language. I turned into an embryo.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Certificate by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

169
Oscar’s Excitable and Overwrought Nerves Lead to Appalling Thoughts

Oscar had wondered what it would be like to be

fired. As recently as a week ago, in the Director’s

office, he had imagined himself stoically accepting termination without a

word. The Director’s threats had actually elated him, made him

feel larger than life. But that was because he’d not

taken the threats quite seriously, he had not believed that,

when it came to the point, the Director would ever

do anything. Now that it looked as though the threats

might in reality be fulfilled, Oscar was appalled. Of that

imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

170
The Vacationing Oscar Explores Provence

The last day of July had come, Oscar’s favorite month.

Sunflowers in the garden brashly raised their deeply resplendent gold.

Oscar tramped through a region of France that he loved:

the parched outskirts of Aix, dusty roads beneath high trees,

red and orange houses, long violet walls, colorful poor folk.

In the evening he sat at the edge of town.

He photographed the tents and wagons of an itinerant carnival.

He crouched by the road, beguiled by the colorful tents.

Tomorrow would be August, the burning fever month, which intensely

mixes fear of death and timorousness into its ardent cup.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from the novella Klingsor’s Last Summer by Hermann Hesse.

171
Solitude Gives Birth to the Absurd

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and

feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense

and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They

are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy

tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a

glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than

their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning,

they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the

original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry.

It also gives birth to the opposite: to the absurd.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann.

172
1914

The last day of July in Petersburg was exceptionally hot.

Zelenyi came out of the garret in which he lodged.

He walked slowly, as though with hesitation, towards K Bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase.

The heat in the city was terrible: and the airlessness,

the bustle in the street — so familiar to all who

are unable to get out of town in summer — worked

painfully upon the young man’s already excitable and overwrought nerves.

Tomorrow would be August 1; apprehensive soldiers quartered in tents

at the edge of town awaited news of coming war.

__________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoyevsky.

173
Oscar Berg Speaks of Life in Military Metaphor

Oscar’s loneliness was caused by his boldly compelling inner plight.

Only very few associates were receptive to what he said:

perhaps he was not aware of even these sympathetic few.

He would rather be alone than together with people who

didn’t understand him, his ideas, or his extravagant inner world.

Two separate Oscars talked about loneliness: the one was his

mother’s son, a “laughed-at ‘mama’s boy” who shunned genial company.

The other was a fearless explorer and a military strategist,

who spoke of life in military metaphor – as a war

with battles, retreats, campaigns – one for whom solitude was symbolic.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation by
Leonard Shengold, The Untouched Key by Alice Miller, and Nietzsche in Turin: An
Intimate Biography by Leslie Chamberlain.

174
A Curious Story

Hannah remained stolidly tradition bound, while Krinsky sought new

paths.

The commonplace transformed by Jewish ritual was Hannah's only

preoccupation.

Krinsky sat at his desk exhausted in body and spirit.

While intently perfecting the New Dogma, he ignored corporeal

pleasures.

A half-eaten apple sat next to the English silver inkstand.

It was Shabbat and Hannah piously lit the two candles.

Hannah cleaved to the faith of her fathers, singularly devoted.

Krinsky ridiculed her obedience to tribal customs, disdaining his past.

Hannah and Krinsky would share the Friday dinner, traditions

notwithstanding.

“Karl, here, take the boiled beef, roasted potatoes and cabbage.”

175
Krinsky’s Address to the Twelfth Party Congress

I would give anything to reverse my life’s muddled course.

The past doesn’t change, but I can learn from it.

I was involved, deeply involved, in a reprehensibly debauched deception.

I have betrayed my friends and millions of my countrymen.

I refused to admit a fact, hoping it would evaporate.

I have been acting a role, maybe all my life,

thinking I have done more, produced more than I have.

I truly never built a solid foundation of my own.

Like Icarus I have flown too high on borrowed wings.

Comrades, I plagiarized the New Dogma, stealing ideas from others.

Editor’s Note: Krinsky died shortly before he was to deliver this speech to the
Twelfth Party Congress. The document was found among his papers by Mrs.
Krinsky, who delivered it to the Party Secretary. The Party Secretary thereupon
locked the document in a vault where it remained for the next seventy years.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the script of the movie Quiz Show by Paul Attanasio.

176
On Plagiarism

Originality is a relative concept in the world of literature.

Ideas are doomed to be rehashed, which wasn’t always problematic.

For Roman writers imitatio, or emulating masterpieces, was considered

virtuous.

The idea of author as solitary genius emerged far later.

Originality came to be viewed as the paramount literary desideratum.

Plagiarism was and remains a murky offense featuring a range

of activities: wrongfully appropriating existing “language, thoughts, ideas,

or expressions.”

The plagiarist who cobbles his work from previous texts – the

contemptible assassin of lettered novelty – vandalizes our esteemed

cultural patrimony.

Stealing from his intellectual forbears, he wrongfully ennobles his self-

conceit.
_________________________________
Paraphrases from The Plagiarist’s Tale by Lizzie Widdicombe.

177
The Purloined Recipe

“Dr. Shirazi says you may serve us anytime now, Hanife.”

Esther Shirazi poured two ounces of vodka into her glass.

Hanife agilely dished up the food she had painstakingly cooked:

pot roast with potatoes and carrots, bell pepper and garlic.

Hanife took the platters and bowls to the dining room.

The Shirazis were hungry; neither of them had eaten earlier.

Dr. Shirazi took a bite of food, and looked perplexed.

“Didn’t we have this same dish at the Nussbaums, Esther?”

“Hanife stole the recipe,” she answered. – “She stole the recipe?”

“That was the plan. Get the recipe. And get out.”

__________________________
Paraphrases from the novels A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines and Town in a
Lobster Stew by B.B. Haywood.

178
Hanife’s Simple Life

Hanife was a quiet, simple woman, dutiful, humble and inoffensive.

Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the

tragic course

of Jewish history — all this she gladly left to Dr.

Shirazi to discuss and debate during the dinners she prepared.

He made the noise and had the opinions, she contented

herself with fixing the meals and feeding Ben, Esther and

Ezra and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life.

Hanife’s world consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand

thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of tedious knitting instructions.

Her responsibility was cooking and planning the next day’s chores.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth.

179
The Colors of Esther Shirazi’s Moods

In her diary, Esther Shirazi classified her moods by color.

She felt “dark gray” when she made a mistake while

driving or embroidering. When Ezra talked too much, she moved

between “very black” and “black!” She was afflicted with the

worst kind of “black spot” when she thought of her

poor Aunt Sara in Tehran and the old woman’s plight.

She worried that she had two selves, one “empathetic, charming,

sensible” and the other an “ineradicable, ever-recurring, hideously

retrievable darkness.”

She felt “light gray” when she went to the hairdresser.

She imagined a life in which she was intellectually appreciated.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “The Death Treatment” by Rachel Aviv and Quarrel and
Quandary by Cynthia Ozick.

180
Dr. Shengold as Portrait Artist

The achievement of the strenuously Freudian psychoanalyst Leonard

Shengold was

not so much to break new ground as to dig

incessantly deeper into the old. By doing so he intensified

our understanding of Freud’s familiar psychological preoccupations to the

point

of faint discomfort. Among Dr. Shengold’s passions were the individual

and his interior life, the patient-psychoanalyst relationship, the psyche

isolated

on the private stage that is the analyst’s office, the

arduous process of seeking and imaging interior existence. In Dr.

Shengold’s published case studies his patients became macabre, even scary

etchings in black and white: dense renderings of viscerous reality.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Lucien Freud Stripped Bare” by Roberta Smith.

181
The Poetry of Earth

Persia revels in all the adornment and wealth of Spring.

Its sunshine is a ray of dawn, a heavenly gift.

The first innocent hour of the young year reawakens phantasms.

Persia’s Paradises are an agreeable confusion of fruit and flower.

Even the king in his royal garden desires nothing more.

No inch of earth is wasted on an empty show.

No avenues of fruit trees anywhere display their meretricious majesty.

There is but a maze of narrow paths, intricate corridors:

flowers everywhere seem to breathe forth in their fragrance the

subtle soul of creation – one might almost say its thoughts.

___________________________
Paraphrases from Nature; or The Poetry of Earth and Sea by Athénaïs Marguerite M.
Michelet.

182
The Inner Garden

In the early days of his work with Esther, Dr.

Shengold listened but said little. His silence discomforted Esther. Dr.

Shengold explained: “A European comes to Persia and sends for

a Persian tree expert to have a garden planted. On

the first day, the gardener sat on a bench all

day but undertook nothing. On the second day, it was

the same. The European asked: ‘When are you going to

get started on the garden?’ — ‘When I have taken in

the scenery.’ It is the same with analysis. One first

has to take in the scenery of every new psyche.”

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Freud’s Mind: New Details Revealed in Documents”
by Daniel Goleman.

183
Esther Imagines Herself as a Literary Character

The true depth and power of psychoanalysis is derived at

the point in your narrative where you touch the infinite,

which is silence. In moments of self-absorbed reflection in Dr.

Shengold’s office – in those moments where Esther touched the infinite –

she imagined herself as a literary character. In analysis Esther’s

joys, her passions, and her afflictions were portioned in fifty-minute

hours like the raptures of fictive beings whose lives were

divided into one-hundred word chapters. At times, in response to

Dr. Shengold’s reproving interventions, Esther envisaged herself as a

figure

in a nineteenth-century novel, a villainess whose moral deficiencies

invited scorn.

____________________________________________
Paraphrase from the article “A Cellist’s Challenge: Playing Bach, Surrounded by
Twisting Bodies” by Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim.

184
Dr. Shengold Analyzes Esther’s Dreams

We know that dreams provide the master key to mental

turmoil, though the patient will resist being brought to this

discovery. Esther and I discussed her nightmares at great length.

However, she claimed to remember little beyond the fact that

they usually involved a large, rambling house, beautiful but fallen

into ruin. She roamed the house, room to room. Upon

opening a door in the house, she found food — smoked

fish, bread, caviar, fruits and vodka — set out on a

table. At this point she would wake up screaming. Such

was Esther’s dread of what I needed her to confront.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett.

185
Sara Dehpour Lives in Poverty in Tehran

In Tehran Sara Dehpour became a dependent living on charity.

Her niece, Esther in New York sent her money and

she lived among the elderly, in a dark hole, a

single room in a seedy building. There was an ancient

dresser-top refrigerator and a one-burner stove. Over in a corner

a round oak table brooded on its heavy pedestal, but

it was only for drinking tea. Her meals she had

elsewhere, in bed or standing at the sink — sometimes toast

with a bit of sour cream and half a sardine,

or a small can of peas heated in a mug.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novella Rosa by Cynthia Ozick.

186
I, Ezra Shirazi

My father was never a Zionist. His aim in life

was not to be an impoverished field worker jabbering Hebrew.

He used to proudly call himself a “Persian by right.”

The Jews, he said, didn’t put two thousand years of

brains and blood into Persian soil in order to have

to prove himself to anyone. He had many Zionist friends.

Some left Iran and lived well. One was a book

seller in Tel Aviv, specializing in foreign texts and periodicals.

I feel vividly what my father was, how fundamentally substantial.

He was not given to light-mindedness, such as Zionist dreams.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novella Rosa by Cynthia Ozick.

187
Aunt Sara Struggles Alone in Poverty

Sara Dehpour lived alone, with few wants, surviving on handouts

and money sent by her niece Esther from America. She

inhabited a small cheap room on the top floor of

a decrepit tenement in Tehran. Perhaps because she lived above

so many stairs, no one bothered to visit her. She

was much alone, as she had been most of her

life. She had no idea where most of her family

was, nor did she think much about it. So many

of her relatives had emigrated to America after the Revolution.

In the shabby tenement she was more or less unknown.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “The Mourners” by Bernard Malamud.

188
Ben Shirazi “Remembers” Aunt Sara

I asked my mother about Aunt Sara. She was quite

surprised of my knowing of her existence and asked me

how I knew about her. I don’t know if I

had always remembered her, but in the last few years

I realized I knew about her. My mother told me

that Sara was her link to the past, my mother’s

past in Iran. I asked my mother how long ago

she had last seen Sara. My mother never talked about

Aunt Sara. It’s a mystery to me how I knew

about this aunt I had never known, or known about.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links
Between Generations by Haydée Faimberg.

189
The Great Tehran Synagogue

The synagogue was not torn down, neither was it abandoned.

The Great Synagogue slowly disintegrated. Crumb by crumb it vanished.

Stones took some of the windows. There were no pews,

only wooden folding chairs. Little by little these turned into

sticks. The prayer books began to flake: the bindings flaked,

the glue came unstuck in small brown flakes, the leaves

grew brittle and flaked into confetti. The congregation too began

to flake off — the women first, wife after wife after

wife, each one a pearl and a consolation, until there

they stood, the widowers, frail, gazing, palsy-struck, lonely golden agers.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her
Afterlife” by Cynthia Ozick.

190
Ben’s Freshman Year at NYU

During his freshman year at NYU, Ben let his hair

grow to his shoulders, and he cultivated a mustache and

beard that feebly grew out in patches like the mange.

He coolly acquired some “bad” friends for a brief time.

He lost his virginity to a girl named Wendy Walberg

in the basement rec room of her parents’ house (sound

track courtesy of Al Stewart) while partygoers reveled gleefully upstairs.

Wendy told him in this intimate setting that she knew

Ben had written the anonymous poems that she had received,

and in this setting she said Yes I will Yes.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Lecturer’s Tale by James Hynes.

191
The Theater of Mind

In my loneliness I become a spectator of life’s drama.

My discontented mind is a scene of thoughts and sensations

from which I stand remote as though at a theater.

My imagination leads a procession of living creatures before me.

Fantastic demons of my interior self enliven my uncompanionable day.

I watch and listen to these guests of my imagination.

I am affected by my inner world’s virtual theatrical exhibition.

All things, good and bad, go by like a torrent.

When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life

is over, the spectator goes his way; the curtain falls.

________________________
Paraphrases from Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

192
Ahmed, the Jihadist, Focuses on his Inner World

Ahmed, the jihadist, was brought into a small, well-lit room.

The brick walls were painted white and the floor was

gray concrete. It was easy to clean and disguised any

bodily fluids that might have been missed. The room had

no ceiling, just a metal grille. Ahmed noticed that the

words “Fuck Islam” had been tattooed across the knuckles of

the guard’s hands. It was here that Ahmed felt strongest.

As long as he could remember, he had been able

to remove himself from his immediate environment, shutting off the

bleak outside world by focusing on a self-created inner one.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Dirty Little Secret by Jon Stock.

193
Avram Dehpour, Primed to Be a Terrorism Consultant

I’ve always believed I could see things other people couldn’t.

Elements falling into place. A design. Meaning in trivial events.

A shape in the chaos. I find these moments precious

and reassuring because they take place outside me, outside the

silent grid, because they suggest an outer space that works

somewhat the way my mind does but without the relentlessness,

the predeterminative quality. I revel in observing life’s accidental

patterns.

As a native Iranian who had been reared to the

anxieties of my family’s political exile, I was primed to

find meaningful connections where other people would not be looking.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novels The Names by Don DeLillo and The Cairo Affair by Olen
Steinhauer.

194
Ben Shirazi Remembers his Uncle Binyamin

I never really knew Uncle Binyamin, actually my great uncle.

Nevertheless he was unquestionably an integral part of my childhood.

Everyone presumed he was dead for a good many years.

I was given his name – Benjamin, Binyamin for religious purposes.

I always heard remarkable stories about his mythical athletic prowess.

His venerated picture was prominently on display in our house.

He was champion shot-putter in the Maccabi HaTzai’r sports club.

He took part in the Second Maccabi Games in Berlin.

He wanted to learn Hebrew and move someday to Jerusalem.

It was always assumed that I would become an athlete.

___________________
Paraphrases from Kaplan’s Quest by Richard Steinitz.

195
Ben and Fiona Get it On

Ben grabs Fiona's breast and says, "I'm totally feeling it."

His moves haven't changed very much over time; he is

as greedy and desperate as he was at his first

sexual encounter, when he was a freshman at NYU, trying to

get the deed done with his marketing professor's doughy, slow-witted

daughter before anyone attending the party upstairs became curious as

to what the two of them were doing in the

paneled basement, with its jettisoned barbells and medicine balls. The

urgency he is feeling now is not far removed from

the urgency he felt then. Ben is feeling the peak

of sexual arousal. The incontestable crazed peak of the peak.

_______________________
Paraphrases from the novel Brood by Chase Novak.

196
Oscar Berg’s Melancholy

An immense melancholy descended upon Oscar Berg, and, as if

to escape from his solitude, he absorbed himself in grief.

The vague consciousness of a misdirected life given up to

impulses whose memory left a bitter taste in his mouth

was the first moral sentiment of his manhood. But at

the same time he felt no remorse. What should he

regret? He had recognized no other virtue than intelligence, and

had erected passions into duties. Both his intelligence and his

passion were swallowed up easily in this great unbroken solitude

of living without faith. And all mortal exertion seemed senseless.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Nostromo by Joseph Conrad.

197
Beethoven Performs in a Quartet

Beethoven seated himself among the musicians. The string quartet

commenced.

The apparition of those four different instruments still sits above me

as I write these words. Their wooden limbs and ebony

slopes, their horsehaired manes and rosined strings somehow, put

together

with calm and order and calculation, made music. Nowhere else

can four disparate sounds live together in such delicate balance.

On account of his deafness there was scarcely anything left

of Beethoven’s virtuosity which had formerly been so greatly admired.

Invisible streams of sadness drip from my dry eyes when

I think about it and when I think about him.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Execution of Noa P. Singleton by Elizabeth L. Silver
and the biography Beethoven: Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers by Ates Orga.

198
Point Counter Point

Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions.

More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key

to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is

stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed,

until,

though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different.

Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are

easy enough. You simply need a sufficiency of characters and

parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Yurovsky murders the Tsar, Oscar Berg

dupes his employer. You alternate the themes, reduplicate situations;

several

people fall in love, die, or pray in different ways.

______________________________________________________

Paraphrases from the novel Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley.

199
Zelenyi Enlists in the Great War

I, Zelenyi, enlisted at the outbreak of the Great War.

I genuinely believed in the war’s three great ignoble fallacies:

that the war would be brief, patriotic and personally advantageous.

I found myself with nothing better to do than study.

A medic in my unit was an objector who had

found his conscience in the works of Krinsky and Gruzhin.

The men in the unit reckoned him a weak-chinned toff.

But he stood up to the sergeant and gained respect.

His learning became commendable and from his mind I learned

some of the mysteries of philosophy, science and romantic poetry.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

200
Ezra and Esther Eat Dessert

Ezra had gone out in the morning to make purchases.

He heard from the shopkeeper the story of an imprisoned

Iranian-American journalist which appeared in the NY Times that day.

Rezaian had been arrested under dubious circumstances and jailed in

Tehran — held in a bare prison cell, sleeping on concrete.

Ezra related the story at table to Esther’s eager interest.

Esther always liked, over the dessert after dinner, to talk,

if only to Ezra, whose absorbing stories amply enlightened her.

Sipping her bourbon and listening to the story, Esther observed

that they ought to make a saint of poor Rezaian.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the
newspaper article “Family of US reporter jailed in Iran tells of ‘inconceivable’ five-
month ordeal” (The Guardian, December 22, 2014).

201
Better Living Through Chemistry

Energy, mass, speed of light. Protons, neutrons, electrons. How small

is the atom? I will tell you. If people were

the size of atoms, the population of the earth would

fit on the head of a pin. Never mind the

vast amounts of energy stored in matter. Matter. Something that

has mass — a solid, a liquid, a gas. Never mind

what happens when we split the atom and release energy.

Energy. The capacity of a physical system to do work.

The atom. The unit of matter regarded as the source

of nuclear energy. The power of the atom is unfathomable.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Underworld by Don DeLillo.

202
Oscar Fears Nuclear Death

When I was eight years old I felt that nuclear

death was close at hand. I felt its irradiant imminence

every time we crawled under our school desks when the

air-raid siren blew, my eyelids pressed against my left forearm,

my other forearm shielding the back of my head my

jutting rump nevertheless fully exposed to the blast wave–and

me wondering all the while whether I would see the

fatal flash of light through the shield of my eyelids

plus arm & if I would actually feel my hair

burning which frightened me slightly more than death by vaporization.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles.

203
The Nuclear Fuck

Like white heat the tightening yes releasing then immediately grabbing

again yes an explosion that rocks the entire body making

my back arch and Ben’s mouth open to gasp for

air as everything from the bottom of my box all

the way through the butterflies in my stomach ripples with

the force of pleasure yes the rhythmic waves pouring through

in bursts of energy like impacts yes I put my

arms around him yes and draw him down to me

so he can feel my perfumed breasts yes and his

heart is going like mad and yes I say Yes.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases form the novel Ulysses by James Joyce and the short story
“Overwhelmed” by Julian D’Angelos.

204
The Orgiastic Frenzy of Tyranny

The party seized greedily for themselves the property of those

who resisted them, those who argued against their actions, and

those whose wealth they simply coveted, arresting people as criminals

without telling them why, and giving the familiar order to

apprehend and detain without so much as saying what the

charge was against them, for they were enterprising, vigorous and

undemocratic and they saw no need to draft a constitution

enabling them to do what they could accomplish without one,

leaping right into their orgiastic frenzy of persecution, plunder,

imprisonment

and liquidation in the name of the Krinskyite New Dogma.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Picture This by Joseph Heller.

205
An Interview with Avram Dehpour

He is gracious. “Some tea? . . . and something maybe to eat?”

I am at the lakeside home of pianist Avram Dehpour.

“Ever tried Iranian jam? It’s not cooked, it’s just pasteurized.”

“My background is mixed in every way. My family in

Tehran was old-fashioned royalist, but on my maternal grandmother’s

side

they were fiercely intellectual Jews, and really passionate, dyed-in-the-wool

communists.”

When he talks about his family, Avram Dehpour is unengaged.

But talk about piano playing seems to stir him deeply.

When he performs, the piano comes alive. “Sometimes when I’m

practicing it feels like the piano might actually devour me!”

___________________________
Paraphrases from Piotr Anderszewski Interview by Ivan Hewett.

206
The Itinerant Life of the Concert Pianist

According to a calculation Avram Dehpour had once made in

his head, he had spent approximately ninety-five percent of all

the hours of his professional life, the hours that made

up twenty-three years in all, in airports, on board aircraft,

in trains and stations, in taxis, in waiting rooms, in

hotel rooms, in hotel lobbies, in recital halls, on street

corners, in restaurants, in cafés, in concert halls. Apart from

Farsi, he could speak French and English. When pressed, he

could also get by in German. He almost always wore

a conventional gray suit. He traveled with a light suitcase.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel To Know a Woman by Amos Oz.

207
On the Road with Avram Dehpour

I sat drinking black tea in the foyer of the

hotel. (This was in Munich.) It was one-fifty. I had

forty minutes. (My concert tour was winding down and this

was not a busy day.) I was bearing up after

three weeks on the road in Europe, though chronically underslept.

I feel unaccountably anxious. Home was four thousand miles away,

and six hours behind; pretty soon, it would be quite

reasonable, surely, to return yet again to my room and

see if there were any fresh bulletins from that quarter.

For now, I looked mistrustfully at my phone’s unopened messages.

________________________________________
From the story “Oktober” by Martin Amis.

208
Yurovsky the Disciplinarian

Yurovsky was the leader of a squad of fanatics and

disciplinarians. The discipline that they would enforce would make good

troops. Yurovsky was murderous in discipline. He was a true

fanatic and he had the complete Russian lack of respect

for life. In a few armies since the Tartar’s first

invasion of the West were men executed summarily for as

little reason as they were under his command. But he

knew how to forge a division into a fighting unit.

It is one thing to hold positions. But it is

something very different to maneuver an army in the field.

What was the revolutionary government’s stand on Yurovsky’s brutal

methods?

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

209
Frosted Windowpanes

For the first time since he had come to America,

Ezra Shirazi’s windows froze over – crystalline frost covered the

windowpanes.

How did atoms and molecules arrange themselves this way?

What was the connection between the molecules in New York

and the molecules in Iran, where his fate was settled?

His thoughts kept returning to the past back in Tehran,

where he experienced his first love and dreamed wanderlust dreams.

Later came the trip to America – roving around New York.

Memory itself demonstrates there is no oblivion, no dissolution.

He had enough memories to last him a hundred years.

________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Letter Writer” by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

210
The Supporting Pillar

Ezra Shirazi’s prowess at chemistry shocked his professors at University.

At age twenty-two he was awarded the coveted Shajadpour Prize.

Outstanding achievements enabled Ezra to maintain the illusion of

eminence.

Accomplishments fulfilled the dreams of his parents, who expected

greatness.

Displays of brilliance warded off threatening depression that always

loomed.

Esther, a depressive herself, took over and enacted Ezra’s depression.

The depression was thus kept outside and the grandiose Ezra

looked over the melancholy Esther, protecting her like a child.

With Esther, Ezra felt strong and indispensable and gained a

supporting pillar for the building of his own personality.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice
Miller.

211
Married Life

I knew when I married Ezra what a dentist’s life

was. I knew he was ambitious and proud. I agreed

when he wanted to do it himself, without leaning on

my money. How could I blame him? I respected him

for that. And God knows I wasn’t forced to marry

him. I fell into his arms, and I swear I

was a loyal wife, even after it got so tiresome

and he organized the clinic and was always off at

meetings or work. I did my duty. I kept his

house and kept myself available and tried to be cheerful.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner.

212
Ezra Shirazi the Chemist Dreams of New York

I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate

the past and the present, the grid of the periodic

table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. The location of

tungsten, at the intersection of Group VI and Period 6,

becomes synonymous here with the intersection of Sixth Avenue and

Sixth Street. (There is no such intersection in New York,

of course, but it exists, conspicuously, in the New York

of my dreams.) I dream of eating hamburgers made of

scandium. Then I share my lunch with the heavy transition

metals. Sometimes I dream of the indecipherable language of tin.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.

213
Manhattanites

Mad cabbies death-gripping the steering wheel with cold stranglers’ eyes.

Businessmen busily halving the morning newspaper like a martial

origami.

Traffic cops blowing whistles amid a second city, of voices

in the air, raggedy and berserk, singsongy and desperate, voices

calling every ignoring stranger friend, big man, boss, doll, sweetheart –

the calls of the homeless cluttered among the nameless others’,

each presenting itself on every block, as in a museum,

a museum of voices – high-pitched, baritone, squeaking, and abrasively

loud.

The trucks and cars a city-wide brass band of horns.

Solitary old men on park benches glaring with unsmiling mouths.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Poser by Jacob Rubin.

214
The Severe Ezra

They sat and ate dinner across from each other. Esther

noticed how much older Ezra seemed. She was aware of

how his clothes looked loose on him now, although he

still appeared a severe man, precise as a utility in

the way he moved and the way he talked sparingly

at the table. He remained mostly laconic and silent about

the landscape of his thoughts. Esther knew what he was

thinking about. She knew he was thinking about Ben. There

was no longer a closeness between him and Ben; whatever

intimacy had once existed had always been engineered by Esther.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje.

215
How Oscar Lost His Eyesight

I was standing on the railroad platform minding my business.

I had purchased a ticket to go to Far Rockaway.

Two gentlemen ran toward a train, one carrying a package.

The latter seemed unsteady, about to fall, when a guard

reached to help him board the car, dislodging the package.

The small wrapped parcel — containing fireworks! — fell upon the rails.

Nothing in its appearance gave notice of its ignitable contents.

The fireworks when they fell exploded like an anarchist’s grenade!

The shock of the explosion threw down some far-flung scales.

The scales struck me in the eye, leaving me blind.

____________________
Paraphrases from Palsgraff v. Long Island Railroad (Opinion of the Court by Benjamin
Cardozo).

216
The Deposed Shah of Iran in Exile

All my home is nothing but sadness. Life is a

prison of desolation and aborted dreams, it is nothing but

a slow progress to my place beneath the soil, it

is a plot by God to disenchant us with the

flesh, it is nothing but a brief flame in a

bowl of oil between one darkness and another one that

ends it. I sit here and remember former times. I

remember music in the night, and I know that all

my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like

teeth. I shall be hungry and thirsty and longing forever.

______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

217
The Unmourned Shah

The reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi was dreadful and unlikely.

He was a secularist in a land of religious Muslims.

No Shah will ever follow, so unredeemable was his rule.

He was spiteful, vicious and weak. He was Iran’s Satan.

The worst Shah of Iran is remembered for a capitulation:

he fled the country in disgrace, a symbol of decadence.

Hell itself is made fouler by Reza Pahlavi’s presence.

Few men have been less mourned, few deaths more cherished.

The Islamic Republic abolished the evil that unjustly oppressed Iran.

Praise to Ruhollah Moosavi Khomeini. May he rest in peace.

____________________________
Paraphrases from “The Rule of History: Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the
Hold of Time” by Jill Lepore.

218
Oscar’s Malaise

I am devoid of religious, social, ideological or biological purpose.

I have never experienced more than a moment of fulfillment.

I find transient comfort in the reiteration of my past.

Who am I that I demand that my life be

without difficulties and pains? Is anybody’s? I do not claim

that my toothache is worse than any other man’s toothache

just because it is mine or because it happens to

be affecting a different tooth. Why, then, should I think

my troubles worse than his merely because they are mine

or happen to be hurting me in a different place?

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from “Krapp’s Last Tape: A New Reading” by Lois Gordon and
Libraries: A Monthly Review of Library Matters and Methods (1922).

219
The Assassination Attempt

A particular episode from the Czar’s life obsessed Oscar Berg.

He spent long periods ruminating on this one frightful incident.

Czar Nicolas rode into Minsk to inspect the Imperial Guard.

With him was his wife Czarina Alexandra, Empress of Russia.

Nicholas, plumed helmet in hand, eagerly anticipated the military review.

Suddenly there was a loud noise, a shock wave and

a good deal of smoke and shouting; the crowd bolted.

Nicholas and Alexandra found themselves covered in grainy chalk dust.

An anarchist had thrown a bomb, the Mayor was aghast.

The day was ruined. The ceremonies ended. Nicholas was furious.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.

220
Oscar Is Beset by Nightmares

Oscar Berg paid sixty-five dollars an hour for a “sleep

consciousness therapist” to teach him how to be aware while

dreaming. The idea was to learn to alter the outcome

of his nightmares. So, for example, if he dreamed of

an explosion and he was aware that he was dreaming,

he could confront that negative image, engage it in constructive

dialogue, and turn it into something helpful and pleasant. He

could say, “Hey, you nasty old explosion, wouldn’t you be

happier and more fulfilled as a bouquet of flowers?” Then

it would turn into an image of a resplendent garden.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Intelligence by Susan Hasler.

221
And the Night Shall Be Filled with Music

A shell lands in the trench. Zelenyi notes how the

furious blast was like a blow from the paw of

a raging beast of prey. The inexperienced recruits are green

and vomiting. Zelenyi feels the breeze in his face, warm

and soft as never before. Thoughts of a night in

Petersburg come into his head. A dinner in the private

room of a restaurant with Anna O—. The mawkish waltz

tunes drifting in from an adjoining anteroom. Music in the

night. That night when Anna O— said yes. Zelenyi runs.

Soldiers pass by him, he hears their voices without understanding.

______________________________________________

Paraphrases from the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque,
a quote from the poem “The Day Is Done” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and
an allusion to Der Rosenkavalier by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss.

222
Run, Brothers, Run Your Race!

A sublime noise penetrated the Kärntnertortheater that evening in

Vienna.

Heroism, youth, and the magnificence of life were ardently awakened.

Now the Adagio had concluded and the Finale had begun–

“Gladly, just as God’s suns hurtle through the glorious universe,

so you, brothers, should run your race, run your race,

joyfully, like a radiant, conquering hero, overthrowing your mortal

handicaps!”

Cymbals and drums decorated the choral tune Beethoven had contrived.

I smiled at the stone deaf conductor on the podium:

his exaggerated gestures floundered, impervious to the music’s driving

pulse.

High-spirited applause, and an exuberant round of “wunderschöning”

and “prachtvolleying”.

__________________________________________

Paraphrases from the novel Howard’s End by E.M. Forster and the poem “Ode to
Joy” by Friedrich Schiller.

223
The Day I Met Beethoven

What I was not prepared for was the sight of

the overbearing, somewhat haughty, bespectacled, gray-haired, middle

aged man, who

walked imperiously through the salon door, ignoring the liveried servant

who held it open for him. There was something vaguely

familiar about the man, an aura, perhaps that betrayed the

master’s genius; there was even an abstract sound of distant

thunder — heard only in my overwrought mind, but it reverberated.

I was ten years old when my father took me

to meet Beethoven. I was at once told to play

something. “The boy has talent,” Beethoven said. I was awestruck.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Road to Omaha by Robert Ludlum and the biography
Beethoven by Barry Cooper.

224
Marked by a Noble Destiny

I have always looked upon myself as something of a

superman. I was of respectable but humble birth, and yet,

certain mornings, let me confess it humbly, I felt like

a king’s son, or a burning bush. It was not

a matter, mind you, of the certainty I had of

being more intelligent than everyone else. Besides, such certainty is

of no consequence because so many imbeciles share it. No,

as a result of being showered with blessings, I felt,

I hesitate to admit, marked out. Personally marked out, among

all, for that long and uninterrupted success, for noble achievements.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Fall by Albert Camus.

225
Fiona Performs in a Room without a View

Fiona unbuttoned her blouse, with a kind of fetching shyness,

and pulled off her shorts, revealing a G-string, and then,

without hesitancy and in milk-skinned nakedness, did a turn on

her toes, kicked one leg high, made another turn, her

breasts flopping lushly, the flesh on her buttocks and thighs

quivering like pudding. She spun and kicked before the crowd

until her body was glistening with sweat. After one of

her slow pirouettes, she looked into the darkness with a

willed lasciviousness that made some of the women cringe, embarrassed

for her. Howls and catcalls greeted Fiona’s balletically nimble

performance.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from Paradise from Exiles: Three Short Novels by Philip Caputo.

226
Hanife Receives a Letter from her Uncle Fazil in Istanbul

My dearest Hanife, I wait for news from America with

eagerness. Whenever one of your letters arrives, people will congregate

in my carpet shop. I read your letters to everyone.

The dull faces lighten up and one wish is expressed:

“Oh, that we could go to America!” Yesterday I sold

an expensive kilim. It was a good day. – You know,

I’ve thought about this. People like music because it’s just

sounds put together in a way that has the power

to move us. The same is true with carpets. There’s

a harmony, when it really works, that is really beautiful!

Uncle Fazil

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from Liberty Writings by Hermann Kiefer and the article “The Rug
Missionary” by Michael Specter.

227
Ben’s Estrangement from his Father

The process of bonding and rebonding in chemistry intrigued me.

As my father and I grew apart my parents cohered.

The magnetic force that drew him to my mother (and

she to him) had its opposite corollary, a counter force

that required that we keep our distance from each other.

Our great comradeship came to an end, simply, without clamor.

It ended as night falls, and in the gathering darkness,

we no longer saw each other clearly, or even tried to.

He looked to the stock market to occupy his time.

He gathered pieces of paper, shares in blue chip companies.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel An Unfinished Season by Ward Just.

228
The State Confers an Identity

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man indifferent

to the ideology of the state must be in want

of a prison sentence. For the state does not tolerate

the indifferent man. It requires that each man proclaim with

fervor his allegiance to the New Dogma. However little known

the identity or views of such a man may be

on his first entering prison, the truth of his identity

is so well fixed in the minds of the administration,

that his individuality is considered the rightful property of his

jailors. He will become the accused, the counter-revolutionary, the

reprobate.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

229
Zelenyi and the Problem of Identity

Zelenyi was determined to be true to himself. But who

was he? The problem of identity was precisely one of

Zelenyi’s quanderies. It was so easy for him to be

almost anybody, theoretically and with his intelligence. He had such

a power of assimilation that he was often in danger

of being unable to distinguish the assimilator from the assimilated,

of not knowing among the multiplicity of roles who was

the actor. The amoeba, when it finds a prey, flows

round it, incorporates it, and oozes on. There was something

amoeboid about Zelenyi’s mind. He was like a protoplasmic sea.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley.

230
The Vocabulary of Cruelty

Zelenyi internalized his experience during his confinement. He evolved.

He

retained an autonomy of behavior, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts

but

at the same time he imagined the minds of his

jailors with exquisite insight. Slowly he developed the capacity to

penetrate the callousness of the prison system. It was his

means of survival. He came to grasp how his captors’

tyranny and indifference were reactions to the wider inhumanity

cultivated

by the reign of the New Dogma. It was like

learning a foreign language. He assimilated the vocabulary of cruelty —

while the grounding of his innate morality preserved his sanity.

231
The Oppression of Zelenyi’s Confinement

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my

comrades were the chains on all of them, the chains

on all of the prisoners were the chains on me.

My confinement at the hospital, my struggle with the everyday

life of tyranny, changed me. I had no epiphany, no

singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation

of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand

unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a

desire to fight the system that imprisoned me and the others.

The totality of injustice was worse than a hammer blow.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela and I Will
Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945 by Victor Klemperer.

232
Zelenyi’s Days at the Central State Hospital

For the whole of each day, between the early-morning head-count

and the evening meal, we moved about within a large

courtyard that was attached to our dormitory room. Some men

played cards or other games. Some talked with friends, or

tried to sleep on the stone paths. Not a few

men, shuffling uncertainly on thin, tottering legs, talked a twitching

madness to themselves, and stumbled into the walls until we

turned them gently and set them on a new course.

The evening meal consisted of watery soup, made of the

peelings of vegetables, ladled out onto our flat aluminum plates.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

233
Zelenyi’s Confinement at the Central State Hospital

I step past the stone-faced guard. The dank library beckons.

I breathe in the musty air. Wearisome flatness seizes me.

Lavrov sits at his desk as I enter. He nods.

He is scribbling in his conspiracy journal. He keeps tabs.

Sergei Lavrov, the librarian, is surely a devoted party functionary.

He watches the impassive inmates as they browse tedious books.

Materials published before the Revolution are nowhere to be found.

Books placed on the List may only reach authorized hands.

I have an urge to write. My mind is full.

Neerovsky grievously confiscated my pen and notepad. I am silenced.

234
Zelenyi Plays Cards at the Central State Hospital

Zelenyi was glad to get out of his dark, cold

cell. But he could not acquaint his mind with the

fact of prisoners actually playing poker, and for money, too.

Blankets were spread over a table. Old cards cut into

various designs served as chips. It was not real —

prisoners walking about and mingling with each other. All the

action was somewhere behind the eyes, in naïve expectation and

calculated deceit. Each man tried to entrap the others and

fix limits to his own false dreams. Poker was funneled

essence, the clear and intimate extract of their bootless predicament.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novels Prison Will Make You Cry by Chester B. Himes and
Falling Man by Don DeLillo.

235
Zelenyi Is Released

If only he could put the clock back and be

once more the man who, at the outset of his

imprisonment, had only one thought and one desire: to escape

and return to his former life! But that, he knew,

was out of the question; he had changed too greatly.

Prison had forced on him a detachment which, try as

he might, he couldn’t think away, and which like a

formless fear haunted his mind. Almost he thought that prison

had ended too abruptly, he hadn’t had time to pull

himself together. Freedom was bearing down on him full speed.

______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Plague by Albert Camus.

236
Oscar Berg Walks in Brooklyn after Dinner

I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after

dinner and going out into the twilight for a walk.

The neighborhood goes dark as I walk, and a second

neighborhood unrolls atop the daytime one. We have few street

lights, and those I pass under make my shadow frolic;

it lags behind me, gallops to my feet, gambols on

ahead. The only other illumination is from the windows in

the houses I pass and the moon that orders me

to look up, look up! Feral cats dart underfoot, bird-of-paradise

flowers poke out of the shadows, the air is balmy.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story Ghosts and Empties by Lauren Groff.

237
Fiona’s Feelings about Religion

Religion wasn’t a part of my upbringing, although, since it

was a kind of social requirement, as a little girl

I went semi-regularly to church with my mother. But my

father thought faith was a childish comfort for the weak,

and that is what I came to feel, too, probably

mostly in order to be more grown up, like him.

When I fell in love with Ben, then, I wasn’t

sure what my feelings would be about my religious impulses.

Ben was only a part-time, and very casual, Jew in

those days. I would not be a traditional Jewish wife.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel While I Was Gone by Sue Miller.

238
Ben Shirazi’s Jewishness

Judaism never troubled Ben Shirazi the way it troubled some,

nor was it the subject of an abiding, metaphysical discomfort

with himself and the world. It did not even harbor

the mystical, unspoken promise of redemptive brotherhood. And perhaps

this

was why he wasn’t ill at ease with being Jewish

and didn’t have to constantly have to pick at it,

the way children pick at scabs they wish would go

away. He was okay with being Jewish. He was okay

with himself, the way he was okay with his body,

with his looks, with his choice of books, films, friends.

__________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman.

239
Ezra Shirazi Looks Back

I was never a religious Jew. I didn’t believe in

tying boxes to my arms and praying to the Almighty

every morning. I doubted not only God but also liberalism.

I’m an old man now, but I still live with

my dear Esther. When I was young I was what

they call a scholar. I was successful in my profession.

I even taught orthodontics in a university. I made a

lot of money; I had an office on Park Avenue

and a comfortable home on the Upper East Side of

Manhattan. My son, Ben, the accountant, does well for himself.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “A Telephone Call on Yom Kippur” by Isaac Bashevis
Singer.

240
The Old Jews of Tehran

The old Jews of Tehran lived dissociated from mechanical time.

Yet for that reason they never lost it. It is

as though out of their subconscious they produced without volition

the few crystallizations of stated instances by which their dead

lives in the actual world had once been firmly governed.

Without recourse to clock they could know immediately upon the

thought just where, in their old lives, they would be

and what doing between the two fixed moments which marked

the beginning and the end of morning prayer and afternoon

prayer; just when they would have been entering the Synagogue.

______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Light in August by William Faulkner.

241
Mourning in Lavasan

Grandmother was dead two years now — the moth caught in

a gale and blown against a wall and clinging there

beating feebly, not with any particular stubborn clinging to life,

not in particular pain since it was too light to have

struck hard, nor even with very much remembrance of the

bright vacuum before the gale, but just in bewildered and

uncomprehending amazement — how grandfather mourned her passing

and sat mute

and still on the veranda in the house at Lavasan,

counting the days one, two, three, five, steadily and ceaselessly,

to that blind chancy darkness which we call the future.

______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner.

242
Music in a Sunlit Garden

I lie down in darkness; blind forgetting is my sheath.

Perception and memory are suspended as I retreat to idyllic

reiterations of a mythicized past: music in a sunlit garden.

Isolation renders me invulnerable, transparently contented and bereft of

violence.

But my abject past possesses and haunts me, returning intrusively.

I am faced with the unbearable ordeal of having to

withstand, to absorb, to take in without end or limit.

Earthly hours are unerasable and untranscendable: testaments of

enduring grief.

I have come to know and see the world cynically.

My eyes but close to look within, to chimeric joys.

______________________________________

Paraphrases from “Trauma, Mourning and Self-(Re)Fashioning in J.D. Salinger’s The

Catcher in the Rye: Reinventing Youth in Cold War America” by Denis Jonnes and a
quote from the dramatic poem Manfred by George Gordon, Lord Byron.

243
Grandfather is Disconsolate at Grandmother’s Death

One day grandfather drew the curtains on the daylight and

did not ever draw them back again. His meals were

brought to the drawing-room when he hinted that he would

like that, and when he said that the stairs were

getting a bit much his bed was brought to the

drawing-room. Grandfather was disconsolate about the turn of events.

Allowances

had to be made for ageing’s weariness, for a widower’s

continuing sorrow, that being reclusive was really hardly strange. The

drawing-room was dark even at the height of summer; only

at night, with all the lights on, was it suffused.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “At Olivehill” from the story collection Cheating at
Canasta by William Trevor.

244
Garden Had Become Desert

Winds blew in from the desert and the solitude increased.

The silent remnants of an ancient garden slept beneath the

sun, hiding the sweet well that through ten thousand years

had brought life to so many. Its waters trickled away

through subterranean channels until they entered the malignant swamp

which

extended itself year after year over the no longer fertile

ground. How great the desolation was, how crushed and puny

the grandeur that had existed here. Even the birds came

no more, for the grasses that had grown centuries before

now perished in the desiccated air; garden had become desert.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Source by James Michener.

245
Writer’s Block

I try to get one or two lines down quickly.

Everything I need is within reach — my notes, my dictionary

and thesaurus, and, in fact, except for the steady accompaniment

of good light, what else am I likely to require

as I move from space to space, other than this

tough pad of paper and the stub of my pen?

But there will come a moment when my faith in

my miniature art collapses. I can count on that; everything

will be going well, the words adding themselves up, gorging

on themselves; then I will be stopped in my tracks.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Segue” by Carol Shields.

246
The Fifth Avenue Bus

The Fifth Avenue bus Hanife usually took came slipping up

to the corner and Hanife, pleased not to worry about

a taxi, started for the stop. She had reached out

her hand to take the rail inside the bus door

when she was roughly elbowed aside and the ugly customer

in the light hat shoved on ahead of her. Hanife

muttered and started to follow, but the bus door closed

on the packed crowd inside and the last thing Hanife

saw as the bus went off down the street was

the man in the light hat slyly grinning at her.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Paranoia” by Shirley Jackson.

247
When You Write Well and Truly

That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling

comes when you write well and truly of something and

know impersonally you have written in that way and those

who are paid to read it and report on it

do not like the subject so they say it is

all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or

when you do something which people do not consider a

serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is

as important and has always been as important as all

the things that are in fashion and ever will be.

______________________________________________
Paraphrase from Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway.

248
Oscar Writes a Sentence

Oscar stared past the keys. Used to be that time

rushed down on him when he started to write, time

fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it

wasn’t lifting. But then he wasn’t finished. There is the

epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached

from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there

is the haunted time of the writer, intimate, pressing, stale

and sad. He struck enough keys to make a sentence.

He’d inverted two letters. He elevated the page and whited

out the mistake, then waited for the liquid to dry.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Mao II by Don DeLillo.

249
Zelenyi’s Enduring Nightmares

I woke, as it seemed, from a nightmare of being

stretched on the rack, only to sink into another dream

in which I was lying in a strange bed, afraid

to open my eyes for fear of what I might

see. The smell and texture of the blanket against my

cheek felt wrong, and I was clad, so it seemed,

in prison garb that was certainly not my own. I

knew that I must still be dreaming, for I had

gone to sleep as usual in my bedroom at home.

My body ached as if I had been stricken with fever.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Asylum by John Harwood.

250
Like Water from a Burst Pipe

At the beginning of the war, the workers were still

only speaking of the need to “do something.” V.I. Lyuzhin,

who had at first been very skeptical, had now come

to believe in the possibility of a revolutionary movement. He

gave most careful thought to the matter, making notes and

planning it all out on paper, while the others did

nothing at all. Little by little he became obsessed with

his thoughts, which made his brain throb night after night.

He did not know how to control the ideas that

streamed from his pen like water from a burst pipe.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola and the article “The Lives
They Lived: Kurt Eissler, b. 1908; Keeper of Freud’s Secrets” by Janet Malcolm.

251
The Dictator

When V.I. Lyuzhin assumed the post of Party Secretary his

detractors sorely miscalculated his political mastery and his will to

power. The pundits had examined the wrong musician, studied a

different score, for when Lyuzhin sat down to play he

stormed over the autocratic keyboard, producing music no one had

ever heard before. He was dazzling. And the secret of

his political genius was that he knew exactly what the

public needed to hear. It amounted to a personal declaration

by Lyuzhin that the masters of capital had had their

day. Lyuzhin channeled public furor into a mandate for dictatorship.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt” by Saul Bellow.

252
The Revolutionary Movement

As a distant spectacle or, more often, as a forceful

intrusion into their lives, the Revolution demanded contemporaries’

attention, affected

their careers, reshaped their sense of the possible. The awareness

of the potentiality of the masses, like the economists’ search

for an alternative mode of production, was a response to

the political passions and commitments that swept across Europe in

the tumult engendered by world war. Burden or opportunity, disaster

or triumph, politics in the years after the Revolution was

everybody’s destiny. The times influenced Lyuzhin, and, in turn, he

molded the times to the dynamism of his inner vision.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the
Late Works by Stephen Rumph.

253
V.I. Lyuzhin Implements the New Dogma

Lyuzhin, as intellectual, lived in a world of words, ideas

and texts. Books helped insulate him from the inhumane realities

accompanying his murderous pursuit of utopia. Years of civil war

following the Revolution created a hunger for a new beginning

and the restoration of order. In his personal library — among

his vast collection of books — Lyuzhin surrounded himself, in those

early years, with a courageous and unbowed band of true

thinkers, who, with heroic asceticism and self-discipline, set about

establishing

a constitution. For Lyuzhin and his followers violence was a

means to an end: the implementation of the New Dogma.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
and the article “Joseph Stalin: Bloody Tyrant and Bookworm” by Geoffrey Roberts.

254
V.I. Lyuzhin Addresses a Group of Factory Workers

We are greeted by a muffled roar from which fragments

of phrases come towards us out of a bluish haze.

At first I can see nothing but two broad sunbeams,

riddled with atoms, falling from the windows in two great

bars of light, stretching from corner to corner of

the hall; an atmosphere dense with dust and waves of

tobacco smoke. Gradually the vague sounds we heard on entering

clarify into the measured utterance of V.I. Lyuzhin who stands

in the shade, and who is constantly being interrupted by

the yes, yeses or the no, noes of the crowd.

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Conquerors by André Malraux.

255
V.I. Lyuzhin Speaks on the Darwinian Imperative

Lyuzhin was a quiet-mannered man, whom you would have taken

for anything in the world but a Krinskyite agitator. Lyuzhin

relied on his sense of mission to persuade his audience.

His speech was simple and informal — the logical precision of

his ideas was matched by his even-tempered inflection. Life was

a struggle for existence, and the strong overcame the weak,

and in turn were overcome by the strongest. The workers

were simply the citizens of industry, and the Krinskyite movement

was the expression of their will to survive. The grim

inevitability of Revolution depended upon one fact: unite or perish.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

256
How the Revolution Altered the Rhythm of Time

No string of quotations, no statistics, can recapture for us

what must have been the inner excitement, the passionate adventure

of spirit and emotion unleashed by the New Order’s dawn.

Far more than political revolution and essential reform is involved.

The Revolution literally quickened the pace of our felt time.

We lack histories of the internal time-sense, of the changing

beat in men's experience of the rhythms of perception.

Those who lived through those days who could recall the

tenor of life under the Old Order, felt that time

itself and the whole enterprise of consciousness had formidably

accelerated.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner.

257
Esther Drives Herself to Dr. Shengold’s Office

The light hadn’t even officially turned green at the intersection

of 82nd and Fifth before an army of overconfident yellow

cabs roared past the tiny deathtrap I was attempting to

navigate around the city streets. Clutch, gas, shift (neutral to

first? Or first to second?), release clutch, I repeated over

and over in my head, the mantra offering little comfort

and even less direction amid the screeching morning traffic. The

little car bucked wildly twice before it lurched forward through

the intersection. My heart flip-flopped in my chest. Without any

warning, I began to pick up speed. Lots of speed.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.

258
Oscar’s Fascination with Speed

As a boy, I was fascinated by speed, the wild

range of speeds in the world around me. People moved

at different speeds; animals much more so. The wings of

insects moved too fast to see, though one could judge

their frequency by the tone they emitted — a hateful noise,

a high E, with mosquitoes, or a lovely bass hum

with the fat bumblebees that flew around the hollyhocks each

summer. Our pet tortoise, which could take an entire day

to cross the lawn, seemed to live in a different

time frame altogether. These experiences helped turn me to

photography.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Speed” by Oliver Sacks.

259
Ben’s Philosophy of Running

When the pressure is intense and the race is only

half completed, a runner who is being chased relentlessly by

a competitor realizes that he might be better off pushing

from behind than pulling from the front. In that case,

the smart move is to yield his lead to the

trailing runner and let the other runner pass. Relieved of

his burden, our runner can tuck in behind and make

the new leader drive the pack. Sometimes, however, it is

important to hold one’s position and not allow the pass.

Racing is about discipline and intelligence. It’s about running smart.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein.

260
Hanife Misses Her Stop

Hanife thought of the silence of the snow that day.

She sat just behind the bus driver on the M50.

If this were a poem she would call the detached

feeling she felt inside her core the silence of snow.

As she watched the snow fall outside the vapor-stained window,

as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream,

the placid traveler fell inevitably into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie.

She was cleansed by memories of childhood in cherished Istanbul.

She succumbed to optimism, daring to believe herself at home.

She fell asleep in her seat and missed her stop.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk.

261
Hanife Writes a Letter to her Uncle Fazil in Istanbul

We must live our lives. Yes, we shall live, Uncle

Fazil. We shall live through the long procession of days

before us, and through the long evenings; we shall patiently

bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall

work for others without rest, both now and when we

are old; and when our last hour comes we shall

meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall

say that we have suffered and wept, that our life

was bitter, and God will have pity on us. Ah,

then, dear Uncle, we shall see that life was sorrowful.

Your loving niece,

Hanife

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov.

262
Oscar Remembers September 11

On the morning of the day they did it, the

city was as beautiful as it had ever been. Central

Park had never seemed so gleaming and luxuriant — the leaves

just beginning to fall, and the light on the leaves

left on the trees somehow making them at once golden

and bright green. Oscar Berg who happened to be downtown

saw a flock of pigeons rise, high and fast, and

thought, Why are the pigeons rising? It was only seconds

before he realized that the pigeons had felt the wave

of the colossal concussion before he heard the ghastly sound.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “The City and the Pillars” by Adam Gopnik.

263
At the 9/11 Memorial

I’ve been there. I’ve seen. I don’t keep away. It’s

a place like any other place, to me. Every time

I go there, following the others over the crunch of

feet on the path, I see even young people weeping,

they put down their flowers and sometimes sheets of paper

with what looks like lines of poems written there. Now

I do what the others do. It’s the way to

be safe, perfectly safe. Today I bought a cheap bunch

of red roses held by an elastic band wound tight

and laid it there, before the fountain, behind the railing.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “Homage” by Nadine Gordimer.

264
Ben Shirazi Dreams a Dream

He dreamed that he was going into an empty house

with white walls and that he was upset by the

burden of being the first human being to enter it.

In the dream he remembered that he had dreamed the

same thing the night before and on many nights over

the past years and he knew that the image would

be erased from his memory when he awakened because that

recurrent dream had the quality of not being remembered except

within the dream itself. A moment later, indeed, when Fiona

knocked at the bedroom door, Ben awoke not remembering anything.

______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

265
Music Carried Across the Lake

Music from the house carried across the lake, too faint

to identify more precisely than that it was a waltz.

In the darkness the low shorelines seemed impossibly far. The

normal qualities of the landscape were altered beyond recognition,

distilled

to strange minimal parts, simple as geometry. Planes and circles

and lines. The full moon stood directly overhead, its disc

softened by the humidity in the air. The sky glimmered

silver, too bright for stars. The wide lake was silver

as well, only slightly duller. Heavy morning mist already rose

from the still water, though the dawn was hours away.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.

266
Uncle Binyamin Studies Hebrew

In bed Uncle Binyamin studied Hebrew grammar. The permutations of

the triple-lettered root elated him; how was it possible that

a whole language, hence a whole literature, a civilization even,

should rest on the pure presence of three letters of

the alphabet? The Hebrew verb, a stunning mechanism: three letters

whichever fated three, could command all possibility simply by a

change in their pronunciation, or the addition of a wing-letter

fore and aft. Every conceivable utterance blossomed from this trinity.

It seemed to him not so much a language for

expression as a code for the world design, indissoluble, predetermined.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Puttermesser Letters by Cynthia Ozick.

267
Uncle Binyamin in Jerusalem

The air is thought-nourishing in Jerusalem, the Sages themselves said.

The thin delicacy of the light also affects me here.

I look downward toward the Dead Sea, over broken rocks.

“A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old.”

Small houses with bulbous roofs cluster toward the flashing horizon:

the color of these is that of the dusty ground.

Something intelligible, something metaphysical is communicated by these

earthy colors.

The openness of the rock-jumble valley reveals an expansive landscape.

The dolomite and clay of Jerusalem look hoarier than elsewhere.

Gray and sunken, as Mr. Bloom said, in Joyce’s Ulysses.

______________________
Paraphrases from To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account by Saul Bellow and
Ulysses by James Joyce.

268
Old Iranian Jews in Jerusalem

Several old Iranian Jews huddled on a bench near an

arcade in Jerusalem. With their seemingly perpetual display of loathing,

despair, and bitter mockery, they might have been drawn by

an enterprising cartoonist. No doubt worn out by endless argument,

they sat in silence, chewing tobacco and staring out into

space as if they read the future and fatalistically accepted

what it foretold. A religious Jew named Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen

Yatom was staging a hunger strike in front of a

brick clock tower. The man was threatening to starve himself

to death unless the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini abdicated his power.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Perfect Peace by Amos Oz.

269
Uncle Binyamin Visits the Wailing Wall

For a long time I stayed from the Western Wall.

It daunted me, that somber wall. The weight and moment

of those worked stones promised to make the business of

seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s

what we’ve rescued from the madness. Holiness, dignity, order,

proportion.

There are obligations attached to such a visit, what ambiguity

there is in exalted things. I kept putting off a

visit. The wall stood apart from the hissing traffic of

Jerusalem like some monument to doomed expectations. I approached.

There

it was. I considered the vision before me, immeasurably awed.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Names by Don DeLillo.

270
Am I a Character in My Own Book?

I have the irregular habit of going to bed early.

My eyes will close and I will fall asleep quickly.

I will soon awaken to a clamoring of peculiar thoughts.

I will think of what I had been casually reading.

My thoughts will run into a channel of their own.

I myself seem to become the subject of my book:

a Beethoven quartet, Oscar Pistorius, terrorism, an animated sexual

coupling.

The subject of my book will separate itself from me.

I become free to choose whether I will be a

character in the book and I return to sane reality.

_______________________
Paraphrases from the novel Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

271
Oscar Berg Clicks his Heels

I had desk duty at the library on Monday. It

was the most boring part of my job, and I

usually had a crossword puzzle to work on when no

one was looking, or a magazine tucked into a partly

closed drawer. Today it was a magazine. I was reading

covertly, and keeping an eye on the closed door behind

which Mr. Berg sat, when two patrons got into a

garrulous dispute. Mr. Berg had opened his door at the

first sound of the loud voices, and now he walked

across the room, his heels clicking on the linoleum.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Dive from Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer.

272
My Early Morning Walk on the Beach

I begin each day with a solitary early morning walk

on the beach, during which I am often the only

person in sight. I step on tide-washed sand and run

my eye along the blue-gray eastern horizon between sea and

sky. If I slice this line into segments, each appears

to be straight, but the sweep of the whole curves

to render the world perceptibly round. Just so, an individual

life can appear to be isolated and without purpose unless

recognized as contributing to lives that precede it and follow

it, endowing each human span with completeness and rich universality.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from Turn: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt.

273
Oscar at Rockaway Beach

There was a long and desolate stretch of beach south

of Holland Avenue where the houses petered out and sand

dunes covered in hard spiky grass ran a stretch down

the coast. The smell of saltwater and seaweed was thick

and cloying. Oscar walked past the old wooden fence posts.

The rim of the beach itself was festooned with impaled

litter and polystyrene cups. There was little sound but the

soft plump and swish of breaking waves and the hoarse

rattle they made on the pebbles as they drained back

to sea. Oscar picked up a pebble and flung it.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Hemingway’s Chair by Michael Palin.

274
Oscar Is Battered by the Breakers

Oscar panted and shouted with pleasure among the breakers where

he could not stand two minutes; the blow of a

roller that beat him off his feet made him laugh

and cry out in ecstasy; he rioted in the roaring

water like a young sea-beast, sprang at the throat of

the waves that threw him flat, pressed up against their

soft fierce bosoms and fought for their sharp embraces; grappled

with them as lover with lover, flung himself upon them

with limbs that yielded deliciously, till the scourging of the

surf made him red from the shoulders to the knees.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Lesbia Brandon by Algernon Swinburne.

275
Far Rockaway Mermaids

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I grow magnificently old.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers smoothly rolled.

I shall wear flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each one to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the briny waves

Combing the white hair of the waves madly blown back

When the wild wind blows the water white and black.

We linger in chambers of the sea by sea-girls wreathed

with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.

276
Subway Odyssey

The New York subway is a serious matter — the rackety

train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream, the suicidal commuter.

No one speaks except to the person on his immediate right

or left, and only then if they are very old

friends or else married. Avoiding the stranger’s gaze is what

the subway passenger does best. Most sit bolt upright, with

fixed expressions, ready for anything. As a New York City subway

passenger, you are J. Alfred Prufrock — you “prepare a face

to meet the faces that you meet.” You have to

look as if you’re the one with the meat cleaver.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Subway Odyssey” by Paul Theroux.

277
New York’s Subways

New York’s subways are a patchwork of swatches and layers,

of bits and pieces, slapped together until you cannot see

the fault lines for the surface, nor the surface for

the patchwork. Subway corridors, stairwells, and sidewalk entrances are

known

to have disappeared, and tiled alcoves, designed to accommodate vintage

phone booths, have vanished behind newly erected walls that sprout

doors to become makeshift toolsheds. Ancient men’s rest rooms, famed

for their shady practices, have mended their ways and have

been converted into candy stands. Nothing is ever really demolished

or dismantled down below, but everything is tentative and amorphous.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases from False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory by André Aciman.

278
Oscar Battles the Rush-Hour Crowds on the M Train from Brooklyn

Each morning, the same ritual confronts me on the subway.

The doors jolt open and hordes of people flood off.

More miserable people swarm on like liquid, filling every gap.

They push right past me, rubbing against my outstretched arm.

I left my Brooklyn apartment earlier this morning, at 7:00:

the moon fading, the light turning toward gray dawn shadow.

I move with the train and the crowds to Manhattan.

No one particularly notices me, I’m just another forgettable man.

The subway is cozy-feeling, despite the army of sad-mouthed strangers.

It’s comforting here after the freezing wind of January outside.

_________________________
Paraphrases from the novels One Step Too Far by Tina Seskis and The World at Night
by Alan Furst.

279
Zelenyi: A Forgettable Man on the Eastern Front

The moon fading, the light turning toward gray dawn shadow.

The Russian guns stayed silent — formidably silent in the January cold.

The blockhouse was quiet, Zelenyi could hear the men breathing.

The tank reversed, disappeared into the forest. Was it over?

A soldier, hunched next to him, stubbornly gripping the handles

of a machine gun, said under his breath, “And . . . now.”

A whistle blew, the Germans came out of the forest.

The German tanks fired unremittingly — orange flashes in the trees —

Russian antitank cannon fired back from the other isolated blockhouses.

Zelenyi could hear officers shouting, encouraging hordes of German

soldiers.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The World at Night by Alan Furst.

280
Metropolis

Automobiles shot out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows

of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloud-like strings.

Where more powerful lines of speed cut across their casual

haste they clotted up, then trickled on faster and, after

a few oscillations, resumed their steady rhythm. Hundreds of noises

wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs

protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and

subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and slowly dissipating.

By this noise alone, a man returning after years of

absence would have been able to tell where he was.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil.

281
Ezra Shirazi in the Morning

Shirazi finished his letters and looked at the office papers.

He rapidly looked through two pieces of business, made notes.

Pushing away the papers, he turned to his morning coffee.

Sipping his coffee, he opened a still damp morning paper.

World affairs and politics had no special interest for him.

His views on these subjects were those of the majority.

He only changed his views as the majority changed them.

Just as he did not choose the shapes of his

hat and coat, he did not choose his political views.

An article about Iran’s nuclear program catches Shirazi’s observant eye.

____________________
Paraphrases from the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

282
An Explosion of Energy

The abiding Poetry of Earth materializes in Beethoven’s Great Fugue:

a feel for nature as indefinable as a poet’s wordsense.

Inner voices, dark and dense, paradoxically embody unravelment and

complication.

This inner life is not the themes nor the counterpoint.

It is a dynamic sequence, constantly surging in rhythmic waves.

We hear an absolutely contemporary piece of music, contemporary

forever:

chaos gathered into archetype. I envy the big noise.

This “birth of the modern” is an explosion of energy.

Oh, but the horrific complications. Finger-traps – keys in tumult.

What does it mean: that moment denied, turned acid, rephrased?

___________________________
Paraphrases from Einstein: The Life and Times by Ronald W. Clark, The Unanswered
Question by Leonard Bernstein, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet
Malcolm, Invitation to the Theater by George and Portia Kernodle, Richard Wagner: His
Life, His Work, His Century by Martin Gregor-Dellin, Conversations with Stravinsky by
Robert Kraft and the Poems “Little Fugue” by Sylvia Plath and “Grosse Fuge” by
Mark Doty.

283
Oscar Berg Retreats to His Inner World

I, Oscar Berg, was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.

My sheltered home did not prepare me for life’s cruelties.

Anxious to get me among boys my age, my parents

sent me, aged fourteen, to summer camp in the Catskills.

Shy, sensitive and different I was a target of brutishness.

Other boys began calling me “cutie” and teased me mercilessly.

One night I was carried off to the camp icehouse.

Knocked about, the boys doused my buttocks with green paint.

I discovered Eliot’s Middlemarch that summer, though, a novel that

explored the life of the inner mind and human frailties.

______________________
Paraphrases from the biography Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray
Monk.

284
Oscar’s Gay Lifestyle

I live alone now and I work hard every day.

And when I am not working I am otherwise occupied.

I don’t see anyone I have no desire to see.

It is easy to screen calls and avoid answering emails,

and then they peter out. I love a long day

when the night promises nothing more than silence, solitude, music

lamplight, the time broken by maybe half an hour on

Gaydar to see if there is anyone new, or even

anyone familiar, in the city center who might stop by

for what they commonly call sex with no strings attached.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story collection The Empty Family Colm Tóibín.

285
My Neighbor, Oscar Berg

He lived by himself very quietly, and but for the

fact that our apartments were next door to each other —

which occasioned a good many chance encounters on the stairs —

we should have remained practically unacquainted. For he was not

a sociable man. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree

I had never before experienced in anybody. He was, in

fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the

Steppes, a strange, wild, shy — very shy — being from another

world than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his

life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny!

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.

286
Water from a Burst Pipe

Oscar Berg’s building in Brooklyn was of worn sandstone, the

street wide, and lined with dignified old brownstone houses. He

smothered a dream of ample old-fashioned rooms, quaintly furnished. He

had found no such enchanting places, except at exorbitant rents.

So he abandoned the dream, and enthusiastically accepted the North

Sixth

Street substitute, though the plumbing facilities, and often the janitor

service, were of the poorest; water from a burst pipe

had buckled the pine floors. In the sitting room in

winter he would pen his obsessive thoughts and read Dickens

by a little droplight lighted on a little mahogany table.

_____________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Undertow by Kathleen Thompson Norris.

287
Oscar Is Battered by his Father

Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure.

Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment and fear. And

the rules alone would break your head! My father never

discussed his rules: he gave orders and I had to

obey. Afraid of being beaten, for he was a very

strong man, I pretended to agree with him, cultivated an

internal life of dissent that I hid from him and

the adult world. Within the family it was accepted that

I would be ruthlessly punished, both by beatings and by

enforced isolation. I was also bullied at my local day-school.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novels Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Martin Eden by Jack
London, Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, the autobiography Twilight
of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family’s Legacy, Wagner’s The Mastersingers of
Nuremberg, and Solitude a Return to the Self by Anthony Storr.

288
Oscar’s Cloak of Silence

During his childhood, Oscar often wrapped himself in a cloak

of silence as a shield against both the vicissitudes of

external reality and the traumatic events within his family. Acquaintances

who knew him repeatedly described his withdrawal into a world

of fantasy, his penchant for isolation, his monosyllabic replies to

adult questioners, his happiness at being left alone by his

parents, his “deafness” when a young neighbor tried to disturb

his daydreams. Silence and solitude had great utility to the

lonely boy Oscar, permitting a condition of “wakeful dreaming” within

a noiseless protective world woven of his own rich fantasies.

_____________________________________________________________

Paraphrases from Beethoven Essays by Maynard Solomon.

289
The Lack of Security at Oscar’s Flat

I live in two rooms on the third floor of

a brownstone in Brooklyn. As I have no doorman, and

my parsimonious landlord pretends that there is no intercom system

because it would ruin the design of the nineteenth-century front

hall, it is impossible to control what my landlord calls

the ingresses and egresses of the house. There are two

doors to the house, one opening into the entrance hall,

the second interior door leading to the stairs. I know

that it is not a very safe system, just pushing

the buzzer and allowing whoever has rung downstairs to enter.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel In the Cut by Susanna Moore.

290
Oscar Fears an Intruder

A fear haunted Oscar. The fear of an intruder. An

intruder who could end Oscar’s life in an instant. The

lack of security in Oscar’s building was an ever-present worry.

A creaking door in a neighbor’s apartment, the sound of

a passing siren in the night would trigger frightful dreams

and Oscar would awaken in panic: stiff and incapable of

movement. Oscar was acutely aware of violent crimes committed by

burglars. Once he heard a noise and imagined that someone

was in the bathroom. He felt a sense of terror

rushing over him, too scared to switch on a light.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Oscar Pistorius: ‘I thought Reeva Steenkamp was a
burglar'” by David Smith.

291
My Brother, Oscar

I never thought I really knew or understood my brother,

Oscar. There seemed to be something special about him which

I (and perhaps others) were conscious of, though we would

have found it difficult to characterize, much less to understand.

He was dreamy, abstracted, deeply introspective; he seemed (more than

any of us) to live in a world of his

own, though he read deeply and constantly, and had the

most amazing memory for his reading. He developed a particular

preference for Eliot’s Middlemarch and Martin Chuzzlewit, and knew the

entire, immense books by heart and would declaim them often.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.

292
The Complexity of Oscar Berg’s Mind

Oscar’s mind was a patchwork of swatches and layers, of

bits and pieces, slapped together until you could not see

the fault lines for the surface, nor the surface for

the patchwork. Oscar’s psyche was a vast repository of recollections,

perceptions and images. Since Freud we have been inclined to

suppose that in mental life nothing which has once been

formed can perish, that everything is somehow preserved and that

in suitable circumstances it can once more be brought to

light. Thus it was with Oscar. Nothing was ever really

demolished or dismantled down below, but everything remained

impregnably secure.

_________________________________________

Paraphrases from False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory by André Aciman and
Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud.

293
Yurovsky’s Remorse in the Wake of the Czar’s Execution

The late-July morning sun was hot and steamy, and there

was no breeze on the balcony. Yurovsky moved slowly. He

was downcast and burdened with self-reproach when he stepped without

noise from Ipatiev House on his rubber-heeled brown boots. He

hated himself for what he construed to be his cowardice.

He had intended to take a much stronger stand with

V.I. Lyuzhin on the matter of the execution, to speak

out with courage and eloquence on a subject about which

he had begun to feel deeply. Instead he had failed

miserably, had choked up in the face of Lyuzhin’s orders.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller.

294
Yurovsky’s Torment

I tried to sleep the black evening of the shooting.

But I had a hard time with the disturbing images.

As I lay I considered the possibility I was imagining.

There was blood everywhere, the remains of a harrowing chore.

Maybe it was all a figment of my frenzied imagination.

Maybe I was a figment of my imagination, an illusion.

Was it possible? These deeds? The product of my hands?

Had I been swallowed up by my own consuming insanity?

I remember hoping that somebody would rescue me from myself:

rescue me as I wandered the hollow corridors of my mind.

_________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Sudden Light by Garth Stein.

295
Bahari’s Revolutionary Ardor

A mad fever swept across Iran, the fever of revolution.

At the end of almost every street you could see

the vastness of the revolution taking hold in every quarter.

The first stage was a raging delirium, as ruthless radicals

eliminated the entrenched ancien régime and installed reliable foot

soldiers.

Those who controlled appointments were impressed by Bahari’s ardor: in

those days of inordinate rhetoric and political extremism his

revolutionary

fervor, equally unbridled, was remarkable for its genuineness. His

fanaticism

was not an imitation but was his own, a natural

consequence of all his previous life and his idealistic temperament.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Tehran’s Promise” by Robin Wright and the novel
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.

296
The Hostage Crisis

The steel door eased closed. There was no use resisting.

The hostages fell atop one another as they were herded

to the center of the Embassy. They huddled between the

benches and watched six hooded men move quickly to take

control. Four of the men squeezed the hostages together, another

carried a large assault rifle and rushed to an outer

room. Then came the sound of steel-toed boots pounding along

the corridor. The hostages lay scattered about like broken things.

Maziar Bahari scanned their eyes. He could already see the

nightmares that would haunt them the rest of their lives.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Angel City by Jon Steele.

297
Maziar Bahari, Counter Revolutionary

Maziar Bahari would eventually betray the Revolution. He was a

man at odds with himself, a man who knew one

life, one calling, and had abandoned them. I had seen

it before. I had seen it, even in men who

had undergone a complete ideological rehearsal, who in the secret

hours of the night had questioned the Revolution, and alone,

compelled by the internal power of their convictions, had betrayed

their calling, their religion, their country. Even they, filled as

they were with new zeal and new hope, had had

to struggle against the stigma of treachery — the ultimate infidelity.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Spy who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré.

298
Bahari Is Arrested

Someone must have been telling damnable lies about Maziar Bahari.

He did nothing wrong, but one morning he was arrested.

There was a knock on the door; a man entered.

“Who are you?” asked Bahari. The Iranian Guard didn’t answer.

Bahari tried to conceal his fear but he became agitated:

“You have the wrong man! I am a loyal patriot.”

Bahari thought of Kafka’s character Josef K., from The Trial,

arrested by men he thought were pulling a practical joke.

"And why am I under arrest?" Bahari then asked. “Why?”

"That is something we are not allowed to tell you.”

_________________________
Paraphrases and quotes from the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka and the memoir
Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival by Maziar
Bahari with Aimee Molloy.

299
Avram Dehpour Endures Political Exile

Everything had changed for Avram Dehpour in 1979, the year

of the Iranian Revolution. In one of the many letters

that he wrote from abroad to his friends and family,

Avram admitted: “Many troubles have fallen on my head all

at once owing to the situation.” The letter is carefully

worded and does not refer to the Revolution – and the

same goes for the rest of his correspondence. If Avram

appeared in his letters to show surprisingly little concern at

what was happening in Iran it must be remembered that

he knew his letters were being censored by the authorities.

_________________________________

Paraphrases from the article “Frederic Chopin: Musical Genius in Political Exile” by
Peter Lekarev.

300
The Execution

A line of militia formed behind Yurovsky as he spoke.

Eleven targets against one wall of the room, nine rifles

pointed from the other. Yurovsky, being in charge, had claimed

the privilege of dispatching both the deposed tsar and his

son and heir. In his right hand he carried a

Nagant M1895 double-action revolver, the standard-issue sidearm for the

tsar’s

army; his left held the handwritten execution order. “Your life

ends here,” he told the deposed tsar. “What, what?” Nicholas

asked. “It’s all over!” Yurovsky screamed. Yurovsky raised his revolver

and shot between the tsar’s eyes. Nicholas Alexandrovich fell dead.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Enchantments by Kathryn Harrison.

301
That Last Night

Until one midnight in mid-July of 1918, few people had

ever heard of Yekaterinburg. Drama, in the shape of exceptional

happenings, had never stopped there. The inhabitants of the town

were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to

exist inside ordinary life. But then, on that midnight in July

certain foreign sounds impinged on the normal nightly Yekaterinburg

noises.

At the time not a soul sleeping in town heard

them – shotgun blasts that, all told, ended eleven human lives.

But afterward townspeople found fantasy recreating them over and again:

those somber explosions that stimulated the fires of civil war.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

302
Obedience to the New Dogma

Under the New Dogma people were deprived of independent thought.

The loyal Yurovsky was but an uncritical recipient of commands.

Obedience to the order-giving elite would advance his progress.

He performed his subordinate functions with a machine-like

predictability.

Under the New Dogma mind control became an unfailing science.

“For the sake of the State and the Leader’s glory”–

That was Yurovsky’s creed, molded by the party’s absolute dictate.

He lost his personal identity and merged with the crowd.

He was a victim of a mass intoxicant: horde indoctrination.

He escaped from responsibility, intelligence and morality into animal

mindlessness.

____________________________________

Paraphrases from the essay “Propaganda under a Dictatorship” by Aldous Huxley.

303
The Aims of the Party

We are fundamentally different from the oligarchies of past years.

We know what we’re doing; parties of the past didn’t.

They never had the courage to recognize their own motives.

They pretended they had seized power for a limited time.

We aren’t like that – who seizes power to relinquish it?

We are interested solely in power, pure power, without exception.

One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution.

One makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution; the object of torture

is torture; the object of power is power. That’s all.

____________________________
Paraphrases from the novel 1984 by George Orwell.

304
The Exile of Oscar Berg

Oscar Berg didn’t stand aloof from other men in a

proud or supercilious spirit, refusing to count them his fellows.

He felt himself separated from them by a great gulf,

which neither they nor he could bridge over, and across

which it was vain to stretch hands or exchange greetings.

A sense of isolation from his brethren, made him shrink

from their society and avoid their presence, but he did

so as one conscious of an infirmity, not boasting of

an excellence. His was a kingdom sufficient for him, and

from its narrow window he saw what he could see.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography The Life of the Honorable Henry Cavendish by George
Wilson.

305
Oscar Berg’s Testament

You men who think I am difficult, hostile or misanthropic!

How greatly do you wrong me! You are utterly misinformed.

My heart and soul have been full of tender feeling.

But for years I have been afflicted with poor eyesight.

And my condition has been made worse by senseless physicians.

Though susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon

compelled to isolate myself, even to live life despairingly forsaken.

How could I, an amateur photographer, admit a wretched infirmity

in the one sense which ought to be notably superior?

I must live alone, like one who has been banished.

Oscar Berg
Brooklyn
October 6, 20–
_____________________________
Paraphrases from The Heiligenstadt Testament by Ludwig van Beethoven.

306
A Resigned Beethoven Writes to his Brother

Dear Carl,

Now for the moment things appear to be going badly

with me, and this has been for a considerable time

already, and will continue so in the future. My hearing

continues to grow worse, I do not count on improvement,

it will never happen. Recovery isn’t possible. I fear that

in the not too distant future I will be completely

deaf. There will come a day when performing shall become

impossible. Must it be? It must be! If God wills

that I cannot hear, I will most assuredly continue to

speak to the hearts of succeeding generations through my work.

Yours, Ludwig
_______________________________________________________

Paraphrases from The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill.

307
A Sad Esther Remembers Her Brother’s Relationship with Music
I remember how Avram, I suppose he was about eighteen
at the time, after a fight with our father, went
to the piano and played a Beethoven sonata. I’ve always
felt that at that moment he was telling Beethoven to
help him through something he could not go through with
father. And this is the agony of someone like this,
who can tell more to the music than he can
to his own kin and kind. There was no woman,
no friend, nobody, he ever loved and understood as much,
or cared about as much, or gave as much to.
_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Rubinstein: A Life by Harvey Sachs.

308
Haim & Dehpour

Daniel Dehpour blossomed into something definite in the business

world.

The walnut-importing business had proved to be a lucrative enterprise.

He filled the public eye as a partner in Haim

& Dehpour with offices in Tehran and Baghdad, and other

things about it that sounded and looked grandiose. The offices

in the two capitals may have consisted — and probably did —

of one room in each; but at a distance all

this had an air. Business associates were more puzzled than

dazzled, it is true; but even the most sober-minded among

them began to think that there was something in it.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Victory by Joseph Conrad.

309
Moses Haim: Business Partner

Moses Haim was ambitious, self-confident, often arrogant, elastic, and

vigorous.

For the much older Daniel Dehpour, Haim was the perfect

business partner, the skilled collaborator. Daniel’s meager, steadily

dwindling savings

had led to a forced reorganization of his enterprise and

unanticipated legal complications nearly prompted liquidation. Failure

was probable; hostility

and ridicule were almost certain. But with the arrival of

the young entrepreneur Daniel had found an estimable colleague:

someone

to share the debts and rejuvenate the operation. Moses was

precisely the intimate Daniel needed: confidante, stimulus, fellow

speculator shocked

at nothing. “You are my alter ego,” Daniel told him.

_______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from Freud: A Life for Our Time by Peter Gay.

310
Daniel Dehpour Writes to Moses Haim in Baghdad

Dear Friend,

I have just now reviewed the documents you sent me.

The grandeur of your plan to expand abroad and its

importance for the future of our firm cannot be disputed.

Nothing is in question but the approval of the accountant.

If he endorses the proposal I will unhesitantly sign off

to it. (Though I have a number of additional ideas

I will be forwarding to you that I hope you

will not disdain.) — Last week I unearthed some old Hebrew

texts from the antiquarian bookseller. These things put me in

a good mood and speak of distant times and countries.

Daniel Dehpour
Tehran

____________________________________
Paraphrases from The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud and The Complete Letters
from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess.

311
Esther’s Reverie

Esther slowly eased her way through her brain’s intricate corridors.

She imagined a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant and

calm.

The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window;

where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat.

Vigor rolled in from the fields and the down beyond.

It was difficult for Esther to keep reading her book.

Rooks were keeping one of their annual festivities, soaring round.

It looked as if a net with thousands of black

knots in it had been cast up into the air.

Moments later the birds sank slowly down upon the trees.

__________________________

Paraphrases from the short story “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf.

312
Lunch at the Taj Mahal

Esther and Ezra had a standing date once each month.

They ate lunch in the East Village at the Taj

Mahal, Esther’s favorite restaurant. She invariably ordered lamb. She was

a creature of habit. The Taj Mahal was a cellar

restaurant that one entered by walking down a flight of

stairs. Below the city, the air was still. Occasionally, the

sound of a fire truck siren burst onto the stone

walls echoing through the dining room. Today Ezra comments on

the murals, “Good old FDR and the WPA.” Esther smiles.

The enchantment of the images in the dim light bewilders.

313
Daniel Dehpour Makes a Promise to Esther

All her life Esther remembered an afternoon from her childhood.

She was waiting for her father, the person she loved

most in the world. When he arrived she rushed into

the warmth of his arms. Esther delighted in her father’s

laughter and tenderness, and his stories of exotic travel, of

trekking through India, of the beauty of the Taj Mahal.

One day, he promised, he would take her there and

they would see it together. Her father never kept his

promise, but Esther treasured the memory of it for the

rest of her life. It was imprinted in her brain.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the PBS Series American Experience: Eleanor Roosevelt.

314
Zelenyi Finds Refuge in a Tunnel Near the Front

The air is still. Here, in the tunnels, it’s quiet.

Occasionally, the sound of a water droplet bursting feebly onto

stone echoes through the chamber. Somewhere, somehow, moisture is

getting

in. But for the most part, it’s dry. We are

safe, underground, in the comforting darkness. We are perfectly safe

here and can sleep as securely as if we were

in a palace. Small arms fire continues outside. We light

a simple candle. Murals of great age are found on

the walls. The enchantment of the images in the dim

light bewilders. The dull sound of distant explosions is unrelenting.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “The Lost Tunnels Buried Deep beneath the UK” by
Chris Baraniuk and The Outhouse War and Other Kibbutz Stories by Shimon Camiel.

315
Esther’s Nostalgia

Her happiness was as fragile as the pattern that was

made by the dust on a moth’s wings. At one

time she understood it no more than the moth did

and she did not know when it was brushed or

marred. Later she became conscious of her damaged wings and

of their construction and she learned to think and could

not fly any more because the love of flight was

gone and she could only remember when it had been

effortless. Her idealized memories of happy days sustained her but

they were a lingering torment in her comfortless yearning.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases of Ernest Hemingway’s recollections of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

316
Esther Remembers Music in the Night at Lavasan

On my way upstairs to bed I stopped to sit

on the spiral staircase and reflect, reflect, until the mildness

of my thoughts lulled and calmed me; and then from

downstairs I heard music. It was my brother, Avram playing.

I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way.

Only within. Inside the brain. An indescribable impression. All my

senses wanted to sink into slumber. And when the last

day comes, I am sure — by ice or fire — he’ll

be down there playing away došanbe, sešanbe, cahâršanbe, he doesn’t

stop. That’s how we say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in Farsi.

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from “The Workers All Call Daddy Cap’n” by Josh Short,
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, the poems “An Unstamped
Letter in Our Rural Letter Box’ by Robert Frost and “Going to Sleep” by Hermann
Hesse, and the play Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets.

317
Hanife Shows Esther a Book about the Sultan’s Garden

There were tulips, which had once driven men mad with

their beauty. So delicate, so rare and brief. Esther read

about the sultan, in Istanbul, who had grown over a

hundred thousand tulips, brought as favors from the wild steppes

of the East. Every spring, he would have an evening

party to show them off. Tulips, Esther read, the ones

that are fragrant, are fragrant only at night. Candles would

be fixed to the backs of turtles, and the turtles

would crawl among the flowers, as the courtiers strolled in

their jeweled clothing, whispering amidst the beauty and the scent.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick.

318
Dr. Shengold Gives Up Cigars

Dr. Shengold missed cigars; the habit was hard to break.

Pencils weren’t bad to chew, but note taking demanded pens.

He sucked on a piece of rock candy when he

felt in danger of being sucked into a patient’s psyche.

Once, the analyst crunched on the candy and a patient

leaped off the couch, frightened and angry, demanding to know

what Dr. Shengold was doing as he sat behind her.

It was all very well and good to analyze the

patient’s fear of being devoured, but of course one was

not allowed to be the active catalyst for such associations.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel August by Judith Rossner.

319
Dr. Shengold as Portrait Artist

In one of his essays, the psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold had

expressed the opinion that a human being cannot adequately be

described in words — only intuited in quasi-perceptual impressions —

that it

was a province exclusively of the psychoanalysts, that the recognition

of a personality was wholly dependent upon the ineffably expressed

variations of feeling and mental imagery for which language had

few words and no shapes and that of the infinite

variety of sensibility and unconscious intersections that make a human

personality, language has no inkling: not even no words, but

not even numbers. Selfhood was the province of the psychoanalysts.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.

320
Dr. Shirazi’s Concerns About Esther Seeing a Psychoanalyst

It has become the age of the self; confessions in

public all over the place, the spillage of the “I,”

and in private, in a quietly structured manner. And who

is doing this talk? Not ill, at least not seriously,

the self-obsessed personalities have a concentrated, almost technical

interest in

the self, as if they were specimens. Interest in others

tends to be perfunctory, impatient, showy. It is they, those

who dwell on themselves, who have a natural attraction to

analysis, and there is a real danger of psychoanalysis not

uncovering, but giving shape to, and confirming, a person’s self-obsession.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Pages by Murray Bail.

321
Esther Watches the Olympics on Good Morning America

Esther watched the Olympics coverage on Good Morning America —

fascinated,

not wanting to move. The Games seemed so remote and

no part of her; it was a play apart and

separate, wondrous to watch, not without its strange pleasure. That’s

all for me, she thought, that’s all taking place just

for me, by God. If she wished, she could linger

here, in comfort, and follow excerpts from the men’s marathon

on through its swift phases, down alleys across streets, over

empty running avenues, past throngs of spectators, crossing lots and

playgrounds, with pauses here or there for the necessary commercials.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

322
Running Man

The roar was still in the air, the rolling rumble

of the crowd. This was the breathless world. Vigor and

mettle came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around

corners, seismic tides of brawn, with jubilant nimbleness flashing past,

amid shouts and shrill of whistles, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly

ease in the glistening light. It was not a street

anymore but a world, a time and space of corporal

glee and near collision. Ben Shirazi was north through asphalt

and mud, and spectators agog stood by holding towels for

the runners sheathed in sweat and musk. Ben ran, unflinching.

_________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Falling Man by Don Delillo and the poem “The Feast of
Stephen” by Anthony Hecht.

323
Mrs. Shirazi Consults Dr. Shengold

I lay down on the couch in Dr. Shengold’s office,

facing away from him. For a moment I almost balked

at telling him the things that had just been going

through my mind, but at $200 an hour, I couldn’t

afford to suppress anything that might prove illuminating. I described

all the things I had thought and felt and imagined

as I sat in the waiting room. As I spoke

I was aware of the sound of his pen scratching

across the pages of the notebook he jotted in furiously

while I talked. Where would that notebook end up eventually?

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Horned Man by James Lasdun.

324
The Work of the Psychoanalyst

The psychoanalyst demands that his patients pursue Truth. To reveal

the inner personality of the patient is the aim of

analysis. The analyst is he who can translate his patient’s

mundane thoughts into an eloquent representation of the unconscious.

In

that sense analysis is the highest form of biography. Freud

was criticized for finding ugly meanings in beautiful things. Those

who find only beautiful meanings in beautiful things are deluded.

The concepts of beauty and ugliness are foreign to analytical

thinking. The psyche is neither moral nor immoral. The misery

of our patients is our preoccupation. That is all. Period.

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

325
Esther Unburdens Herself to Dr. Shengold

Esther Shirazi imagined the face of Dr. Shengold, like the

phantom of a dream, as she lay on the analyst’s

worn leather couch, relating her thoughts and associations to the

silent man behind her. It was an enigmatic face that

she saw in her mind’s eye and Esther, remembering how

in past times she had told Ezra of all the

tumults and unrest and longings in her soul, day after

day and night by night, only to be answered by

her husband’s listening silence, would have told herself that it

was the impassive face of the man in the moon.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

326
The Life Struggle

One day Esther spied a moth trapped inside her bedroom.

The creature evoked a thread of animated light become visible.

He was little or nothing but life itself: élan vital.

Then he could not raise himself; his legs struggled vainly.

“I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to

right himself, but the moth’s failure and awkwardness signified the

approach of death. I laid the pencil down once again.”

The insignificant moth having righted himself now lay most decently

and uncomplainingly composed. The life struggle was over. O yes,

he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

___________________________

Paraphrases from the story “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf.

327
Esther Dehpour on Grandfather’s Veranda in Lavasan

It was a hot, humid evening, the trees in the

garden were wrapped in a damp vapor, and the stars

seemed immersed in dirty cotton wool. Esther Dehpour was sitting

on the wooden veranda with her old grandfather in Lavasan.

Mr. Dehpour said: “Everyone is a stranger to one another.

Even the stars in heaven are alien to one another.”

Moths and mosquitoes congregated around the light on the veranda.

In the distance, from the direction of the hills, orchards

and vineyards, a desperate jackal howled. Crickets, frogs and sprinklers

chirped agreeably as if in response to the distant jackal.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz.

328
Shah Reza Pahlavi

Shah Reza Pahlavi had been handsome as a young man.

Although not always approved of by the nation as a

whole, he was liked by the common people of Iran.

He knew how to please and could be most charming.

Majesty was something he lacked; the crown sat uneasily on

him as Shah, and gray hair did not suit him.

His manners were those of monarchy: distant, imperious and

condescending.

He embodied a period of transition, preserving old forms in

the service of new modes of thought and foreign ideas.

He seldom prayed at the mosque, being uninfluenced by clerics.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

329
The Old Warrior

At dawn, alone, I must silently mouth my earthly cares.

I remember warriors, the hall, rewards – but joy has perished.

Wretched, I tie my heart with ropes far from home.

Sorrow is renewed when the mind ponders ghosts of the past.

No man is wise until he lives many winters in

the kingdom of the barren world bereft of cheer.

A marvelous fate destroyed the men! Storms beat these stone

cliffs, a blanket of frost binds the earth, winter moans!

I sit alone with my mystery. It is good to

keep faith; grief should never quickly escape a man’s heart.

___________________________
Paraphrases from the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer.

330
The Final Days

The Empress, Farah Diba was convinced it was all over.

Reza stared ahead, distant, as if disconnected from his surroundings.

He let conversations go on around him, looking stricken, tired.

He searched for a frame of reference, some clarifying context.

Was he like Charles I about to be shamefully beheaded?

He wondered aloud: “Am I like Czar Nicholas of Russia?”

He lapsed into silence as he finished his jasmine tea.

Even with Farah Diba the Shah rarely revealed his emotions.

“It’s so sad. It’s so sad.” Farah Diba said, weeping.

The Shah put on his glasses and read a book.

___________________________
Paraphrases from The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

331
Esther Writes to Aunt Sara in Tehran

My dearest Aunt Sara,

Next year Ezra and I plan to travel to Tehran.

I will try to visit you. One day I am

sure we will meet again. I would like to tell

you of the journeys I have made in my life,

see your wise, kind eyes, feel the warmth of your

hand in mine. I would like to tell you that

my memories of my childhood in Iran will always remain,

though faded like an echo and locked away like a

keepsake, my place of safety, my heaven on earth, the

destination about which I forever wonder but can never reach.

Your loving niece,

Esther

_______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Gwendolen by Diana Souhami.

332
A Jew Returns to Tehran

I went back to touch and breathe the past again,

to walk in shoes I hadn’t worn in years. This,

after all, was what everyone said when they returned from

Tehran — the walk down Memory Lane, the visit to the

old house, the knocking at doors history had sealed off

but might pry open again. The visit to the old

temple, the visit to Uncle So-and-so’s house, the old school,

the old haunts. And then, of course, the tears, the

final reckoning, the big themes: the return of the native,

the romance of the past, the redemption of lost time.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory by André
Aciman.

333
Ben Shirazi and the Rabbi

Ben had the usual Jewish education at his mother’s prompting.

“What our story is really about is memory and faith.”

The rabbi’s cryptic reference confused the young boy, Ben Shirazi.

“There is no Jewish religion without remembering our people’s history.”

Ben inquired, “Remembering what?” with steady-eyed curiosity and

growing impatience.

“As Jews we remember what was told us at Sinai.”

“At the Seder we remember the miraculous Exodus from Egypt.”

“We are told not to forget our ancestors, the Patriarchs.”

“We Jews are chosen to be God’s privileged mind readers.”

At the phrase “mind readers” Ben assumed a quizzical grin.

______________________
Paraphrases from Preface to Saul Bellow: Collected Stories by Janis Freedman Bellow.

334
The Metamorphosis

One morning Isidore Bellis awoke to find himself in Maine.

He had been changed into a bored, cabin-bound Jew.

For the last thirty years Bellis had lived in Miami.

A retired Jew from Brooklyn, Bellis had cleaved to balminess.

He awakened in a start, in the woods, wind howling.

‘What’s happened to me,’ he thought. It was no dream.

His room, a proper room for a gentile, was bare.

Bellis’s glance then turned out the window, to snow falling.

The dreary weather made him a quite melancholy, lonely Jew.

He reads the morning newspaper quietly and studies stock quotes.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka.

335
Remembering Walden

To do hermitage, the preference for one’s own company predominates.

Picture yourself in such solitude, in natural surroundings, say, the

classical version. Build a hut in the woods, split your

own logs, grow things, ritualize daily subsistence, listen to the

wind sing, watch the treetops dance, feel the weather, feel

yourself in touch with the way things are. You remember

your Thoreau. There’s a definite moonstruck component to avoiding all

other human beings and taking on the coloration of your

surroundings, invisible as the toad on the log. Become your

secluded surroundings. When it is done lock the guarding door.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Leather Man” by E.L. Doctorow.

336
Dr. Shirazi Waxes Philosophical

It was a thoughtful day for Dr. Shirazi. Winter. Saturday.

The short end of December; a day for Waldenesque musings.

He was alone in his house and woke late, lying

in bed until noon, in the room kept very dark.

The dreary weather made him a quite melancholy, lonely Jew.

He calmly worked on a thought—a feeling, waxing philosophical:

“Now a singularly important individual, a necessary existence: suddenly

nothing:

I am followed by the inevitable inference I am not.”

Dr. Shirazi would not allow himself to succumb to dejection.

He turned to the morning newspaper and studied stock quotes.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Old System” by Saul Bellow.

337
The Stranger

“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.”

Oscar Berg was handed a telegram at the Mid-Manhattan Library.

YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP

SYMPATHY. WEAR BLACK.

The matter was left doubtful; it could have been yesterday.

The Greyhound bus should get him there well before nightfall.

He will spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil.

“I fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave;

obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse, or could he?

I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said,

‘Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know. Really.'”

____________________________________________________
Quotes and paraphrases from the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus.

338
The Funeral

“The Tsar is ill. The Tsar is dying. Good God!”

Oscar Berg rode on the Greyhound Bus to Hartford, Connecticut.

Mother’s unforeseen funeral was an inconvenience to the sullen librarian.

Life should be staid routine, he thought: deviations were tiresome.

The somber life of a librarian was one of workaday conventionality.

A funeral was a meddlesome annoyance: why did she die?

His “good enough” mother was never Good Enough for Oscar.

He listened to Mussorgsky on his iPod on the bus —

Boris Godunov: an opera subjected to cuts, recomposition, re-orchestration,

reworking.

(Enter the Patriarch, church dignitaries, and all the boyars, sobbing.)

_________________________________________________
Quotes from the play Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin.

339
Oscar’s Boundless Sense of Guilt

Oscar was a blighted son. He was involved in interminable

conflict with his mother who was not enthusiastic about Oscar’s

career plans and lack of career success. In childhood Oscar

was subjected to his mother’s nagging criticism. He was the

black sheep. Oscar’s slightest misdeeds were crimes in his mother’s

eyes. Again and again Oscar tried to appease his mother,

to make amends. Oscar’s disturbed relationship with his mother

determined

the sense he had of himself, a self-concept that vacillated

between extremes: he saw himself as a repentant and absolved

sinner and at times as a secret and undiscovered murderer.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the paper “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion”
by Bennett Simon and Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory by Jay Greenberg and
Stephen A Mitchell.

340
Oscar Berg’s Feelings

Freud or not, my feelings about my mother remain mysterious.

Did I like her or not, or feel either way?

I felt nothing, really. I felt an absence of feeling.

I never felt much about any members of my family.

I don’t feel that much toward my best friend, either.

We grew tired of each other, and I am relieved.

He needed money; I couldn’t give it generously any more.

I have never been sure I truly cared for anyone.

But I still have these grief-filled dreams about my mother.

We are still connected as by an invisible live wire.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Something Happened by Joseph Heller.

341
Oscar’s Inner Portrait Gallery

Oscar sometimes retreated to an inner gallery of portraits of

his mother — portraits that captured moments of joy and despair,

of longing and dissatisfaction. In some blighted sons, those who

had turned away from mother, there exists in their minds

nevertheless a beautiful likeness of mother, but one who was

felt to be a picture of her only, not her

real self. The real mother was felt to be unattractive—

a dreaded person, really. The beautiful likeness had been dislocated

from the real mother but had never been relinquished, and

played a great part in the pathways of their desires.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the paper “Love, Guilt and Reparation” by Melanie Klein.

342
The Vain Quest for the Illusory Sublime

There are those obsessed with transcending the mundane, the ordinary.

Their yearning for transcendence is born of a vain illusion:

the presumed fundamental difference between the ordinary and the

profound.

The norms of transcendence we cling to are not eternal truths.

They are artefacts of minds adrift on seas of impermanence.

What seems so majestically True, Right and Just ultimately shows

itself to be utterly clichéd: as merely true, right, just.

What is left, however, is not a disheartening nihilistic chasm:

(clinging to “nothingness” is just as deluded as clinging to

“somethingness” )

Envisage, rather, a new beginning: a transvaluation of the commonplace.

______________________________
Paraphrases from Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy by Louis E. Wolcher.

343
The Poet’s Life

Reza Mohammadi, the poet, neglected the reality of current politics.

He was unable to remember if Iran was a republic.

Perhaps, it was still under the rule of the Pahlavis.

He remembered several regimes — were they relevant to reading Pushkin?

Governmental quarrels always came down to a question of words.

“Republic,” “monarchy,” “the will of the ruling class,” ad infinitum.

He would never dream of getting caught up in affairs-of-state.

One day all words would fade to silence before poetry.

The commonplace transformed by genius was Reza Mohammadi’s only

preoccupation.

His wish? A quiet life, a bowl of cabbage soup.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novels The Last of the Just by Andre Schwartz-Bart, Dr. Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak and Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin.

344
The Greatness of Krinsky

Krinsky’s powerful impulses and emotions found their match in his

intellect and self-control. He checked his passion for philosophy with

the detachment of a chemist, his yen for deductive reasoning

with a disciplined inductive approach. Sometimes he fooled himself, as

when he denied ambition, malice, and idealism, and when he

claimed to be unruffled by critics. From his concern with

archaeology, to his wish for a statue of himself in

the university courtyard, Krinsky worked out his ambivalent relationship

with

the past. In his case the key fantasy concerns becoming

a part of history, an indispensable figure who altered civilization.

_______________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank by E.
James Lieberman.

345
Krinsky at Home

A vast glazed mahogany cabinet filled the wall behind Karl

Krinsky’s desk. Its lower shelves were given over to books,

the majority of them relating to European history. A large

section was devoted to economic texts. These were in a

variety of languages — Italian, French, English and Dutch — and were

decades old. The upper shelves of the cabinet were home

to all manner of strange objects, mostly of an archaeological

nature: clay figurines, bronze implements, bits of pottery, fragments of

stone sculpture and the like. On the very top shelf

were two skulls — pallid pools of gloom behind the glass.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Savage Garden by Mark Mills.

346
Krinsky: A Disciple’s Recollections

I will do what I can with the plain facts.

Krinsky had a cultured intellect – laser focused, tyrannically fixated,

opinionated.

He spoke in complete sentences, at high speed and impatiently.

He lived by his ideas. His vast knowledge was real.

He could exhaustively document that vast knowledge, chapter and verse.

Krinsky inhaled books and theories the way others breathe air.

He was here to give aid, to clarify and move.

His outright goal was to ensure that the greatness of

humankind would not entirely evaporate in vapid, self-satisfied bourgeois

well-being.

There was nothing of the average in Krinsky’s abounding life.

___________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Ravelstein by Saul Bellow.

347
Life under the New Dogma

Millions were destroyed by the state under the New Dogma.

Dispensable bourgeoisie, party members with suspect loyalties, and

unproductive intellectuals

were tortured or sent to death in the concentration camps.

People were commonly rounded up and transported in cattle cars.

The state was unconcerned with the fate of such people.

Under the Krinskyite New Dogma we became a “quicksand society.”

The system sucked up victims and drowned or suffocated them.

Condemned undesirables were eliminated matter-of-factly; they were

turned into corpses.

Millions were annihilated on ideological grounds with a rational pretext.

A rationale had considerable value as a manifestation of order.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Ravelstein by Saul Bellow.

348
The Fanaticism of Krinsky

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth,

for as a rule they make many others die with

them, often before them, at times instead of them. Krinsky

did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so

lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is

to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth

laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free

ourselves from insane passion for the truth. Insane passion

for the truth makes one feelingless to evil in some direction.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and The Varieties of
Religious Experience by William James.

349
The Middle-Age Ben Shirazi Visits His Parents

Twice a month, like a dutiful son, I visited my

parents in their small overfurnished condo on the West Side.

Retirement had changed my father and my mother, shrunk them.

They were in their late eighties, both small and wrinkle-skinned.

They seemed to look more alike; their features had blended.

When I arrived, I would find them sitting on the

balcony watching the traffic go by on Central Park West.

My father developed a baffling patience for my mother’s stories.

She talked endlessly of her childhood in Tehran, before the

Revolution, when her father used to drive them to grandfather’s villa.

_____________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Apollo” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

350
Esther’s Old Photo Album

Did my parents ever feel American? I never asked them.

I doubt my mother would have said yes. My mother

sometimes told me stories from the past and could be

persuaded to get out her old photograph album from childhood.

“So many ghosts,” she would say as she closed it.

My father had no photo album. He rarely spoke about

his past. My mother kept most of her documents: photocopies

of old passports and telegrams, a business card from someone

in the Baghdad office of Haim & Dehpour, a tattered

book about the Jews of Tehran. Letters from Uncle Binyamin.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Heimat” by Natasha Walter.

351
Oscar Berg in Life Class

A regular patron at the library caught Oscar Berg’s fancy.

Of course, he felt no sound romantic inclinations toward her.

No sensual or sexual notions about a woman aroused him.

The thought of an unclad woman’s body appealed to him

but only in a very few classical paintings and sculptures.

It was the nude male form that moved Oscar Berg

in some deep, exuberantly appealing, solid, but faintly uncertain way –

ever since that day he walked into the Metropolitan Museum

of Art’s life-drawing class and saw a male graduate student

standing naked there as the model, he with superbly-tanned chest.

________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons.

352
Ben Shirazi is Late for English Class

Harold Bloom sneered as Shirazi, ever troublesome, found his seat.

At that time Bloom had been giving lectures at NYU.

By the end of May the professor began to ramble.

The students would never learn much about the English Romantics.

They would hear and see odd things as Bloom lectured.

One after another, the academic formalities and rituals dropped away.

Professor Bloom had the unconscious frankness of a man preoccupied.

And toward the term’s end long pauses punctuated his lectures.

The class waited three minutes, five minutes, utterly silent as

Bloom mutely argued and reasoned, thinking of brilliant alternatives.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Herzog by Saul Bellow.

353
Fiona Gets Ready for Work

Fiona is in the tiled shower, soaping her nubile body.

She is getting ready for work at The Slipper Room,

a strip club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The double cheeks of her backside are well modeled.

She takes care in the soaping of her ample breasts.

Ben has the ecstatic privilege of lifting them up to

kiss and fondle their undersides — and also her parted thighs.

Young men like Ben, specialists at reading the sexual signs,

appreciate her bountiful excitability, the ever-present potential for carnal

action.

Fiona will put on tights and lipstick like a showgirl.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novella The Actual by Saul Bellow.

354
Backstage with Fiona

The manager rings the bell of my dressing room, then

he knocks on the door. It’s time. “Just a minute!”

I hiss, with a single vocal cord, as I survey

and analyze my naked belly. I glance at myself in

the mirror, with the proud little wink that has demolished

so many men in its time. I tuck in the

silk shirt of my outfit, and then take one last

look at myself in the mirror, edged by too many

white light bulbs, and it’s all just an orgy of

emotions, fear, unease, anguish, and excitement. The manager knocks

again.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Everybody’s Right by Paolo Sorrentino.

355
Esther as Performance Artist

Esther Shirazi, like all analytic patients, drew inspiration from her

analyst, Dr. Shengold. Esther imagined the analytic hour as a

“living” art where she got to perform before an actual

audience. Dr. Shengold, his abstemious analytic posture

notwithstanding, was an

active participant in Esther’s live performance. As a participant, Dr.

Shengold experienced Esther’s performance and responded through

interpretation. Via that

response Dr. Shengold directly affected Esther’s train of associations, and,

in fact, became a creative partner in the living art

of psychoanalysis. Dr. Shengold was both audience and stimulus for

the image of the world reflected by Esther’s silent interior.

_________________________________________________________
Paraphrases from Form and the Art of Theatre by Paul Newell Campbell and the
biography Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century by Martin Gregor-Dellin.

356
Interview with Avram Dehpour

“Do you get nervous backstage?” I don’t get nervous for

a performance in the sense of being frantic or having

the shakes or anything like that. But I do notice

that I sometimes start behaving a little differently right before

a concert. I’ll find something to do until the concert

begins, like fiddling with my cuff links forever or adjusting

my collar too many times. Then I’ll notice I’m doing

it, and I’ll think, “This is my way of being

nervous.” Sometimes before a concert I will leave my dressing

room for a stroll. A brief walk clears my mind.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the blog post “Rachmaninoff Third, Part Eight” by Jeffrey
Chappell.

357
The Romanovs

In the summer of 20—, the editor of the NY

Times Book Review asked me to review the treatise, The

Romanovs by one Oscar Berg. I agreed to conduct the

review, though I am not a specialist in forensic anthropology,

because of my research on the Russian Revolution, and

also because there can be value in an outsider’s perspective.

The improbable and undocumented conclusions Berg has drawn, the

misrepresentation

of information by means of paraphrasing, the distortion by way

of omissions in quotations, the outright wrong quotations made this

a most painful and wearisome book to read and review.

Stephen F. Cohen
New York University
October 25, 20—

________________________________________
Paraphrases from Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform
by Richard A. Posner and Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk contra Freud
by K.R. Eissler.

358
The Middle-Aged Ben Remembers Hanife

Hanife was a simple, gentle woman who came from Istanbul.

She had no immediate family as far as I knew.

The years of employment in our house were her life.

In such circumstances people cling however unhappily to their jobs.

They save their money, coin by coin, for the future.

She hoped to have a decent burial in her homeland.

I did remember that when my mother died, it was

Hanife who wept piteously at the grave, she, Hanife, as

sentimental about death as only the deeply religious can be.

And so, prayer was her way of coping with existence.

__________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow.

359
Uncle Fazil – Alone in Istanbul

It is late in the day. Fazil Fahri stands in

his store, his hands clasped behind him, waiting. Like a

character in a play, waiting for the plot point. The

action that will motivate his next move. But there is

nothing. No stage direction. No dialogue. The rug merchant moves

to the window. He looks at the sidewalk below. People

move about. In contrast, Fazil Fahri feels so solitary and

so still, as though he may be fading away. He

wonders if this happens, sometimes. If a person is so

totally alone and inconsequential that he simply ceases to exist.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins.

360
Beethoven Speaks of His Diabelli Variations

Beethoven spoke one day to a visitor about his Diabelli

Variations. “It stretches, this little trick of mine, from variation

to variation, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface

of it. The order, the form, the texture of my

Diabelli Variations will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated

a complete representation of it. Like a complex figure in

a Persian carpet. So it’s naturally the thing for the

critic to look for. It is the thing for the

critic to find. I call it a little trick but

that’s only my little modesty. It’s really an exquisite scheme.”

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novella The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James.

361
Oscar Loses His Sight in His Right Eye

I lost my sight gradually, like a motion picture fade-out.

After learning what was happening, I wanted to measure it.

I would stand near the lake in Central Park where

they did ice skating and see what I could see.

The houses over Central Park West went first, they got

darker as if dissolving into the blue early January sky.

Then the barren shade trees began to lose their shape.

By late February all I could see were phantom shapes

of the ice skaters floating past me on the ice.

That last night everything went gray, then altogether black.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow.

362
The Garden of the Almighty

In all his writing, Ibn Rushd had tried to reconcile

the words “reason,” “logic,” and “science” with the words “God,”

“faith,” and “Qur’an,” but he had not succeeded, even though

he had used with great subtlety the argument from kindness,

demonstrating by Qur’anic quotation that God must exist because of

the garden of earthly delights he had provided for mankind:

and do we not send down from the clouds pressing

forth rain, water pouring down in abundance, that you may

thereby produce gardens planted thick with trees? This proved,

Ibn Rushd said, God’s existence and his essentially kindly nature.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The Duniazát” by Salman Rushdie.

363
Hanife Observes Ramadan

Reaction to the span of the Ramadan day was exactly

like the reaction of body and mind to the time-change

on arrival in a country whose hours are far behind

or ahead of the one departed from. The fuzzy intoxication

of being awake when you were used to being asleep

and to be sleeping when you were meant to be

awake wore off just as the internal clock resets itself

after a few days in a country across a date-line.

The devout Hanife rose in the cold for the pre-dawn

meal; hunger and thirst were a clamor only by sunset.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer.

364
The Man Who Would not Swallow Lies

There was no room in this nation for Zelenyi, a

man who would not bend, who would not swallow lies,

who would not act the parrot in a room of

imbeciles. There was no room at all for such a

fool. Back then, the poor imbeciles in government, in secret-police

chambers and other such game rooms of stunted, cruel oppressors,

what can these poor imbeciles do when such a fool

walks free? They consult secret manuals and hold secret meetings.

They try to be cruel, for they have not the

imagination to do anything else. They gawk. They fumble clumsily.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Prague by Arthur Phillips.

365
Ben at the Market

Ben spent his afternoon working at Gristedes on First Avenue.

Around him were shelves and counters full of long loaves

of fresh, crusty bread; the familiar smell filled his nostrils.

Fine sunshine brought the housewives on the Upper East Side

out into the streets to shop; they attracted Ben’s attention.

This day business was good because the weather was pleasant.

A pretty girl was crossing the street and Ben permitted

himself to gaze at the girl lustfully as her breasts jiggled.

Her flared skirt swung gracefully, emphasizing her slim bare legs,

promising – but never quite delivering – delightful glimpses of feminine

underwear.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Modigliani Scandal by Ken Follett.

366
Oscar Berg Librarian

Oscar Berg was an eccentric, theatrical personality — rumored to be

gay, but such a Protean character that any such effort

at categorization was misplaced. He was a student of Philip

Glass operas and the history of the Russian Revolution; he

was an amateur photographer and cellist; he was a man

of parts. This improbable figure had survived at the New

York Public Library; and indeed had eventually been promoted to

Branch Librarian, because he understood the nature of power in

a petty bureaucracy. Nearly everyone on the library staff owed

him a favor. He was unquestionably an unlikely library czar.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Director by David Ignatius.

367
Oscar the Photographer

Over time, Oscar Berg noticed that his photographs were becoming

beautiful, and this frightened him, so again he put his

camera away. Certain scenes, however, demanded his attention. He

brought

out his camera, once more moved it an inch to

the left, or to the right, tipped it the tiniest

bit, and waited for the light’s perfect utterance. He took

more and more pictures. He could not stop himself. Their

beauty fascinated and repelled him. He could not bear too

much beauty. Beauty brought nostalgia into the picture. Nostalgia

slipped

itself between the lens and the object fixed before him.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Search for Heinrich Schlögel by Martha Baillie.

368
Why I Write

Since early childhood I knew I should be a writer.

I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms.

These made me unpopular with my peers throughout my schooldays.

I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories.

Feeling isolated and undervalued I held conversations with imaginary

persons.

I knew that I had an ample facility with words.

I felt a power to face unpleasant facts of life.

I created a private world in which I could get

my own back for failures in commonplace dealings with others.

I created a mental diary existing only in the mind.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the essay “Why I Write” by George Orwell.

369
Big Brother

The Krinskyite regime maniacally gobbled up information on its citizens.

Fighting a never-ending war against enemies of the state justified

a never-ending excuse for looking into details of people's lives.

The spy apparatus was like a giant Hoover vacuum cleaner.

Construction on a network of surveillance cameras was completed

gradually.

Two great armies of workers finished the work in stages.

Groups of about twenty workers were formed, each of which

had to take on small sections of the great cities.

Workers descended on different regions to methodically build the

contrivance.

Many large gaps arose, which were filled in only gradually.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the story The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka.

370
The Managing Partner

R. Bruce McCain was an accountant in an executive position.

He was an upright, moral soul who never did wrong.

He would not even take bribes from clients being audited.

Colleagues at Deloitte were uneasy with him over that failing.

Fellow accountants held themselves discreetly aloof and distant from him.

They sensed imminent danger from someone of such antiseptic rectitude.

He took pride in proceeding along the ethical path of

firm founder, William Deloitte, grand old man of the profession.

McCain had one character flaw: his insistent preoccupation with prying

into the private lives of his employees and prospective employees.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man by Joseph Heller.

371
The Secret Dossier

The managing partner, R. Bruce McCain, studied a dossier labeled:

Benjamin Aaron Shirazi, New York University, Accounting Major,

Honors Program.

An inch thick with small print and a few photographs,

it was prepared by some ex-CIA agents in private intelligence.

Each year they did the investigating for a small fee.

It was easy work, checking out sundry unsuspecting accounting students.

They learned that Shirazi preferred to live in the Northeast,

that he was holding three job offers, two in Manhattan.

He owed $23,000 in student loans. He never used drugs.

R. Bruce McCain flipped through the dossier and smiled slyly.

________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Firm by John Grisham.

372
Ben Interviews at Deloitte

The sleek glass doors slid open to admit me and

I walked through the atrium past the oddly-placed Starbucks kiosk

to the elevator, which I took to the seventh floor.

The reception area into which I emerged was unusually luxurious,

not what I’d come to expect from offices in mid-Manhattan.

The series of abstract prints on the wall was merely

anodyne but the framing was museum-quality. The receptionist I

approached

had an easy smile I felt was a little misplaced —

the smile of a woman who sold expensive designer jewelry.

I gave her my name — she asked me to wait.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel 10:04 by Ben Lerner.

373
Fiona Tries to Fit In

The exams were easier than Ben expected; even the business

law exam had easy questions, requiring only a basic knowledge.

He now felt relief but knew that he would have

no excuse when Fiona wanted to make plans for dinner.

He set a date for her visit to his parents.

Fiona worried; she felt the Shirazis would not accept her.

She believed Ben had told them too much about her.

She understood that she was going to be presented to them

as something more than a girlfriend, and she was apprehensive.

Dinner would test Ben’s diplomatic skills and Fiona’s ebullient charm.

________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín.

374
The Quartet

Imagine four people seated at a dinner table. Dr. Shirazi,

his wife Esther, their son Ben and Ben’s wife, Fiona.

A quartet. Dr. Shirazi’s voice was deep, rolling, bold, like

a cello, splendid in antagonism, yet lyric — intermittently the solo.

Not bound by the sense of the words, its cantilenas,

its roars, its occasional tortured squeaks made incantatory music of

their own. Esther and Fiona were the two violins, complementing

each other in mocking chatter. Ben was the viola — expansive

and unhurried, frequently limited to filling in harmonies and only

occasionally emerging as a solo voice, artfully balancing the ensemble.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Risk Taker Supreme: Is Daniel Day Lewis Too
Good To Be a Movie Star?” by Matthew Gurewitsch

375
Ben and Fiona Have Dinner at the Shirazis

Halfway through dinner, I knew I would replay the whole

evening in reverse — the bus, the snow, the crowded large

living room where candlelit faces beamed with laughter and premonition,

the piano music, as I wandered from room to room,

thinking that perhaps Ben and I should have arrived much

earlier tonight, or a bit later, or that we shouldn’t

have come at all, the still-life by Behjat Sadr on

on the north wall, where, turning to me by the

window where I thought I had found a quiet spot, someone

suddenly put out a hand and said, “I am Esther.”

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Eight White Nights by André Aciman.

376
The Dour Dr. Shirazi

Dr. Shirazi was a brilliant man with a dour disposition.

He was a largely humorless person, articulate enough but with

barely a trace of wit, who never in his life

had spoken satirically or with irony, who rarely cracked a

joke or spoke in jest — someone instead haunted by an

exacerbated sense of duty, endowed with force of mind,

and for that he had paid a high price in

assigning the gravest meaning to his work, one that, intensifying

over time, perniciously magnified his heavy sense of unconscious guilt.

The guilt in Shirazi seemed absurd, but was, alas, unavoidable.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Nemesis by Philip Roth.

377
Fiona Conceals Her Identity

Ben was afraid his father would see Fiona as she

really was: a sleazy stripper who sold her nubile body.

Ben worried that Fiona would come across as a tart.

He did his best to clean up Fiona's dubitable life-style.

Lap dances were referred to as "business transactions," strip club

habitués were "corporate clients," and the strip bar where Fiona

worked was deemed a "cocktail facility." Fiona was earnest and

polite, always answering questions, "yes, sir," and "Yes, Dr. Shirazi."

Ben had tutored Fiona in the minutiae of Jewish ritual.

Her eyes misted over, dutifully, at any mention of the Holocaust.

_________________________________________

Paraphrases from the biography The Man to See: Edward Bennett Williams by Evan
Thomas.

378
Fiona is Intimidated by Ben’s Father

The dinner party was memorable for its guest list, which

included me, a stripper and Ben’s father, a straitlaced dentist!

When suddenly there was a moment of silence at the

table, I looked up at Dr. Shirazi who was staring

at me point blank: that icy glassy look of his

which disconcerted me. I struggled to say something. Ben’s father

intimidated me. I had nothing to add to the conversation,

nothing to throw into the muddy waters between us. I

felt as exposed as a stranded lamb. Ben was sitting

to my left, Ben’s mother opposite us, beside Dr. Shirazi.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “My Bizarre Dinner Party with Donald Trump, Roy
Cohn and Estee Lauder” by Peter Manso and the novel Call Me by Your Name by
André Aciman.

379
Fiddler on the Roof

Tevye’s rebellious third daughter ran off with Fyedka, the shegetz.

Tevye tore his shirt in mourning and pronounced Chava dead.

He sat shiva and partook of the meal of comforting.

For Tevye only strict adherence to Jewish law might insure

the survival of his people: no deviation could be tolerated.

“What did being a Jew or not a Jew matter?

Why put such walls between them? Why this bitter trial?”

In the end, he shunned his dear but prodigal daughter.

Chava’s marriage symbolized an unbearable assault on Tevye’s

patrimonial authority.

Maybe someday his heart would soften: paternal love trumps taboo.

__________________________
Paraphrases from the article “From Taboo to Afterthought: A Literary History of
Intermarriage” by Rabbi Philip Graubart.

380
Oscar’s Lack of Fit

I never quite fit into the local society of boys.

I would not play with them, preferring my lone pursuits.

In school I seemed an isolated, dreamy boy who didn't

like rough play and whose solitary preoccupations set me apart.

I often stayed away from the playground except to eavesdrop.

One classmate found me strange and conceited, without redeeming

qualities.

Another observed that I had no close friends, and that

I seemed to prefer writing stories to more routine activities.

I was lazy, too, and didn’t participate in class projects.

Remembering my boyhood, I would say I never liked school.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography William Faulkner: American Writer by Frederick R.
Karl.

381
The Eleventh Party Congress

I can see it now: the meeting hall, the portrait

of Krinsky, the bulky table covered with course green cloth.

Krinsky is a short, stocky man with steely eyes afire.

The party congress takes place in Warsaw in the thirties.

It is the era of terror, purges, and encroaching tyranny.

Krinsky disguises his single-minded defense of the New Dogma in

the jargon of Hegel, but everyone grasps his veiled meaning.

He proclaims that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can

insure lasting peace, and therefore, no deviation can be tolerated:

“World peace is in the hands of the party secretariat.”

________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Inventions” by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

382
The Authorial “I”

I read the novel The Stranger in my teens and

Camus’s unblinking vision frightened my soul to its marrow. The

cosmic loneliness of Meursault, the hero of that novel, haunted

me and I was impelled to use symbolically Camus’s device

of having the story flow from the point of view

of a narrator isolated in his jail cell during the

hours before his execution. For me there was a spiritual

connection between Meursault’s frigid solitude and the plight of a

desperately lonely man ruminating on his afflictions among the books

of a public library in the hour before its closing.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William
Styron.

383
The Library

The library lingers in the somnolent air of the afternoon.

This morning the reading room and corridor teemed with patrons.

But now there is a melancholy stillness and time slows.

A custodian mops the empty halls in the yellowing light.

The Mid-Manhattan Branch, built in the eighties, strikes a clanging

note of late-century efficiency, crumbling plaster board and dappled

linoleum.

Weirdest is the track lighting, reminiscent of a motel lounge.

The Central Library is a stately palace that bespeaks majesty:

the individual dwarfed by the nobility of blue-gray marble columns

and copious gilt-framed portraiture, by the gewgaws of carved walnut.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Laws of Our Fathers by Scott Turow.

384
The Library Custodian Encounters Oscar

Cleaning the library, with its rows and rows of books,

was the job of the custodian, Saul Saunders. Saul’s boss

had warned him never to quarrel with the man in

charge of the library. “He’s a crackpot,” he had told

Saul. Many times, however, Saul would pause in his work,

feeling that his eyes were being drawn to Oscar Berg.

He would turn around and find Oscar staring at him.

Then Oscar would look away quickly, as though ashamed. “What

in hell does he want from me?” Saul wondered uneasily.

Oscar never spoke to Saul except to say good morning.

_________________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “The Man Who Killed a Shadow” by Richard
Wright.

385
The Survivor

Vladimir Zelenyi did not consider it heroic to have survived

the Revolution and its aftermath. Like other witnesses of the

demise of the Old Order, he lamented that the best

had perished and the worst had survived. But we who

have survived relatively little find it hard to believe him.

How could it be anything but heroic to have entered

Hell and not been swallowed up? To have witnessed it

with such delicate lucidity, such reserves of irony and even

equanimity? Our incomprehension and our admiration combine to

simplify Zelenyi

into a needily sincere amalgam: hero, saint, witness, redeemer — survivor.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “The Art of Witness: How Primo Levi Survived” by
James Wood.

386
A Secret Jew in Tehran

Was it a shock? I don’t remember. A surprise, for

sure. They told me in such a way as to

say, it’s not important, and I accepted that characterization. Many years

after my parents told me, I remained in hiding, in

effect. I couldn’t identify with it. It didn’t feel like

me. All those years in Tehran, I never entered a

synagogue. I had not one Jewish experience. I increasingly believe

that one derives from being one’s self, and that one’s

self is rooted, among other things, in one’s heritage and

history. The beliefs of your ancestors are part of you.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover their Jewish Roots by
Barbara Kessel.

387
The Matter of Identity

Beethoven was one-sixteenth black

the presenter of a classical music program on the radio announces along

with the names of musicians who will be heard playing the String
Quartets opus 127 and opus 135.

Does the presenter make the claim as restitution for Beethoven?

Presenter’s voice and cadence gave him away as irremediably white. Is
one-sixteenth an unspoken wish for himself.

Once there were blacks wanting to be white.

Now there are whites wanting to be black.

One-sixteenth. The trickle seemed enough to be asserted out of context?

What does the distant thread of blood matter in the genesis of genius.

_______________________________________
From the story “Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black” by Nadine Gordimer.

388
The Shadows of Manhattan

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half.

In the top half I see looking faces and it’s

not easy to tell which are people, which is stone work.

Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place:

clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women.

A city like this one makes me dream extravagantly tall.

It’s the bright steel rocking invisibly above the shade below.

I look over strips of green grass lining the river,

at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of tenements.

Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible — like the gilt-edge city.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Jazz by Toni Morrison.

389
Oscar Berg in the Darkroom on 9/11

I walked with my camera through the empty streets toward

Central Park that resplendent September morning, eager to photograph

strollers.

Later that dismal day in my darkroom, I made a

set of small proof prints and pasted them into an

album. I write these thoughts in my journal where I’m

master, just as I'm master in the darkroom, stirring my

prints in the magic developing bath. I shuffle like cards

the lives I deal with. Their faces stare out at

me. People who will become other people. People who will

become old, betray their dreams, become ghosts – like faded negatives.

___________________________________________

Paraphrases from The Year of Living Dangerously by David Williamson, Peter Weir,
and C.J. Koch and Berggasse 19: Sigmund Freud’s Home and Offices, Vienna, 1938: The
Photographs of Edmund Engelman.

390
Oscar’s Grief on 9/11

Dear Franz,

All I could say, and much more, and much better,

you will have said to yourself, I’m sure. And I

have so little light and wisdom in me, when it

comes to such disaster, that I can see nothing for

us but the old Earth turning onward and time feasting

on our suffering along with the rest. Somewhere at the

heart of the gales of grief already they have blown

themselves out. I feel we are all alone

and forsaken in the world, and I, especially, a sole

survivor and an empty shell. I am sad and tired.

Oscar
September 11, 2001
Brooklyn, New York

______________________________________________________
Excerpt from “The Letters of Samuel Beckett” and quote from Object Relations in
Psychoanalytic Theory by Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell.

391
The Inattentive Ezra Casts a Shadow over Esther

I felt less big, as a personality — smaller, contained, overshadowed —

and I kept trying to stretch myself out, yes, it

was a war I was having within me, not with

Ezra, really — although it’s complicated, because I don’t think he

had any understanding of what I felt, even though I

tried to tell him, which made me mad at him,

and, see, he didn’t notice any change in me; I

mean, he was happy with me, but since I was

like a shadow, I wondered, how could he like this?

This wasn’t the woman he knew — why didn’t he notice?

____________________________
Paraphrases from The Erotic Silence of the American Wife by Dalma Heyn.

392
Oscar’s Boss

Philip “Luigi” Foglio was a manager’s manager in the serpentine

world of library administration, overseeing the superintendence of Oscar

Berg.

He was bigmouthed and a little excitable. Oscar feared him.

He was not, in any conventional way, compelling or artful.

His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed,

with thick pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome, Roman nose.

He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as

though he had just been jumped for his lunch money.

He issued edicts with the arch determination of a martinet.

Oscar misdoubted him immeasurably and avoided him like the plague.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael
Chabon.

393
Oscar Remembers His Boss

Foglio possessed no power of thought no depth of feeling,

no troublesome sensibilities: nothing but a few commonplace animal

instincts.

I sigh as I write these dismal reminiscences of him.

I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage with,

I think, more lively curiosity than any other human person.

He was a rare phenomenon – so reprehensible, in every sense:

so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such a mediocre nonentity.

My conclusion was that he had no soul, no heart,

no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts.

He was an execrable human being in so many ways.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

394
The Inscrutable Authorities

The library administration was a labyrinthine structure of bureaucratic

offices:

like atoms arranged in molecular clusters, themselves arrayed in crystals.

Official dealings with the library authorities, owing to the admirable

consistency of the offices involved, were simple and usually direct.

The authorities met Oscar Berg’s wishes in minor matters — and

so far nothing more was involved — meaning that they deprived

him of the chance of winning small, easy victories and

of the satisfaction that went with them and the well-justified

confidence that he would derive from embarking on other battles.

The inscrutable authorities indulged managers but thus undermined their

assurance.

______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Castle by Franz Kafka.

395
The Less Than Precocious Oscar Berg

His ambitious nature suggested that Oscar Berg was going to

be precocious and a great achiever in school. But it

didn’t turn out so exactly. He always excelled in the

early part of any school term — studying hard at first —

but after the initial months he wanted to get on

to the next term of the next grade or to

work with the teacher in a class above his own.

And then, before he even left high school he had

taken to photography and at first refused to attend college

anywhere on the grounds that it might “damage his vision”!

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel In the Tennessee Country by Peter Taylor.

396
The Preservation of Order

The somber group of men sat in a large room.

It rested far belowground, accessed by only a single elevator.

The chamber had been built secretly during the Ahmadinejad regime

under the guise of renovating the building squatting over it.

The plan was to use this “super-bunker” as a refuge

during a feared nuclear attack by America and its allies.

This facility was not for the top leaders of Iran.

It was intended to protect senior bureaucrats in the government.

Even in the context of Armageddon there must be order.

Order must be preserved to safeguard the Revolution’s far-reaching ideals.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Saving Faith by David Baldacci.

397
Oscar’s Brother Looks Back Thirty Years

One evening after dinner, our father watched a rerun of

Gunsmoke. Oscar sat beside him, holding the booklet, Your Survival

in Nuclear Attack, that the Civil Defense warden had distributed

that afternoon at school. The first through sixth grades — Oscar

was in sixth, I was a year younger — had assembled

in the school cafeteria. Then the warden turned off the

lights and showed us a picture of a cloud surging

violently upward, as though, through the enormous pressure, it suddenly

released itself from the hard darkness of the earth’s core.

“Dad,” Oscar said, “We have to build a bomb shelter.”

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story collection Mother Sorrows by Richard McCann.

398
Oscar Writes to his Brother

Franz,

I’m writing this at 12 noon in a café in

mid-town. It is warm and bright and I wish I

were in Provence. Another fortnight and I shall. I’m as

dull as ditchwater and can hardly hold the pen. Nobody

can read my writing but it’s the best I can

do. I went to Beckett’s Endgame last night. Well played,

but somehow I disliked the play. One day you’ll be

blind like me. You’ll be sitting here, a speck in

the void, in the dark, forever, like me. Pen drying

up, like myself. I’m warming up for my last soliloquy.

Oscar
Manhattan

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956 and quotes from the play
Endgame by Samuel Beckett.

399
Oscar Buys a Painting at the Rubenstein Gallery

Propped up on the chest of drawers in my room

is a small painting. It’s called Nobody’s Home. I bought

it at an opening in Chelsea at the Rubenstein Gallery.

I go to openings all the time. I drink free

wine, talk with the artists, and imagine an alternative life

in which I am rich enough to become a collector.

The artist I saw last night was a woman on

the verge of fame, which meant that her works were

unaffordable, or affordable only to the wealthy. I thought the

paintings were magnificent. I had a hard time explaining why.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Apartment by Greg Baxter.

400
The Teenage Fiona

On the wide edge of a large kidney-shaped swimming pool

sit two naked sixteen-year-old girls, Louisa Calloway and Fiona Dembosky.

It is a heavily hot and humid night in Nyack.

Unlit lamps are hung all about the pool; in the

dark the greenish-blue water glistens, barely moving, luminous and

inviting.

Around the swimming pool are flowering shrubs, all blurs of

white dim blooms, and the still air smells indistinctly sweet.

Fiona puts her arms behind her and arches her chest.

Tiny nipples stand out, and long blonde hair swings back.

“Sex appeal!” she whispers loudly, then she bursts out laughing.

________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Families and Survivors by Alice Adams.

401
The Teenage Ben

My father came to a halt in front of Collegiate.

“Well,” he said in a soldierly manner, “this is it.”

I stared at the gloomy building and imagined those same

words used by fathers sending their sons off into battle.

It was my father’s idea that I attend Collegiate School.

He thought it would transform me into a useful member

of society, a lawyer, say, or maybe a number-crunching accountant.

“It’s time you sorted yourself out,” he said. “You’re sixteen.”

“You’re nearly a man. You need to start buckling down.”

I was barely managing to get by as a boy.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel What I Was by Meg Rosoff.

402
Esther Shirazi Writes in Her Diary

Cracking open the inner world, writing even a couple of

pages in my diary, threw me back into depression, not

made easier by the weather, two gloomy days of rain.

I was attacked by a storm of tears, those tears

that appear to be related to frustration, to buried anger,

and come upon me without warning. I woke yesterday so

depressed that I did not get up till after eight.

I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a

place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside?

I think these pages are a way of doing that.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton.

403
The Teenage Ben Attends Yom Kippur Services

Yom Kippur was a holy day of fasting and obligation:

it was a sin not to attend services this day.

The week had developed slowly for me, the services had

allowed me to be near the pretty girl I devoured

with my eyes from behind, the girl who, to my

confusion, to my guilty pleasure, had confessed to “impure thoughts.”

The fact that she had chosen to come to temple

alone, to attend Yom Kippur services, made her seem virtuous.

The synagogue’s mottled shadows permitted me to gaze at her.

“Now I long for her, now I truly see her.”

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Holy Week” by Paul Theroux and Sonnet No. 227 by
Petrarch.

404
On Petrarch

On Good Friday morning in 1327 Petrarch was smitten by

the sight of Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon.

A lasting passion was awakened in him, celebrated in his

“Scattered Rhymes,” a collection of 366 poems of unrequited love,

isolation, the vanity of youth and the passing of time.

Laura herself was lovely to look at, fair-haired and modest.

But she was married and spurned the poet’s agile advances.

Petrarch channeled his rarefied feelings into the love poems and

showed his enduring contempt for men who perpetually pursue women.

Upon Laura’s death Petrarch’s hopeless grief surpassed his former

despair.

405
The Story I Wished for Them

At some weddings, the doubts in the air are as

palpable and unnerving as clear-air turbulence. I remember one where

the bridegroom did not look at the bride throughout the

ceremony, despite her increasingly frantic attempts to make eye contact.

He was like a coldhearted man on the subway, she

a panhandler. Fiona Dembosky and Ben Shirazi were the opposite.

They locked eyes until one perfect tear slid cinematically down

her cheek. “I didn’t have any prewedding feelings of, ‘Oh,

is this the right thing?’ ” she recalled. “I knew Ben.

I knew that he loved me and I loved him.”

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Andrea Perlbinder and Garth Stein” by Lois Smith
Brady.

406
Mrs. Shirazi Takes a Taxi to Dr. Shengold’s Office

“1199 Park Avenue, driver.” Mohammed is a polite man, but

a vicious driver. Perfect combination. He doesn’t smile in his

license picture or in the front seat. But he gets

me there. As we pull up in front of Dr.

Shengold’s building, I scan the cracked leather seat, running my

fingertips over the broken surface, curiously warm in spots. I

trace the winkled stickiness of masking tape, making sure I

have everything, I reach around my boots to find my

bag, feel the remnants of yesterday’s snow, and slice the

palm of my hand on a broken and rusting umbrella.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Life After Yes by Aidean Donnelley Rowley.

407
A Collection of Images Frozen in Time

Louisa Calloway sips her coffee in her home in Nyack.

She stares at her high school yearbook, a collection of

frozen images, a lost world in which time stands still.

Most everybody is gone. She hasn’t seen Fiona in years.

The pictures seem to be a day old to her.

She still laughs at the drama club portrait, still

remembers the shouting when the football team won the regional.

And there she is on page thirty, she and Fiona.

Louisa Calloway looks at herself in her drill team uniform.

Wonders where that girl went. Wonders where Fiona Dembosky went.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story collection The Water Museum by Luis Alberto Urrea.

408
Esther Writes a Despairing Entry in her Diary

20 September. — Only resolution and habit can let me make

an entry tonight. I am too miserable, too low-spirited, too

sick of the world all in it, including life itself,

that I would not care if I heard this moment

the flapping of the wings of the angel of death.

I am weary tonight and in low spirits. I cannot

but think of Ben, and how different things might have

been had he never met Fiona. If need be, tonight

shall be sleepless . . . Already the sudden storm is passing and

its fierceness is abating. I have felt and suffered much . . .

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker.

409
The Department of Krinsky Studies

I am chairman of the department of Krinsky studies at

the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Krinsky studies in North America in

March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with

intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to

the chancellor that we might build a whole department around

Krinsky’s life and work, he was quick to see the

possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. The chancellor

went on to serve as adviser to Nixon, Ford and

Carter before his death on a ski lift in Aspen.

The college is renowned as a result of Krinsky studies.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo.

410
Oscar in the Evening

Oscar had taken a piss and now sat alone in

his living room sipping Starbucks and staring out the window

at the city where it lay in the evening sunlight.

He heard the muted siren of a passing police car.

The room was in disarray, as usual, and needed dusting.

This lonesome evening he thought of nothing, nothing at all.

In the end there was nothing left but obscure memories,

vague notions that might just as well have been fantasies.

Or dreams that he had dreamed and then had forgotten,

seeing them resurface in a blurred image at random moments.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Silence by Jan Costin Wagner.

411
Oscar Staring Out the Window

The view from the window at evening is endlessly fulfilling.

It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions

and vague cravings. It satisfies every childlike curiosity, every muted

desire, whatever there is in me of the scientist, the

poet, the primitive seer, the watcher of fire and shooting

stars, whatever obsessions eat at the night side of my

mind, whatever sweet and dreamy yearning I have ever felt

for nameless places faraway, whatever earth sense I firmly possesses —

all these are satisfied, all collected and massed in that

living body, the sight I see from the open window.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story collection The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo.

412
Drowning in Finnegan’s Wake

In college Oscar Berg began to understand the range of

his instability. He had made it to his sophomore year but

he definitely entered a decline in his ability to accept

reality. He ignored his studies and read French poets, the

international bilingual quarterly Botteghe Oscure, New World Writing, but

the

downfall seemed to be the Russians and, especially, James Joyce’s

Finnegans Wake which was an intoxicating paradigm of how the

mind worked. This was a book that he drowned in.

Ulysses was life on land but Finnegans Wake was a

vast ocean in which you found exhaustless places to swim.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Summer He Didn’t Die by Jim Harrison.

413
Oscar’s Vain Search for Transcendence

Oscar Berg never tired in his search after that transcendental

and supernatural secret of the Absolute and he did not

recognize that the great secret of the transcendental, the miracle

of the metaphysical is that it does not exist. The

very notion that one might imagine the strange sublunary poetry

which lies in a particle of an inch at the

other end of a microscope was so wantonly extravagant that

he was destined to be mocked for spending his whole

life, both interest and principal, in a vain search for it.

While he was lost in his quest, life eluded him.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Haunting Melody by Theodor Reik; Poetry of the Universe: A
Mathematical Exploration of the Cosmos by Robert Osserman; The Ambassadors by
Henry James; The Angry Theater by John Russell Taylor; Song of Myself by Walt
Whitman; Don Juan by George Gordon, Lord Byron; Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak;
and The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold Schoenberg.

414
Oscar in the Morning in Far Rockaway

When I woke it was half-past eight. I found my

swimming-goggles, wrapped them with a comb in a towel, and

went down-stairs and walked up the street to the beach.

The tide was about half-way out. The beach was smooth

and firm, the sand yellow. There was nobody on the

beach, but in the distance, a pod of surfers bobbed

in the water, waiting for waves. Although the tide was

going out, there were a few slow rollers. They came

in like undulations in the water, gathered weight of water,

and then broke smoothly on the sand. I waded out.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Taking the A Train to Summer” by Ben Detrick and
the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.

415
I Have Become Lost to the World

I pick up a book of poems. I read the

line “I am lost to the world” as “I have

become lost to the world,” which, I believe, is less

self-pitying, less melodramatic, and more resigned, more confused. I have

become lost to the world / In which I otherwise wasted

so much time. The poem is about the life of

an artist, which I am not. But I understand, primally

almost, the concept of losing, of loosing oneself from the

world, of disappearing into a different place, one of retreat

and safety, of the twinned yearnings of escape and discovery.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.

416
On Writing

All my writings are chapters from my most personal experience,

but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.”

The things that happened to me in my life have

already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded

them and given them shape and contours with crystal-like symmetries.

Recording things as they happened means enslaving oneself to memory,

which is only a minor element in the creative process.

To my mind, to create means to order, sort out

and choose the words and pace that fit the work.

Materials from one’s earthly journey ultimately forge an independent

creature.

__________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Operation Shylock: A Confession by Philip Roth.

417
The Opiate of the People

I have a virtuoso collection of wounds and angers. I

began to hoard them at a young age. I have

a veritable museum of grudges! Even as a child I

doubted the beneficence of God. There was a rage in

me, a bitterness, a resentment against something, or someone – I

could not say what. One night, wide awake, I suddenly

knew. Yes, it was God, this God of my parents

who prayed to Him so fervently, assuring me that God

knows everything, is everywhere, perceives our most secret thoughts,

protects

us. How could this God, this protector, let me suffer?

__________________________________________

Paraphrases from the autobiography My Young Years by Arthur Rubinstein.

418
V.I. Lyuzhin Feeds his Hatred in Exile

The more time Lyuzhin spent in exile, the more hours

he read foreign newspapers for news of the world, internalizing

strands of anti-Tsarist grievance. He valued rhetorical effect over

consistency

of argument. His lines of poetry might be labored and

archaic, but from time to time, he could turn a

memorable sentence. Describing his impervious defiance in the name of

the New Dogma, he wrote: “The swimmer in the sea

does not fear rain.” When he was not elegant, he

was at least clear: “The freedom that you call for

is for the capitalists only. The proletariat suffers under oppression.”

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve
Coll.

419
The Abuses of Capitalism

I have found that the need to assume that the

ruling capitalist class is benevolent is the chief reason for

denying the reality of the abuses of capitalism. The proletariat

feels that they cannot survive without their capitalist rulers; they

need to believe that someone is shielding them from evil,

starvation and death — that they are living in an ordered

universe presided over by a benevolent god. It is hard

for the proletariat to maintain any joy or much sense

of purpose in the face of feeling exploited and abused.

The proletariat’s craving for denial is an obstacle to revolution!

V.I. Lyuzhin
December 16, 19–
Zurich, Switzerland

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts about Therapy, Hate, Love and Memory
by Leonard Shengold.

420
V.I. Lyuzhin’s Early Years in Exile

Owing to his having escaped the clutches of the law

by his flight to Switzerland in May, 19–, no formal

legal indictment, was drawn up against V.I. Lyuzhin at the

time. It was not until some seven years later that

his case was gone into systematically by the Tsarist authorities,

in connection with his banned writings. His one desire was

to settle in Zurich — which pleased him because it was

not a large town — and develop in tranquility the new

world that was shaping itself within him. The idea of

revolution was still pulsating within him, still clenching his spirit.

_____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography The Life of Richard Wagner by Ernest Newman.

421
V.I. Lyuzhin Returns from Exile

Late one spring afternoon, in the year 1917, a sealed

railway car paused for a moment before crossing a bridge

over a river. From it descended a stocky figure with

a bald and bulging head. The train immediately proceeded on

its way. V.I. Lyuzhin, leader of the revolutionary Party, was

returning to his homeland after a decade of exile in

Zurich to take the reins of the Revolution. The compact

man dressed in shabby clothes looked about him then walked

on undaunted by his project. His role was cast. The

plan of action was determined and the end irrevocably fixed.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Rules of the Game by Stewart Edward White, the
poem “Hamlet” by Boris Pasternak, and the article “On this Day: Lenin Returns
from Exile” by Dennis Cummings.

422
Enemies of the State

The Central State Hospital housed the insane as well as

enemies of the state — writers, intellectuals, artists: persons who expressed

forbidden ideas, or simply individuals who failed to exalt the

state and the New Dogma, such as Ivan Vremsky, an

art professor who had libeled the work of the great

Potemkin, official state portrait artist, whose works, including portraits of

Krinsky and all the party secretaries, adorned the halls of

power in the capital and whose depictions of the glorious

revolution and the persons who made it inspired the proletariat

to heroic sacrifices in the name of the New Dogma.

423
The Administration of the Central State Hospital

The New Dogma blighted the bright promise of human life.

Society in whole became one vast Inferno, wretched and foul.

Citizens of the state were slaves, hounded and persecuted, woeful

victims of the most pervasive tyranny modern history has known.

A faceless bureaucracy managed the state under the New Dogma.

The entire government was a labyrinthine structure of governmental

offices:

like atoms arranged in molecular clusters, themselves arrayed in crystals.

The Central State Hospital was run by one central administration:

State Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle Against

Counterrevolution and Sabotage.

The hospital was but one penal institution devised to dehumanize.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The First Circle by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn.

424
Vremsky Libels The Great Potemkin

With the splendid innovations of his green period, the Great

Potemkin confounded the critics of the age, stilling their imprecations.

The soaring versatility of his monochromatic inspiration galvanized a

whole

generation of artists and gave rise to an exhilarated movement.

Schools flourished under his illustrious influence and extravagant works,

based

on the Potemkin exemplar, filled galleries with their refined

expressiveness.

Potemkin was the light of the era; his creations predominated.

With the Revolution and the rise of the New Dogma

Potemkin moved from abstract expressionism to Dogmatic Realism and

his

vision grew sterile, weak and repetitive. His ingenuity foundered.

Professor Ivan Vremsky

Central State University
October 25, 19–

425
The Educative Function of Art under the New Dogma

The docent explained the pictures to the crowd of museum-goers,

superciliously but not without insight, and showed them what Potemkin

had attempted and what they must see in his portraits.

The uncritical citizens listened to the lecture with bewildered interest.

The earnest style had entirely satisfied their naive aesthetic sensibilities.

The vague idealism, the suspicion of a philosophical idea which

underlay the titles Potemkin gave his pictures, accorded very well

with the educative function of art under the New Dogma.

Here was a stern moral appeal; and the contemplation of

these works could help the proletariat lead a higher life.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham.

426
The Artist and the New Order

Only the Krinskyites are naive enough to think that an

artist can fit into society. That’s because they don’t know

what an artist is. What can the state do with

the real artists, the seers? They think that a toady

like Potemkin is an artist. There is absolute opposition between

the creator and the state. So there’s only one tactic

for the state — kill the seers. If the idea of

society is to dominate the idea of the individual,

the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be such things

as

seers if the state did not try to suppress them.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Life with Picasso by Françoise Gilot and Carlton
Lake.

427
The Great Potemkin on the Art of Portrait Painting

In one of his essays on painting, the Great Potemkin

had expressed the opinion that a face cannot adequately be

described in words, or even in sculpture, that it was

a province exclusively of the painters, that the recognition of

a face was wholly dependent upon the ineffably expressed variations

of light and color for which language had few words

and sculpture no shapes and that of the infinite variety

of angles and intersections that make a smile, language has

no inkling: not even no words, but not even numbers.

Only the great visual artists could describe a human face.

_________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.

428
Portrait of Krinsky

Krinsky was a large, burly man standing five feet eight

inches tall, with a big bald head and the strong,

hairy body of a brawler, with a face that could

convey so much, a decisive jaw and stern dark eyes

and a sizable mouth he could twist every which way,

and a low commanding voice emanating from deep down that

always had a little growl in it, a man conscientiously

on the grand scale who looked as if he could

stand up to anything and easily fulfill the role of

a prophet, the embodiment of invulnerable resistance and powerful will.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Humbling by Philip Roth.

429
Krinsky: A Critical View

Krinsky’s preoccupations with class struggle, with reform, with the

elevation

of mankind, with the primacy of an ordered society, with

the importance of pursuing the ideal and especially with human

misery, are now our own primary preoccupations, for the better.

I am convinced that throughout history they have always been

the preoccupation of men and women concerned with the betterment

of their lives and those of their fellow mortal creatures.

We need to acknowledge Krinsky’s achievements; we do not need

to revere his errors. We must not idolize the man.

He taught us much; there is still much to learn.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst by J.
Moussaieff Masson.

430
The Funeral of Zelenyi

His coffin was in a large room, and people filed

by. Music was playing the entire time on a beautiful

grand piano. There were so many people and lots of

agents from the Committee for State Security, and they shamelessly

took photographs of the people there. But nobody cared. The

coffin was lowered, and then people refused to leave. This

was the main thing. People refused to leave. They read

the poetry of Gruzhin. It was amazing. Everyone there made

a statement that Zelenyi was a human being. He became

a radiant symbol of one man’s defense of free expression.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Pasternak’s Funeral: A Poetic Protest.”

431
Ben Writes about FDR’s Presidency

The last term in my last year of college sputtered

out in a week-long fusillade of examinations and research projects.

There was a last paper on FDR’s presidency for which

I would have to make one exasperating last visit to

the library, the dead core of my education, the white,

silent kernel of every empty Saturday I had spent trying

to ravish the faint charms of the study of accounting.

So I came around the concrete corner that gave way

to the granite steps of the library. I entered and

asked the librarian for two books I had on reserve.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon.

432
Ben Shirazi Uses the Library Photocopier

I spent the morning at the library researching my project.

It was an irritating morning, as it turned out, because

the librarian would not allow me to use the photocopier.

“Sir, this is for staff use only,” the librarian said.

“There’s a coin-operated one on the third floor for use

by the public, but this photocopier is for staff only.”

I told the librarian that Oscar Berg always let me

use this machine — that it never posed a problem before.

The librarian said, “Then Mr. Berg is breaking the rules.”

Mr. Berg was a lovely and helpful, nervous little guy.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Half Moon Street by Paul Theroux.

433
The Young Oscar Berg Struggles with School Rules

Our world revolved around school rules, rules as mysterious and

arcane as the murkier corners of a papal cabal. Bottom

button of blazer open or not, left hand in pocket

or not, diagonal or straight crossing of the courtyard, running

or walking on the lawn, books in right hand or

left, blue ink or black, cap tipped forward or back.

There was no cribsheet, no list to consult, no house

book embossed Rules. Regulations merely existed, bobbing to the surface

of school life. We took their randomness, their rigidity, their sheer

number, for granted, and we obeyed because they were there.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel What I Was by Meg Rosoff.

434
Ben Writes a Sonnet for Fiona

Ben realized soon after he met Fiona that he had

never been so aroused by a female; his desire for

her showed him a part of his nature he had

not known to exist; he was seized by a biological

force that had nothing to do with the mind, and

he was driven to have her. Fiona was a lovely

girl with elongated gray eyes like a cat’s, perfect teeth,

a straight nose, a lithe, frank body. After their first

coupling Ben wrote a sonnet and left it beside her;

rhyme and meter came easily to Ben. Fiona inspired him.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry.

435
Fiona’s First Orgasm

All those jubilant juiced-up raunchy times when I had made

such good use of my skin — fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twelve,

lying on my bed, a Sidney Sheldon book propped up

on my prepubescent belly, wetness puddling at the base of

my vagina, drawing the slickness out until I became a

singular sensation, a crest. My God. I can recall my

first orgasm at age eight, the sudden surprise of tipping

over into a new space, new muscles doing new dances.

Through my sexuality I had always felt in contact with

an essential self, something unalterably and preeminently true and female.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the memoir Prozac Diary by Lauren Slater.

436
Fiona Is Abducted

Fiona doesn’t like oral sex because she was once forced

to do it at gunpoint, in a car, in the

parking lot next to the railroad tracks, outside the bar

where the guy picked her up. I wish she hadn’t

told me. I hear freight trains. I see people coming

out of the bar, laughing, drunk, going to their cars

while she crouches in misery and fear, the gun at

her head. How easy, if I had the gun at

his head, to pull the trigger. I would have raised

the revolver and shot the guy dead between the eyes.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from “The Collected Stories” of Leonard Michaels.

437
A Spy in the Adversary’s Camp

Up from the valley came the faint rattle of gunfire

and the distant cries of ISIS fighters charging on Raqqa.

From my vantage-point I had a view of the battle.

I was a new recruit, an American, not yet ready

for engagement with the enemy — too raw for hand-to-hand combat.

I spent days wandering unnoticed, ungreeted, and disdained, an alien

in a hostile land, tolerated but unwelcome — a suspect convert.

I strayed, like a lost soul, through an unreal desert,

ears ringing to conversations held in an annoying foreign tongue.

I longed for another American, for a word in English.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Running Elk by Rex Ellingwood Beach.

438
Ben Shirazi Attends a Church Service with Fiona

I am never more of a Jew than I am

in a church when the hymnal organ begins to sound.

I may be estranged at the Wailing Wall but without

being a stranger — I stand outside but not shut out,

and even the most ludicrous encounter serves to gauge, rather

than to sever, my affiliation with people I am unlike.

But between me and church devotion there is an unbridgeable

world of feeling, a natural and thoroughgoing incompatibility — I have

the emotions of a spy in the adversary’s camp overseeing

rites associated with the ideology responsible for persecuting countless

Jews.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Counterlife by Philip Roth.

439
The Collapse of the Krinskyite Regime

Ultimately the New Order collapsed under the weight of corruption.

Krinsky had not foreseen the consequences of failed utopian idealism.

What replaced the New Order was lawless, drunken and lost. The

nation’s traumatized people had been promised a paradise on earth.

Now, suddenly they had to fend for themselves. It was

social Darwinism at its most vicious. The strong preyed on

the weak, the weak went hungry, and the oligarchs reigned

supreme. They became the new Tsars. They blew through the

capital in bulletproof caravans surrounded by heavily armed security

details.

At night, the security details fought each other in the streets.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The English Girl by Daniel Silva.

440
Oscar’s Lunchtime Bathroom Break

As I see it, the stop at the men’s room

is of a piece with the morning’s work, a chore

like the other administrative chores I am responsible for, and

therefore, though it obviously doesn’t help the library administration, it

is part of my job in a way that the

lunch hour of sunlight, sidewalks and pure volition is not.

The library pays me to make six visits a day

to the men’s room — three in the morning, and three

in the afternoon: my work is segmented by stops in

this tiled decompression chamber to urinate on a deodorant cake.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker.

441
Oscar Unwinds

In the city at the end of the workday I

would generally take a walk for exercise and to unwind

after yet another session at the desk trying, with little

success, to make sense out of the queries of countless

library patrons, but also in the vain attempt to get

myself to feel like something other than a foreigner being

held against his will in a hostile and alien country.

A small-city boy to begin with, I could not see

a necessary or sufficient reason for my being a resident

of New York, the busiest, most congested spot on earth.

_______________________________
Paraphrases from the novel My Life as a Man by Philip Roth.

442
Ben’s Years at New York University

My teachers at the Collegiate School were either too starchy

or too folksy for my taste and I did not find

them as spellbinding as those I later had at NYU.

The professors at NYU seemed to me bristling with energy

and opinions — some of them decidedly and unashamedly left-wing

opinions.

Many of the NYU professors were Jews, excitable in a

manner hardly foreign to me, but even the ones who

weren’t Jews talked a lot faster and more combatively than

the teachers at Collegiate and brought with them into the

classroom an attitude that was sharper, harder and more vital.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Indignation by Philip Roth.

443
Professor Bloom Recalls Ben Shirazi

“He was something, silently slinking into class with all that

disheveled hair and then laying down the law on Kafka.

I remember those A students all reading Kafka’s Letter to

His Father and explaining exactly how ‘Metamorphosis’ and The Trial

derived from his relationship to his tyrannical and irascible father.

‘No,’ Shirazi said wearily, ‘it’s just the other way around.

His idea of his relationship to his father derives from

‘Metamorphosis’ and The Trial. By the time a novelist worth

his salt is thirty-six, he’s no longer translating experience into

fable – he’s imposing his fable into experience.’ So said Shirazi.”

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Deception by Philip Roth.

444
Ben Shirazi Graduates from New York University

As New York University receded behind him, Ben Shirazi imagined

the scene of his graduation. His father will be waiting

in Washington Square. Dr. Shirazi will not be cowed by

his son’s attainments, nor parade them too vainly before his

neighbors; but nor will his son be cowed any more

by his once overbearing father. They will greet each other

amicably, as equals. In a local pub they will clink

glasses, and Ben will be aware of a sense of

mission fulfilled. From his father Ben inherited conscientiousness and

self-reliance.

From his god-fearing mother Ben inherited his simple, sanguine faith.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Ever After by Graham Swift.

445
Ben Shirazi Meets R. Bruce McCain

Bruce McCain types on a computer pad at his desk.

I expected him to resemble a character out of a

David Mamet play, Hannibal, perhaps — profane, hard driving, a

scavenger.

Instead, his drooping eyes, jowly face, receding chin, and salt-and-pepper

toupee make him seem mild, hardly a dynamic managing partner.

He’s a sports fan — baseball memorabilia, trophies, and athletic

photographs

adorn his shelves and walls in his spacious corner office.

We sit down in uncomfortable vinyl client chairs and begin.

McCain opens the interview in a low voice, saying, “Accounting

is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional.”

____________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Corrupt Practices by Robert Rotstein.

446
The Great FDR

The president steps through the roaring curtain at Town Hall.

We applaud until our arms hurt and our hands ache.

We shout until the ushers set off flairs enforcing silence.

The orchestra tunes itself. The audience sings the national anthem.

The president and Mrs. Roosevelt are smiling in their box.

FDR is a strange fellow, I thought — not like the

other presidents we’ve had. Not like Harding. Not like Hoover.

He attracts mad adulation from the masses — that I know.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is loved and looked up to, a

mode of hope for millions. He has warm kind eyes.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “The President” from Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme.

447
New Hire, Ben Shirazi

There, in the men’s room at Deloitte, a revelation fell

upon Ben Shirazi, as complete and unbidden as those descending

on the prophets. Of all the possibilities opening before him,

the greatest was the chance to become someone else. He

didn’t yet know who that would be, only that it

would be a new and more estimable self, a Ben

Shirazi that perhaps always had dwelled within him, waiting for

the right moment to crack its shell and take wing.

He entered his new place of employment, catching bits and

pieces of his face reflected in his office’s glass door.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from Standing In from Exiles: Three Short Novels by Philip Caputo.

448
Ben Shirazi’s Early Years at Deloitte

His associates merely underrated him as a mildly pleasant fellow.

They thought of him as permanently several levels lower than

he would presently reach in the solid hierarchy of Deloitte.

They were therefore constantly unable to believe his creditable

achievements.

They assumed that the individual they had known shortly before

must have been arrested at the level they had observed.

Because he was treated with condescension, he made secret resolves,

I am quite sure, as any spirited person would, to

show the condescender how mistaken he had been. These resolves

don’t need to be openly stated or even secretly recognized.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Democratic Roosevelt by Rexford Tugwell.

449
New-Hire Ben Shirazi Studies Deloitte Culture

Upon being hired I worked out a personal strategic framework.

I arrived half an hour early each morning and followed

my own timetable for the day: fifty-five minutes of concentrated

work, then a five-minute break, including toilet breaks. I avoided

any unnecessary socializing along the way. I requested and took

home files documenting previous policy decisions so as to be

able to study which phrases recurred, and formed the basic

vocabulary, so to speak. I wanted to learn Deloitte culture.

I spent evenings and weekends studying various Deloitte structures and

investigating the informal communication networks that existed in the

firm.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Room by Jonas Karlsson.

450
Ben Shirazi and the Game of Money

In an effort to do good, to get Fiona’s attention,

Ben threw himself into work, and it became all about

the money, making enough to impress her and then enough

to protect himself, and just taking it in, making money

from money. There was so much money out there, money

that could be his for just having an opinion, a

point of view, making a good guess. It was the

game of money, the fun of money, it was addictive,

and he kept winning. He’d tell himself that he’d won

two million dollars, he’d won a big bonus, he’d won

the admiration of those around him who took it seriously.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes.

451
The Imposter

Though luck plays a part in poker, any player worth

a pair of deuces will tell you that poker is

a game of skill not a game of chance. For

Ben Shirazi, the poker playing accountant, it was his skill

at his profession that determined his fortune. But deep down,

Ben sometimes felt like a fake, an imposter. He silently

dismissed proof of success as luck, timing, or as a

result of deceiving others into thinking he was more intelligent

and competent than he believed. Had he flown too high

on bogus wings? Did his success rest on hollow ground?

452
Ben Shirazi Plays Poker at his Loft in TriBeCa

The poker games were at Ben’s place, where the poker

table was. There were six players, the regulars, Wednesday nights,

the business writer, the adman, the mortgage broker and so

on, men rolling their shoulders, hoisting their balls, ready to

sit and play, game-faced, testing the forces that govern events.

They played each hand in a glazed frenzy. All the

action was somewhere behind the eyes, in naive expectation and

calculated deceit. Each man tried to entrap the others and

fix limits to his own false dreams. Poker was funneled

essence, the clear and intimate extract of their daytime initiatives.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Falling Man by Don DeLillo.

453
The Mad Monk

Around the office, Frank Bergoglio was nicknamed the Mad Monk.

He was a former seminarian; five foot six inches if

he was lucky, forty or fifty pounds overweight, badly pockmarked,

nails bitten to the quick. A driven personality. The kind

to stay up all night working, to go three months

without taking off a weekend. A capable accountant, but he

was burdened by a zealot’s poverty of judgment. He burned

at too high a temperature to be worth much meeting

with clients, but he made a good assistant to Ben

Shirazi. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s celibate.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow.

454
Frank Bergoglio Shuns the Priesthood

Unlike most of my friends, I loved going to church

when I was a kid. It gave structure to my

life. And it had lots of rules. I was always

good at rules. It wasn’t until I was in college

that I started asking the hard questions about the rules.

I’ll never forget the look of pride on my dad’s

face when I told him I was going to the

seminary. But it just didn’t work out. I’ll never forget

the look of disdain when I told him I was

leaving the priesthood to become an accountant. He hated accountants.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Special Circumstances by Sheldon Siegel.

455
The Inscrutable Ben Shirazi

Ben Shirazi rarely confided his innermost thoughts to his family,

friends, and colleagues; at meetings he refused to take notes.

There were times when Ben seemed to delight in being

unreadable, like a book in a dead language written in

an undecipherable script. He delighted in his colleagues’ rampant

speculation

about whether he’d retire when he reached sixty. Perhaps his

reluctance to show emotion or reveal his inner feelings stemmed

from the inbred defensiveness of his forebears who lived for

generations as “Jews of discretion” in Muslim Iran, where one

person simply knew the other and knew him beyond question.

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace and the
article “An André Aciman Movie?” by Jake Marmer.

456
Ben Retires

In his late fifties Ben Shirazi, like almost all the

partners who reached that age except for the top three

or four, had retired from Deloitte; by then he was

worth easily five million dollars and he was soon sitting on

numerous corporate boards, eventually being named chairman of Procter

&

Gamble, for whom he’d done arbitrage in his early days.

He’d become a consultant to a Boston buyout firm

specializing in financial institutions, and always looked for potential

acquisitions.

Despite the continuing responsibilities and the demands on Ben’s time,

he continued to visit his parents on the West Side.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Everyman by Philip Roth.

457
From the Autobiography of Karl Krinsky

I left my native city of Trier at 20 and

spent eight years in solitude away from family, friends, and

a successful business career which I detested. When I left

my native city I associated no more with men of

my age, until I was drawn into the Socialist revival

of the early nineties, among Englishmen intensely serious and burning

with indignation with very real and very fundamental evils that

affected all the world. I starved myself socially and erotically

in order to let the grosser weeds die out and

make way for the ample growth of my inner garden.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from Sixteen Self Sketches by George Bernard Shaw and Young Man Luther
by Erik H. Erikson.

458
Krinsky’s English Translator

Krinsky was born abroad, and all his relatives were consumed

in some purge or massacre. I translate his books, and

live between his language and mine. I do other books

as well. (And it’s soothing to translate books that are

not essential, mere entertainments: novels, studies predicting the future.)

Of

course, I say I have to do them to make

a living. The old man’s books have never sold enough

to support him, so you can imagine how tiny a

sum is the small percentage of his royalties that accrues

to me. He smiles indulgently at my other literary activities.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from I, etcetera by Susan Sontag.

459
Krinsky’s Resentment

Karl and Hannah Krinsky endured a meager existence in London.

Their surroundings and lodgings were a dim world of bricks

and soot and screeching iron, of huddled tenements, of tiny

backyards, each with a privy and clothes boiler and washing

line, and everywhere an air of damp and sulfurous stench,

and a rough-hewn, rollicking, hugger-mugger, devil-may-care, peculiarly

London type of

good cheer that barely mitigated their woe, their worldly struggles.

Karl Krinsky, heavily-bearded, heavily indebted and suffering from

carbuncles, exclaimed:

“One day the proletariat will rise up and sunder the

shackles of the Old Order — and men will be free!”

_____________________________
Paraphrases from The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.

460
The Stench of Krinsky’s London

In the nineteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria

busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity,

either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or

decaying

life that was not accompanied by stench. People stank of

sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench

of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and

from their bodies, if they were no longer very young,

came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and

tumorous tissue. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys

and the stench of caustic lyes from the ubiquitous tanneries.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Perfume by Patrick Süskind.

461
Hannah Krinsky’s English Exile

At times a lava of talk came rushing out of

her, shreds of rage or reminiscence, in a jumble of

German and English; she complained that she was a prisoner

in this room, in this house, in this deprived land.

“England, this land without cultivation,” she would sob most days.

But I had begun to reassess these outcries — they seemed

more calculated than spontaneous. They were (I supposed this long

before) feints and trials. In reality they were the lamentations

of exile. It was not that she missed old comforts;

she missed old dignities. Her ideal was an aristocratic humanism.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick.

462
Oliver Krinsky Remembers his Grandparents

They always spoke in English to each other; it was

a matter of principle with them, although they must have

felt much more at home in their native German, its

idiom packed with idiosyncratic meaning for them. But they banished

that language, too proud to use it since they themselves

had been banished from its precincts. I myself, an English

child growing up in England, never thought of my grandmother

as anything but foreign. My grandfather Karl’s accent was so

impenetrable that it was sometimes impossible to understand what he

was saying (but then I did not understand him anyway).

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “Two Muses” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

463
The Aging Krinsky

Karl Krinsky had to face the permanent hardship of aging,

locked inside the shell of a man deprived of himself.

Hannah Krinsky could no longer care for her broken husband.

By this time, aging and infirm, she needed tending herself.

She cried whenever she saw him at the kitchen table.

His head in his hands, he was unable to eat

the kosher meals she had painstakingly cooked and reverently served.

“Try something,” she begged, but he ate nothing, said nothing.

Soon Hannah began to panic — she was at wit’s end.

She had never seen Karl give way like this before.

___________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Humbling by Philip Roth.

464
Krinsky Lies in State

Krinsky lay, as dead men always lie, in a specially

heavy way, his rigid limbs sunk in the soft cushions

of the coffin, with the head forever bowed on the

pillow. His yellow waxen brow with bald patches over his

sunken temples was thrust up in the way peculiar to

the dead, the protruding nose seeming to press on the

upper lip. He was much changed and grown even thinner

since V.I. Lyuzhin had last seen him, but, as is

always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer

and above all more dignified than when he was alive.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy.

465
Hannah Krinsky Mourns her Beloved Karl

As she approached the coffin, she said something and wept

and suffered. Suddenly she raised her head in surprise and

looked around. There had long been people in the room,

anxiousness, movement. She got down from the footstool and, staggering,

stepped away from the coffin, passing her palm over her

eyes, as if to squeeze out the remaining unwept tears

and shake them onto the floor. Some men went up

to the coffin and lifted it on three cloths. The

carrying out began. The mourners walked and walked and sang

The Internationale, the singing seemed to echo down the alley.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases from Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.

466
The Party Secretary Eulogizes Krinsky

His memory was like the other memories of the dead

that accumulate in every man’s life—a vague impress on

the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in

their swift and final passage; but before the high and

ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as

still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery,

I had a vision of him opening his mouth voraciously

as if to devour all humanity. He lived then before

me—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities;

draped nobly in the bountiful folds of a gorgeous eloquence.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

467
Ben Shirazi Remembers his Mother

My mother and Uncle Avram had an Orthodox upbringing — all

photographs of their father show him wearing a yarmulke, and

I was told that he woke up if it fell off

during the night. My father, too, came from an Orthodox

background. My grandparents were very conscious of the Fourth

Commandment

(“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”), and the

Sabbath was entirely different from the rest of the week.

No work was allowed, no driving, no use of the

telephone; it was forbidden to switch on a light or

a stove. My mother always lit candles on Friday night.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “Sabbath” by Oliver Sacks.

468
Ben Remembers His Mother’s Passover Preparations

How his mother’s memory, her meaning, expanded in Ben when

he recalled the alacrity with which she had prepared each

spring for Passover, all the work of packing away the

year-round dishes, two sets of them, and then lugging in

their cartons from the basement, the glass Passover dishes, washing

them, shelving them – in less than a day, between the

time Ben left for school in the morning and returned

in midafternoon, she’d emptied the pantry of chumitz and cleaned

and scoured the kitchen in accordance with every holiday prescription.

Was his mother serving necessity or was necessity serving her?

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth.

469
Fiona at Passover

As a Jew, Ben was never more than sporadically observant,

and in the course of our marriage my view, as

a gentile observer, of the annual transit of Jewish holidays

across their queer lunar calendar, with all their Byzantine statutes

and elusive significance, had come to resemble my view, as

a baseball fan, of the great test matches of cricket.

But I had always had a soft spot for Passover.

I got a strong feeling of satisfaction from sitting down

to eat a mad meal of parsley, bones, hard-boiled eggs,

crackers, and salt water with a bunch of Persian Jews.

__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.

470
Oscar’s Solitary Way of Life

Not without hardship I’ve conquered the solitary’s way of life.

I know its tests, limitations and satisfactions and over time

have shaped the scope of my needs to its limitations,

long ago abandoning excitement, intimacy, adventure, and antagonisms

in favor

of quiet, steady, predictable contact with nature, reading and work.

Why invite the unanticipated, why court any more shocks or

surprises than those that life would be sure to deliver?

I am a ghost, a man who’s cut himself off

from sustained human contact and its possibilities, yielding to the

illusion that the exploration of the inner world will suffice.

____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Exit Ghost by Philip Roth.

471
No Exit

I sit down at my desk and for another hour

record in my composition book everything I have been thinking.

I smile to myself as I see on paper what

I thought last night before I dozed off at midnight.

I am reminded of a story about Sartre coming out

of his study one day and recognizing that he was

condemned to the perpetual struggle of being caused to see

himself as an object from the view of another consciousness.

A working title, I think, and record in the white

window of the composition book the words No Way Out.

My barren life has become a hell with no exit.

____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth.

472
Oscar Berg and Library Bureaucracy

Oscar Berg was now an old hand, both at the

work and at the landscape of bureaucracy. He was intimate

with every folly and every fall. (Ah, but he did

not expect his own fall.) He was a witness to

every succession. (Ah, but he did not expect to be

succeeded himself.) The bureaucracy was a faded feudal world of

territory and authority and hierarchy, mainly dusty, except at those

high moments of dagger and toppling. Through it all, Oscar

was seen to be useful: this accounted for his climb.

He was well acquainted with every permutation of library administration.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick.

473
Oscar Dreams about Getting Fired

In a dream, Oscar Berg enters a dimly-lit room. He

hears voices somewhere nearby. It is the Library Director and

a subordinate engrossed in heated discussion. Oscar makes out the

phrases, “gross misconduct,” “the Tsar” and “Russian Revolution,” while

the

dream image of the N.Y. Public Library is transformed into

a prison. Oscar begins to fear that he is about

to be interrogated. For most people, he thinks, the fear

of getting fired is no more than wallpaper — present but

rarely seen. Oscar, fully aware of his misuse of company

time, has no choice but to stare at this wallpaper.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer.

474
Oscar’s Day of Reckoning

Oscar dreaded his afternoon meeting with his boss, Phil Foglio.

How would Oscar Berg explain the countless hours he had

spent researching the assassination of the Czar and his family?

He felt a kind of panic like a frightened undergrad,

coming to an examination for which he had not studied.

It was the kind of panic that recurs in dreams,

the kind of dreams one has decades after leaving school.

The course one signed up for and forgot all about.

The examination overlooked until there’s nothing to do but fail.

How would Oscar explain himself to his boss, Phil Foglio?

_____________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel A Shooting Star by Wallace Stegner.

475
Oscar Imagines a Dire Fate

Oscar imagines with precision the minute before his execution. He

steps off the ladder on to the scaffold. Around him

crowds are shouting, yelling — ten thousand faces, twenty thousand eyes.

Oscar’s brain is especially active, and works incessantly — hard, hard,

hard — like an engine at full pressure. Various thoughts beat

loud and fast through his head — all unfinished ones, and

strange. He wants to mine every remembered second for its

every nuance, to sift through the mountains of ones and

zeros for every sensation that he can enlarge, dissect deconstruct.

In the final moments he knows, sees and understands everything.

________________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novels The Idiot by Feodor Dostoevsky and Mailman by J.
Robert Lennon.

476
Oscar Berg Imagines his Execution

To the Next of Kin:

I read Oscar Berg the judgment ordering his execution as

handed down by the Central Administration for his act of

using official hours to research and write a history of

the last Czar of Russia. As Berg was led down

the corridor he began to sob and to beg. When

he caught sight of the gallows, he relieved himself in

his pants and began to thrash about. Suddenly he clutched

his left shoulder, whimpered, “I don’t feel well,” and collapsed

and died of cardiac arrest. This is not the way

I would have had it. Please accept my sincere condolences.

Yours truly,

Phil Foglio
Director
New York Public Library

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Manners of Dying” by Yann Martel.

477
The Theatrical Oscar Imagines his Brother Franz’s Eulogy

Fellow mourners,

My brother, Oscar, was an artist, but also a man,

a man in every sense, in the highest sense. Because

he shut himself off from the world, they called him

hostile; and callous, because he shunned feelings. He fled the

world because he did not find, in the whole compass

of his loving nature, a weapon with which to resist

it. He withdrew from his fellow men after he had

given them everything and had received nothing in return. He

remained alone because he found no second self. Thus he

was, thus he died, thus he’ll live for all time!

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from Franz Grillparzer’s Funeral Oration for Beethoven.

478
V.I. Lyuzhin, the Party Secretary

Lyuzhin’s formal education gave shape and purpose to his hatred.

During his years at university, he gravitated toward the writings

of Krinsky and fellow students who preached the need for

radical change — first by words and then by armed violence.

Their creed was simple, strident and seductive. The Romanovs, their

European backers, and the bourgeoisie corrupted by capitalism were the

source of all that was wrong in Russia. Only by

revolution could the proletariat throw off the shackles of capitalist

exploiters and regain their true place in the world order.

V.I. Lyuzhin was determined to lead Imperial Russia to revolution.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Day of Wrath by Larry Bond.

479
Radical Jihadists

ISIS captures us, shots ring out, sand envelopes the encampment.

In that moment, in the wasteland, our fate is sealed.

Voices murmur, “Help. Help us.” They are the forgotten ones.

In the night, our hands are tied, we are blindfolded.

Uncertainties in the desert: sand storms, nocturnal scorpions, terror

brigades.

They will kill us in the darkness, a quick gunshot.

Intimidation is their game. They control through bluff and executions.

They amass here, from radically different callings, inspiring dread.

They are stealthy, composed in their strident authority — always

suspicious.

They are ascendant in dark places, they quarter like bats.

480
Ibrahim, the Radical Jihadist

Ibrahim’s formal education gave shape and purpose to his hatred.

During his years at university in Cairo and Oxford, he

gravitated toward fellow students and teachers who preached the need

for radical change — first by words and then by violence.

Their creed was simple, strident, and seductive. Israel, its American

and European backers, and those Arabs and Muslims corrupted by

Western money were the source of all that was wrong

in the Arab world. Only by armed struggle could the

peoples of the Middle East throw off the shackles of

their Western exploiters and regain their place in the world.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Day of Wrath by Larry Bond.

481
The Cult of Personality

The raw material of life fills us with dismal presentiments.

It carries within itself a persistent echo of the painful

features in our national development related to the cult of

personality that has been debunked and repudiated by the party,

features that, although they are not so far away from

us in time, nevertheless seem to us to be in the distant past.

But our past experience, no matter what it was like,

never becomes a matter of indifference to the present moment.

The assurance of a complete break with the past lies

in a true and courageous comprehension of its full consequences.

______________________________________
Paraphrases from Foreword by Alexander Tvardovsky to the novel One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

482
The Fall of Krinsky

This is the story of a man named Karl Krinsky,

who in his long life was called moral and immoral,

decent and scheming, omniscient and a figurehead, hero and fraud.

A complex life cannot be reduced to a single word,

but Karl Krinsky had something bold and soaring in his

personality that attracted extremes, and seduced a nation to adulation.

That boldness compelled him to do remarkable and unprecedented

things.

That boldness also led a nation to say that, at

the end, his failures destroyed whatever good he had done.

The celebration of virtue and accomplishment is wandering lost

somewhere.

_________________________________
Paraphrases from the biography Paterno by Joe Posnanski.

483
At the Circulation Desk

I picked up a novel off the shelf in the

fiction section of the library and peered at the cover.

A blurb promised “a riveting read with Tolstoyan sweep and

Dostoyevskian vitality,” which made me immediately put the book back.

I approached the circulation desk to check out another book.

The librarian had a thousand-watt smile, but there was something

cheerless about her all the same, one of those weird

disconnects that always send me rummaging through my own memories

of a disconnected childhood. My rule is never to get

chatty with librarians. I’ve learned to spike any budding conversations.

__________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Blow the House Down by Robert Baer.

484
Oscar Berg Has a Final Cup of Tea

My final cup of tea is my daily salvation. I

have it alone in the empty conference room, staring into

the wall in front of me with my back toward

the office. It’s a kind of daily meditation. My mind

goes headlong into a free-fall that lasts approximately for the

duration of my cup of tea. Those few vacant minutes

are the most gratifying of my entire workday. They settle

the dust of the day, and by the time I

reach the sugar at the bottom of the cup (I

don’t stir my tea) I am feeling a glorious emptiness.

_______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the story collection The Scatter Here Is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer.

485
Literary Genius

All the roil about the State of the Novel has

passed me by. In the evening while the portable dishwasher

rattles out its smell of burning motor oil, I sit

down at my desk and begin to write. I write

not without puzzlements and travail; but naturally like a bird.

I am devoted to accuracy, psychological realism, and earnest truthfulness;

also to virtue, and even to wit. I am not

troubled by what has happened to the novel: all those

declarations about the end of character and story. I am

serene. Sometimes it seems I might be a literary genius.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “Levitation” by Cynthia Ozick.

486
Ben Rises Early

Ben stood at the window and watched the day dawn.

The view was across bridges, narrows and sounds and out

past the boroughs and toothpaste suburbs into measures of landmass

and sky that could only be called the deep distance.

It was still nighttime down on the river, half night,

and ashy vapors wavered above the smokestacks on the banks.

He imagined the whores were all fled from the lamplit

corners by now, duck butts shaking, other kinds of archaic

business just beginning to stir, produce trucks rolling out of

the markets, news trucks streaming out of the loading docks.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo.

487
The Middle Aged Ben and Fiona at the Breakfast Table

My husband is an avid consumer of the morning news,

but does not subscribe to the time-honored spousal mealtime practice

of hiding behind a newspaper; he has his electronic tablet

at the breakfast table, where he scans the New York

Times, The Wall Street Journal and, on occasion, CNN, while

scarfing down rolls and orange juice, — me, well, I’m not

ready to face any of these options — morning is not

exactly my finest hour — and so I generally sip coffee

and just listen to his running commentary while feigning interest

in the Dow Jones Average or the president’s budget message.

_________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Asylum by Jeannette de Beauvoir.

488
Ben Mixes His Private Life and his Professional Life

Philip R. had got into a mess with his finances

and was having trouble with Internal Revenue. As an accountant

with a good many writers among my clients, I was

used to their irresponsible attitude to money — the way they

fall back on the excuse of artistic temperament for what

is, in fact, calculated tax evasion — and I was able

to sort things out for Philip R. and show him

how to keep more or less solvent. As a way,

of showing his gratitude, he took Fiona and me out

to dinner, then we had him over at our place.

_________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the short story “People Don’t Do Such Things” by Ruth Rendell.

489
The Dinner Party

The dinner party was memorable for its guest list, which

included Philip R., the well-known writer. I had heard that

he had been a client of Ben Shirazi’s but I

had no idea they socialized. The two met in 20—

when Philip was being investigated by the IRS for tax

evasion. The writer counter-attacked, accusing the federal auditors of

using

“KGB-like tactics.” Ben’s win-at-any-cost style, brashness and love for the

spotlight made an impact on the much older writer. Ben

was sitting to my left, Fiona opposite us, beside Philip,

the others seated around the table, friends for many years.

___________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the article “My Bizarre Dinner Party with Donald Trump, Roy
Cohn and Estee Lauder” by Peter Manso.

490
Philip R. Attends a Dinner Party at Ben and Fiona’s Loft in TriBeCa

The ideal thing for a writer is when he has

written all day — with minor interruptions thrown in — but, like

some latter-day Nick Carraway, needs to head out to a

dinner party. He doesn’t want to lose his momentum, but

he’s also eager to meet friends at the dinner. Half-way

through dinner, though, he can’t wait to get back. Yes,

company is always fun, but how utterly fantastic to get

back before midnight, and pick up exactly where he left

off at seven. Something someone said that evening caught his

attention. He’ll use it in the novel he is writing.

______________________________________________
Paraphrases from Goodreads Q&A with André Aciman.

491
Philip R. Visits Ben and Fiona’s Loft in TriBeCa

It was the sort of place I might have expected:

a four-thousand-square-foot loft that occupied the top floor of a

nondescript building on Duane Street. Entering for the first time,

I was struck by its fashionable quality, the sense it

conveyed of attaching great value to design. Not that it

was cluttered, or indeed feminine in any way; no, if

anything it was a minimalist affair with finished cement floors

and pipes conspicuously fastened to the ceiling. But each piece

of furniture seemed perfectly curated — lit and positioned just so —

and the walls featured impressive and forceful works of art.

___________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

492
The Party Guest

Ben and Fiona kept up a constant round of parties

at their Tribeca loft. Fiona’s particular friend was a client

of Ben’s, Philip R., then in his fifties, a hulking,

highly successful novelist. Fiona found him a “divine” party guest.

Despite his devoted marriage Philip had several well-established

homosexual relationships,

which accounted for Fiona’s lasting non-flirtatious friendship with him.

Philip

summed up how friends saw the Shirazis in his novel

The Accountant, where the lead protagonists, modeled on Ben and

Fiona, “love each other desperately, passionately. They cling to each

other like barnacles cling to rocks.” Fiona relished the attention.

____________________________________
From the biography Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise by Sally Cline.

493
Oscar Berg Reflects on Bachelorhood

I am a bachelor — at my age, a confirmed bachelor.

I don’t want anyone to pity me. I am content.

I imagine that couples often forget they are married; I

know that a person who is single remembers it every

day, like a broken promise, that dwindling inheritance he is

neglecting to spend. The married ones remind him of his

condition — children do, too. He feels called upon to apologize

or explain. He resists saying that he has made a

choice. Where is his act? Bachelorhood looks like selfish delay,

and the words are loaded: bachelor means queer, spinster — hag.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Consul’s File by Paul Theroux.

494
Oscar Berg Imagines Old Age

For some time now, Oscar Berg felt himself growing old;

never has become the key word: the many adventures he

will never undertake, the children he will never have, the

faraway places he will never discover, the cello he will

never learn to master — without ever fearing he will fail.

The passing years grow heavy; their weight drags him down.

Oscar tires more easily. He is often out of breath;

his mind wanders. His need to sleep becomes more urgent.

He’s lived a lot of years. How many does he

have left? He has wasted an appalling number of them.

_____________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Time of the Uprooted by Elie Wiesel.

495
Notes from Underground

When I died, no one was around to see it.

I died all alone with no one to witness it.

When I drew my last breath, no one saw me.

I lived alone. I had no children. I was the

only witness to my life, my decrepit, friendless, unenviable life.

You can take only one thought with you to the

grave, and invariably it is a thought that bugs you,

something that must be thought all the way through to

the end before you find peace. The thought I took

was “You are a joke, your life was a joke.”

__________________________________
Paraphrases from the story “My Life is a Joke” by Sheila Heti.

496
Fiona Receives a Cancer Diagnosis

When the verdict came from the specialist oncologist through the

general practitioner who was of their generation and in their

group of friends, Fiona was the one who answered the

early morning call. Every day Ben left their bed first,

accustomed to early rising. He came from the bathroom and

found her pressed back against the pillows with tears leaking

down her cheeks as if something inside her had suddenly

given way. He stopped at the open door. Before he

could speak she told him. There is no looking for

the delay of an appropriate time for such . . . what? News.

________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer.

497
The Clock Tower

A brick clock tower strikes eight times in the distance.

I stand alone in the shadow of an arcade nearby.

No one else is here, time’s progress has virtually stopped.

Then a cat appears and walks deliberately towards the tower.

The black cat is lost in the clock tower’s shadow.

A few moments later, I hear a man’s dampened footsteps.

Aged, he stands out alone, seemingly isolated, against his surroundings.

He is like an insignificant scrap from the morning newspaper.

By noon he is already out-of-date: a trivial, forgotten castoff.

The very image of the forlorn, he fears approaching death.

__________________________
Paraphrases from Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman and Jung & Hesse: A Record of
Two Friendships by Miguel Serrano.

498
Ben and Fiona Retire to Israel

Not far from the sea, Mr. Benjamin Shirazi lives on

Amirim Street, alone. He is fond of olives and feta.

A retired accountant, he lost his wife not long ago.

Fiona Shirazi died at home one morning of ovarian cancer.

Their only son, David, has gone off mountaineering in Tibet.

Here in Bat Yam the summer morning is hot and

clammy but on those mountains night is falling, mist is

swirling low in the ravines. A needle-sharp wind howls as

though alive, and the fading light looks more and more

like a nasty dream. Benjamin Shirazi stands by the window.

_______________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Same Sea by Amos Oz.

499
Benjamin Shirazi Stands by the Window

He is watching the departing day and waiting. What does

the last light promise, and what can it now deliver?

The sky turns gray. There are still some clouds, one

of which faintly reflects the glow of the overcast sky.

The setting sun is not visible from where he stands.

Night is falling. The streetlights are coming on, and windows

shine out between intervals of darkness. Time passes. Moments hasten.

The moonlight casts a mask of death on the city.

This place seems like the end of the world. He

does not mind being at the end of the world.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel Don’t Call It Night by Amos Oz.

500
Unsent Letter Found Among Fiona’s Papers

Belated Rosh Hashanah greetings to you! I was invited by

my new friends to a special dinner. I’ve been made

an honorary member of their circle. They’ve even given me

a new name: Naomi. The name is from the Bible,

which some of them claim to have read. As a

work of literature, it’s gotten mixed reviews. Our mailman says

that God was no Tolstoy. So now I have two

names. The plain one, Fiona, and Naomi. Can you believe

that an ordinary girl like me, from Nyack, NY, should

have so many identities? You’d think I was Mata Hari.

Naomi (Fiona)
Bat Yam, Israel
__________________________________________________
Paraphrases from the novel The Free World by David Bezmozgis.

501
 Afterward and Afterword
This is not a trick ending, for my story has no ending at all. I do not know
whether Oscar Berg will tell his boss, Phil Foglio about his use of
company time to write a book about the Romanovs — or, if he does,
whether Foglio will forgive Oscar — or whether he will fire Oscar. What I
do know is that Oscar will not hurl himself under a subway train. He
will not be hanged, stoned to death, branded or banished, and he will not
swallow arsenic. I do not think Phil Foglio will fire Oscar or call the New
York Police Department to have Oscar arrested; or that Foglio will
ultimately shun him because of the erotic pleasures Oscar revels in; or
that Oscar’s neighbors, scandalized, will ignore him. I hope Oscar will not
be fired by an employer that cannot tolerate the creativity of its
employees. I do not expect an angry jury, indignant over Oscar’s misuse of
company time, to declare him a sociopath or a lunatic or an unfit member
of civilized society. I imagine Oscar will continue to get by, enduring a
plodding existence, living each moment frame by frame.

As for me, I will continue to make my way in this life on a metaphorical

bridge of thoughts and perceptions from day to day to try to connect the
known with the yet unknown. My bridge, like the Brooklyn Bridge itself,
is made up of many planks: each single plank requiring the supplement of
others. Like Oscar Berg, I will traverse the passage from Brooklyn to
Manhattan, day in day out, moment by moment.

________________________________________
Paraphrases from The Erotic Silence of the American Wife by Dalma Heyn.

503