Review: If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



A Tale of Two Reviews

After finishing the book, I looked up and searched deep in my memory to find if I ever read a book that I liked and enjoyed that much or if any of my previous reading experiences came even close to this one. Most, if not all, other fiction books would pale in comparison with this book. It can be argued that it has everything a reader would hope to find in a fiction work and I think I'll have a tough time picking the next fiction book to read where the narrative follows the ordinary well-trodden path that will probably feel boring now. One of the most solid 5-star rating I gave to a book.

It's a profound piece of work that can't be described without giving away the pleasure of experiencing it; maintaining the excitement and promise that comes with the expectation of the first sentence and prolonging them with such a skilful and creative way of writing, capturing the essence of reading pleasure along the way. A clever, thought-provoking, and witty book about books, reading, and writing. For most of the time, I would raise my head for few minutes every couple of sentences to think about what I read and link it to my past experiences and pleasures or conjure future stories, I thoroughly enjoyed savouring and chewing it slowly, and I think most readers would do, given the right mood and frame-of-mind.

I haven't seen many myself so I'm trying to look into other cases where second person narrative was used, but this one was almost perfect, and keeping its momentum for that long required such a mastery of the art that propels Calvino to the shortlist of top creative writers in modern age, though sometimes a reader might find it difficult to yield to the wit of the writer. I can't help but think as well about who Calvino is; is he Flannery, or is he Marana? Sometimes I think he got the best of both.

However, I can also understand this review, by another me, in a different place and time:

I think I will never fathom how on earth could a writer pull such a lazy stunt of literary nothingness; sometimes I have to raise my hands in the air and admit that some things are beyond me. A fiction where nothing happens but nonetheless carries on for 260 odd pages and some readers, somehow, manage to finish it. I wonder as well how can any reader keep going on with the type of lazy second person narrative that shows such a condescension and self-absorption.

Can't any writer fill pages and pages with something like:
"I can write a review or I may decide not to. If I write someone might read it and another one might skim through the lines and others decide to do without it altogether. You, reader, might love, like, hate, or loathe it, you might be reading it in the underground or sitting on a sofa or lying in a bed, on a computer, or phone, or .....", and so on inking pages and pages, wasting our time and adding to our frustration.

In addition to writing first chapters, playing around with contrasts and opposites here seems to be another obsession of the writer, but also an easy way of filling pages if the publishers keep ringing every day and you can't meet deadlines. It's easy; write something and its opposite then highlight the contrast and don't forget to add the deep contemplative touch.

Stay away from this experimental book, unless you have nothing better to do than wasting your time with a megalomaniac self-obsessed writer who thinks he's so smart when he sets everything to go in circles. I got the feeling at times that he wanted to capture the spirit of his character Marana and spoil the act of reading forever.

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Review: The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



A brilliant novella, poignant and surreal, with many interpretations and comparisons to the modern human life with its feelings of alienation and estrangement.

A sensational first sentence, like that of his other novel 'The Trial', starts a terrific first chapter (out of three comprising the novella), where the protagonist deals with his predicament normally and with insistence on carrying on and going to work until he encounters the rejection and revulsion from others and starts to feel the shame and guilt.

It is a scary story as well. In a sense, anyone can be exposed to metamorphosis with different forms, severities, and abruptnesses. The simplest of which is what we all underwent, from being once children, then youths, men and women, and shortly elderlies, in addition to other life conditions and changes in views and personalities.

There are many ways to look at the story. On the first few pages it looked as if extreme working conditions with neglect to personal needs and diversions turn people, in a surreal way, into vermin and leads to their isolation. It can be thought of that the way the protagonist was treated was what turned him into a monster not the other way round. And unlike others, I can't find he family can be blamed either; it can be argued that it was merely an understanding problem because of the lack of communication. The different views and angles are a testimony to the brilliance of such timeless thought-provoking works.



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Review: Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



POLO: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of your lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.
KUBLAI: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars nicknamed Kublai Khan and Marco Polo; as they sift through a rubbish heap, piling up rusted flotsam, scraps of cloth, wastepaper, while drunk on the few sips of bad wine, they see all the treasure of the East shine around them.
POLO: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.



That’s a taste of what you’ll find in the poetic descriptions of imagined cities by Marco Polo and his conversations with Kublai Khan.



Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.



Perhaps the most eccentric book I’ve ever read to date, and certainly the most difficult to describe. I really found it challenging at times to go through till the end and at some pointI thought I'll never do it. To be honest that was because of the magical descriptions of some cities that forced me to re-read over and over again and I seemed never to progress, which, thinking about it now, might not have been necessarily a bad thing.



Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: "Journeys to recover your future?"
And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."



I enjoyed it for most parts but maybe I'll appreciate it more in a different age, time, location, or state-of-mind. I generally blame the bustling London for my diminishing capability of tasting poetry and books of this nature, or probably I needed to find the substance Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, or rather Calvino, were smoking.



"And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Kublai said. "It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations."
"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."



I must say though that I found some city descriptions to be just ludicrous and too gaudy and tacky by any means and with any state of mind, of course one doesn't expect all the poems in a book to be up to the same level or to taste all of them equally, but at some point I had to say this is absolute nonsense; The emperor has no clothes and all that glistens is not gold. But some other cities were just brilliant; Mauralia, the metropolis, formerly provincial city, is one of them:

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.



Descriptions of cities at times were descriptions of human emotions and experiences. Each city gives the readers something to think about, and some will resonate with their experience.



Chloe, Eutropia were memorable, as well as Baucis, Leandra. I found the cities of the dead to be particularly intriguing, my favourite of which is Adelma:

I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask."
The stevedores climbed the steps in a line, bent beneath demijohns and barrels; their faces were hidden by sackcloth hoods; "Now they will straighten up and I will recognise them," I thought, with impatience and fear. But I could not take my eyes off them; if I turned my gaze just a little toward the crowd that crammed those narrow streets, I was assailed by unexpected faces, reappearing from far away, staring at me as if demanding recognition, as if to recognise me, as if they had already recognised me. Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidoscope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.
I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy."




A recommended read for the dreamers and poetry fans out there , but like other works of similar nature, it definitely needs a contemplating mood and a quiet location away from the city; maybe in the country or in a park, under a tent in the middle of wilderness or lying on a beach. Otherwise, in a bus for instance, it will sound ridiculous (or more ridiculous than it really is if you don’t like it)



Cecilia the continuous city, Olinda the city that grows in concentric circles were special. Irene as well:

If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.
For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is a city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

Eusapia; another dead city

They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.

Raissa, the unhappy city

Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

Thekla:

If you ask "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer "So that it's destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city."

Trude:

"You can resume your flight whenever you like," they said to me, "but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes."

And Perinthia; the city that was modelled following astronomer’s calculations:

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.



I re-read the book trying to contain it entirely in my mind. Reading it quickly, I thought, might present a better view; since patterns and are better discerned at a distance. Then a third time to extract my favourite parts, and started to realize it’s not nearly as bad as I might thought at times, and that I will probably revisit it again in the future, perhaps then I will be able to find the meanings that eluded me, or I’ll learn how to imagine clothes to put on the emperor’s naked body.



Kublai asks Marco, "When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?"
"I speak and speak," Marco says, "but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."



And a perfect ending

He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."



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A Pale Blue Dot -- Carl Sagan

"Consider that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Review: God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Hitchens' case against organized religion and the God hypothesis. It's his version of Dawkins' "The God Delusion", with more disdain and contempt for religion; all but no one here was spared the jarred blade of criticism, even the likes of Gandhi. Like the case with Dawkins' book, even though my viewpoint towards religion didn't change much, I nonetheless felt much more informed by the time I had finished the book, with its countless historic and philosophic references and citations that need pursuing. Staying with the inevitable comparison between the two books, they almost followed the same line that some chapters even had similar titles, which of course can be expected since both are dealing with the same matter and disparaging the same arguments, though for me "The God Delusion" was more distinct with its scientific eye-openers, while "God is not Great" focused more on history and politics.

On a personal note, I found the use of language here quite interesting. At some point I could confidently say that no adjective was used twice anywhere in the book. The richness of vocabulary used, despite being frustrating for me at times, was fascinating and entertaining in itself. I'd be glad if I referred to the dictionary only once per chapter on a second reading. I also found myself lost sometimes amidst references from all over the history timeline and from all over the world to prove or disprove a point, I felt in few chapters that the point could have been made clearer towards the end. Most of the chapters though had perfect punchlines and the book generally is full of splendid quotes.

A more detailed review and a number of quotes and excerpts should follow soon, hopefully, after a quick skim through the pages once again.



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Review: The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904

The Lady With the Little Dog and Other Stories, 1896-1904 by Anton Chekhov

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



After finishing this collection, I realised I've been reading it, on and off, for almost a year in between other readings. I also realised I read the book in all formats; paperback for few weeks until I had to return it to the library, ebook on computer, kindle edition on tablet, and on mobile. It accompanied me in different countries, seasons, and moods. I managed to enjoy these Russian tales over the weeks and months, and it was generally an entertaining as well as thought-provoking read overall.

By shear coincidence, my reading order started with "The House with the Mezzanine", "A Visit to Friends", "Ionych", and "The Lady with the Little Dog" which I, admittedly, thought were slightly monotonic, revolving around the same themes, locations, and characters; the idle Ivan Ivanichs/Dimitri Dimitrichs sipping tea with rich noble families in their drawing rooms, falling in love with the young tender slender daughter playing the piano, and discussing the meaning and purpose of life. Then came the trilogy "Man in a Case, Gooseberries, and About Love" with its special and memorable characters. The splendid "The Bishop", the incomplete story "Disturbing the Balance", and "The Bride" followed, I previously read numerous short stories that were probably inspired by the first, and I think the latter is one of the best in the collection and can be interpreted on different levels. The shocking and jarring depiction of the appalling conditions of the lower class in "Peasants", in addition to human cruelty in "In the ravine" came next. Then finally was the impressive and thought-provoking novella "My Life" with its protagonist's decision to desert the town life with it corrupt bureaucrats and pursue a manual labour life, describing the brutality and scornful side of peasant life as well, and discussing the social debates of that time. So, overall it was something like a panoramic view of the whole Russian society at that time starting from the rich noble families all the way to the lowest class, with the final novella to have both ends in the same story.

I was particularly fascinated throughout the whole collection by the realistic characters that you can understand their motives and relate to their feelings despite the time and distance from the 19th century Russia, in addition to the vivid descriptions and disconcerting endings. It has been indeed an interesting journey for a year with the stories of Chekhov who's among the few who influenced the very art of short story - now I recognize that many other short stories I read were inspired by his style, and I'd strongly recommend this collection though I don't know where it stands if compared with other collections of the same author.



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Review: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



As one of the reviews on the cover described it, "A Perfect Introduction to Science", which it is indeed. Another well-written book by Richard Dawkins, much lighter and simpler than most of his books, mainly targeting more general readers serving to find the magic in truth rather than myths, and to show how reality can be sometimes more entertaining than fiction.

For me, there was little new there but I thoroughly enjoyed the way it was written and the calm and patient approach to explaining scientific concepts. Each chapter discussed a scientific topic or phenomenon, it started with listing some of the legends that tried to explain this subject, then slowly discussing the scientific explanation of the phenomenon focusing on the beauty of the truth and how it can be more magical (not in the supernatural sense of the word) than the myths and fantasies created and passed on over generations.

This is an essential read to help increase basic science literacy. The light version of science here might appeal to the general reader who finds it difficult to read a science book. The introduction and final chapter can serve as an eye-opener for some readers, though you would normally think that a Richard Dawkins' reader will normally be already familiar with these ideas.



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The Lucky Ones -- Richard Dawkins

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

The story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.

It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

Films of the year

Michael Aneke's minimalist masterpiece 'Amour' was truly remarkable, Tarantino's 'Django Unchained' had all the entertaining madness you'd expect from him, the Terrence-Malick-style surrealism in 'Beasts of the Southern Wild' was surprisingly well-crafted and the engaging journey of Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi' was a visual pleasure, Kathryn Bigelow's thriller 'Zero Dark Thirty' was even better than 'The Hurt Locker' which swept the Oscars few years ago (it has the potential to become an American classic for post 9/11 period) and 'Argo' was probably even better, 'Silver Lining's Playbook' was a pleasant feel-good movie, and Spielberg's 'Linclon' was a taut political thriller .. but Tom Hooper's magnificent achievement 'Les Miserables' is my favorite film this year despite a few flaws; it wins the Kirollos' award for picture of the year!

The Reckoning

Sometimes I read my posts of the early revolution days and laugh, and at other times I read them and feel sorrowful, but for sure it was an exceptional, albeit costly, learning experience, not just for me, but for the current generation of my fellow countrymen. We saw dreams rise and fall before our eyes, something that not many people in the world did in their lifetimes; most people live and die with their big national dreams staying the same, just dreams, without materialising into facts. Some say that whole lifetime experiences that normally span several decades were compressed into two and half years, the adolescent ambitions, the realization of the big gap between dreams and reality and the discrepancy between the future plans of each party forming a coalition, and the disillusionment of witnessing dreams turning into nightmares.

Sometimes I blame myself for getting carried away with the revolutionary wave and the hopeful spirit like that, and think that I should have known better, but then I recall how all the country’s writers and intellectuals shared in the sweeping euphoria of those days. It was rather foolish to hope one day that democracy and progressiveness could be achieved without secularism. Me, out of everyone, should have known better. There were signs that many of us deliberately ignored during the early days and decided to go through with the revolutionary spirit. This proved costly, and all of us paid the price, some more than others. Of course there are the sole winners, the victorious followers of certain political/religious ideology who ended up achieving what they have been planning for years, these reaped what they, and their allies, sowed for years and decades and their political shrewdness during the transition period proved much superior to the naivety and gullibility of the civil secular parties. It is even questionable that these civil parties, dominated mostly by the left-wing and Nasserists, would have been much better if they reached power.

I can't believe that my response, during the early days of the uprising, to the question of what will happen next, was that I don't know and I don't care, and that I despised those who sought clear future plans. How I was unaware of the monster in the waiting, a monster who knows exactly what it wants and sets realistic goals and works towards achieving it, is beyond me now. As much as I hate saying that, one of the people I used to make fun of was actually right when he said in the early days, that we two roads, a known and an unknown one, and that it was a no-brainer to refrain from the unknown one. I owe an apology to General Omar Soliman as well whom I despised, the same way I despised anyone who repeated his famous words "but when..". The basic definition of democracy is confused in the minds of most of my countrymen with fascism, and it was clear since the first referendum that things would go the way it went later, the way the realists expected early on. Now, seeing the outcome of all of that, regardless of who did what and what the influence of external powers was, I realise the price we, or rather poor Egyptians, paid for try to fix things by radical revolution rather than legitimacy. It is funny how I ridiculed in the past those who called for respecting legitimacy, the same way “reformist” at some point was considered a libel opposed to the “glorious” term of “revolutionary” is some mediums.

After 1 year it started to become clear, even for a determined revolutionist and proponent of radical change, half a year later it became so obvious and impossible to ignore. Considering the difference between reality and dreams became a must if we really care about common people that everyone likes to preach in their name and achieve political victories on their expense. The poor won’t eat our revolutionary slogans that won't lead anywhere. Fighting epic lost battles can be morally satisfying for our egos and the tempting attitude of “us against the world” can be quite seductive for many but the reality is that there are millions out there who are unwilling to have this fight and we had to respect and accept that, and accept as well that an overnight change was impossible expect with a huge cost that almost none of us and most certainly the common people we talk about are not willing to pay, and that gradual reform is the less painful alternative specially with the heavy burden of poverty and illiteracy we are carrying. It was also lamentable how some activists and many of us were dragged into ridiculing how common people cared about (trivial) things like food and security rather than freedom and democracy that global media and international journalists like to think and talk about, and like to believe that all Egyptians fight for them but that's not the truth, and it's equally fascist, like military and religious fascism, to decide on behalf of the people. 

So what did I learn? A lot, at times I feel I've grown up 20 years in these last two years which, despite being beneficial hopefully, can be sad in itself. Sometimes I catch myself missing these days when I believed dreams can come true for a nation, the same way we miss the days of childhood innocence and the days I believed in a god whom I asked solve my problems on my behalf.