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A review by zjunjunia
Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere by André Aciman
4.0
My first time reading a collection of essays and I'm glad I picked this one as I know I love his writing. Short stories, essays - I have little experience of reading shorter writing forms. Even with things like Sherlock Holmes, I'd read one short story after another to make it feel like a continuation. But there is a beauty in these shorter, self-contained forms. They do not demand much in character development and can spend more time on minutia. Not only did I enjoy this form, but I also think this may be the writing form I would/could/should dive into first in my own personal writing journey. His first essay on Lavendar triggered an idea for an essay to write. I particularly enjoyed using an object, concept or idea to then time-travel and visit multiple moments and feelings versus having to go through life chronologically. As the essays progressed, I didn't feel the same appreciation as the earlier ones. They were shorter and felt repetitive. Should a collection of essays also have a symbiosis and logic when placed together? I think so.
Some quotes:
Lavender:
"Sometimes the history of provisional attachments means more to us that the attachments themselves"
"Sometimes it is blind ritual and not faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit not character that makes us who we are"
"lives in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness comes"
"I liked the idea of tea more than the flavors themselves, the way I liked the idea of tobacco more than of smoking, of people more than of friendship, of home more than my apartment on Craigie Street."
"unlock memory's sluice gate, one by one - without effort, caution, or ceremony"
Intimacy:
"Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?"
"It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories, are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions"
Emerson: "To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense."
"What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we projected on things, not the things themselves - the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift."
La Princesse de Clèves, Madame de La Fayette: "I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you."
"Writing - as I did later that day - is intended to dig out the fault lines where truth and dissembling shift places. Or is it meant to bury them even deeper?"
My Monet Moment:
"art is about discover and design and a reasoning with chaos."
Temporizing:
"firms up the present by experiencing it from the futures as a moment in the past"
"What stands between him and life is not his fear of the present; it is the present."
A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past:
"Some crudely mistake confession for introspection"
Roman Hours:
"Enforced errancy and mild discontentment are the best guide."
The Sea and Remembrance:
"Water cities are like conditional, transient homes; they are our romance with the sea, with time, with space, with ourselves."
Place des Vosges:
La Rochefoucauld: "If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others."
In Tuscany:
"for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it's at a slight angle. Bookish people."
Some quotes:
Lavender:
"Sometimes the history of provisional attachments means more to us that the attachments themselves"
"Sometimes it is blind ritual and not faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit not character that makes us who we are"
"lives in the dark so as not to be blinded when darkness comes"
"I liked the idea of tea more than the flavors themselves, the way I liked the idea of tobacco more than of smoking, of people more than of friendship, of home more than my apartment on Craigie Street."
"unlock memory's sluice gate, one by one - without effort, caution, or ceremony"
Intimacy:
"Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?"
"It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories, are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions"
Emerson: "To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense."
"What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we projected on things, not the things themselves - the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift."
La Princesse de Clèves, Madame de La Fayette: "I thought that if anything could rekindle your feelings for me, it was to let you see that mine too had changed, but to let you see this by feigning to conceal it from you, as if I lacked the courage to acknowledge it to you."
"Writing - as I did later that day - is intended to dig out the fault lines where truth and dissembling shift places. Or is it meant to bury them even deeper?"
My Monet Moment:
"art is about discover and design and a reasoning with chaos."
Temporizing:
"firms up the present by experiencing it from the futures as a moment in the past"
"What stands between him and life is not his fear of the present; it is the present."
A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past:
"Some crudely mistake confession for introspection"
Roman Hours:
"Enforced errancy and mild discontentment are the best guide."
The Sea and Remembrance:
"Water cities are like conditional, transient homes; they are our romance with the sea, with time, with space, with ourselves."
Place des Vosges:
La Rochefoucauld: "If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others."
In Tuscany:
"for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it's at a slight angle. Bookish people."