André Achiman – Alibis
Some quotes from André Achiman’s “Alibis”, a collection of essays about time, place, identity and art.
“We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves – the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.” (Intimacy, p. 33)
—
“What people omit to mention about the essence of travel is a small detail so obvious that one blushes to bring it up: namely, that every journey needs to start somewhere. A tourist leaves one country to visit another. A plane leaves an airport to land elsewhere […] Home is what sets the course to our travels. Home is what we leave behind, knowing we’ll recover it at the end of the journeys. Home is also what makes going away safe. To quote T.S. Eliot, ‘The end is where we start from.’ An odyssey is just a return trip that’s taken too long.” (The Contrafactual Traveler, p. 93)
—
“Water cities have a way of seducing us, though it’s always difficult to know why, and explanations vary with each city. Perhaps it’s the fact that when afternoons grow too hot and the air too thick, you can always turn your back on your day-to-day life, utter an exasperated ‘enough with this,’ pull out a bathing suit stashed somewhere in your desk, and dash off to the nearest beach. Unlike in cities where beaches lie an hour from home, in Venice water is available before you even long for it: the lines between work and play, downtown and resort town blur. Here water is part of life, of who you are, of everything you take for granted, of what you do, eat and smell.” (The Sea and Rememberance, p. 113)
Achiman writes this about Venice, but this is exactly how I feel about living in Zurich.
—
“Each walk carves out a new city. And each of these tiny cities has its main square, a downtown areas all its own, its own memorial statue, its own landmarks, laundromats, bus terminal – in short, its own focal point (from the Latin word focus, meaning fireplace, hearth, foyer, home), warm spot, sweet spot, soft spot, hot spot.” (New York, Luminous, p. 152)
—
“It’s not steel or concrete we love. Steel and cement are the mordant, the primer over which we apply our wishfilm. Without our wishfilm there is no city. The wishfilm we leave on our walks glistens on the city’s hard surfaces like the luminous imprint of fish scales left on a butcher’s block hours after the fish was caught, cut and cooked – outside of time. It still glistens, still pulsates, reaching out to strangers, calling out to them, sometimes long after we’re gone. T he remanence of our presence, our lingering afterimage on this city – the best in us.” (New York, Luminous, p. 156).
12/07/2020
