THE CHAOS THEORY

“A Movable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway

This is Hemingway’s memoir about the time when he lived in Paris, a period “when we were extremely impoverished and extremely happy.”

It is about his writing habit, his many strolls around the neighbourhood, the roads that he walk pass every day, the cafes that he frequented, the library and bookstore where he often borrow books from.

It is also filled with stories such as how he pick up the betting habits on horse races, and plenty more tales from the expat scene that live in that particular place in that particular era between World War 1 and World War 2, which include fellow writers and artists such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and more of the so-called “Lost Generation.” It is the real-life scenes of what would become the prelude of his fictitious first novel “The Sun Also Rises.”

But perhaps above all, this book is about the romanticised Paris. The Luxembourg Garden, Cafe de Flore, Les Deux Magots, his daily lives with his first wife Hadley Richardson, and the environment that facilitated Hemingway’s first big break as a writer.

“Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

They say to be an extraordinary writer, you need to have an extraordinary life. Fyodor Dostoevsky grew up in a poor family, where his parents and their 5 children live in only 2 rooms. The father and mother were very hard working, deeply religious, and they spent most of their evenings reading serious books aloud to their children, an activity that developed Dostoevsky’s passion for books since early age.

Dostoevsky was a sickly and delicate child growing up, a shy boy but with a brilliant ability to write. This ability, and his love of books, landed him into a trouble in 1849 when he was already a grown man, where he got arrested for “taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press.” Something punishable by death under the rule of Tsar Nicholas I. But at the very last minute before the firing squad executed him, the sentence was changed from death to hard labour in Siberia.

This intense experience left a mark on Dostoevsky, and it constantly recurs in the subject of his writings. Especially after his obscure nervous disease developed into violent attacks of epilepsi, which he would suffer for the rest of his life.

And his suffering didn’t stop there. After he was allowed to go back to Russia in 1859, about 5 years later he lost his first wife and brother Mihail, and proceeded to pay his brother’s debt and support his family even though Dostoevsky himself still lives in poverty. This, is when Dostoevsky came up with the idea of Crime and Punishment.

The novel is a brilliant portrayal of the range of negative human emotions, from suffering, to greed, lust, anger, envy, sadness, disappointment, to perhaps the most extreme one: the urge for murder. It gets so real and dark that sometimes it gives me literal eery feeling down to my bones.

It’s astonishing how Dostoevsky can make me feel the suffering of Raskolnikov’s poverty and desperate situation. Can make me see that Raskolnikov’s plan – to murder one evil pawnbroker, steal her money, and use them for several good deeds – actually sounds sensible. Can make me feel as if I’m the one who has just killed the pawnbroker lady, with all these weird guilty feeling sensations throughout the period when I’m reading the book.

And the way Dostoevsky construct the development of the story after the murder, that’s a testament to his maestro ability. I was made to wish that the murder never happened, because firstly Raskolnikov didn’t do everything that he planned to do (aka steal all of the pawnbroker’s money) so his main incentive wasn’t even collected because he got so distraught after committing the murder, and thus the murder was for nothing. Secondly, the mental agony of murdering another human being was insane, where Raskolnikov became ill afterwards due to feeling a tremendous sense of guilt.

Meanwhile, look at how life turns out to be for him, without the murder and stolen money. Oh, but now we (as in Raskolnikov and the readers) have to bear the burden of hiding the truth, not to mention the total paranoia of anyone finding out about it.

This is the genius of Dostoevsky, where he could make the reader feel the regret and all the emotional struggles throughout. That is, until the feeling of relieve after Raskolnikov eventually admitted to the murder and get sentenced for it. What an absolute wreckage of an emotional journey it has been, what a brilliant book.

“The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids” by Ryan Holiday

It is rare to have read and understood a book before we even read the introduction, but this is what the Daily Dad is for me. I’ve been a keen follower of the Daily Dad mailing list since day one, and I have read every single entry until today. But there’s just something different when reading it in a book format, neatly organized into chapters and topics, and of course with mostly new materials.

Indeed, they say that knowledge is an organized information, and true to Ryan Holiday’s style of writing, this book provides us with parenting lessons from a wide range of discipline, from history to sports, from politics to business, which are broken down into 366 days of the year.

Lessons such as spending time with them, playing with them, on reaching out to them, how our behaviour will set the standard for them, how to set up good examples (because their little eyes are always watching us), about what we all need as a parent: patience and discipline, that our house shouldn’t be a neat and spotless place but instead a place where it looks like kids are living there.

It is also about the balance between supporting and pushing our kids, creating a relationship where they can talk their feelings openly, how to raise readers, how to be an ancestor and not a ghost, about our casual remark on them that could stick with them, about the inner thought that we instil in them, what’s really going on behind a tantrum, how to support them no matter what even when they screw up, teaching them how to handle winning and losing properly, how to teach them resilience, and so much more.

As Holiday remarks, “parenting is a topic that every philosophy and religious tradition has spoken about. We can find lessons on how to control our temper in front of our kids from Plato. Lessons on how to cultivate a peaceful home for our kids from Marcus Aurelius. Lessons on how to not spoil our kids from Seneca. Lessons on how to support our kids from Queen Elizabeth II. Lessons on how to inspire our kids from Florence Nightingale.”

Holiday then continues, it is also “Lessons on how to cultivate curiosity in our kids from Sandra Day O’Connor. Lessons on how to cherish time with our kids from Jerry Seinfeld. Lessons on how to balance our careers and our kids from Toni Morrison. Lessons on how to believe in our kids from the life of Muhammad Ali. Lessons from mothers who survived the Holocaust, fathers who led the civil rights movement, sons who became war heroes, and daughters who won Nobel Prizes … the Stoics and the Buddhists, the moderns and the ancients. We can learn from them all.”

As the saying goes, everyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad. And this is the perfect book to help us learn how to be a great dad.

“The Daily Laws” by Robert Greene

This is the best of Robert Greene’s wisdom, in a form of summaries taken from his previous books: 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature, as well as from his speeches.

The strategies and stories are neatly broken down into 366 chapters for each day of the year, and organized under 12 different themes for each month. So not 48, not 33, but 366 laws filled with insights from history.

For an illustration, most of the summary of 48 Laws of Power are in the 30 days of April, The Art of Seduction is in the month of July, and The 33 Strategies of War are mostly in September. Imagine what would the other 9 months look like?

As usual with any Robert Greene book, I don’t want to spoil any more details. It is perhaps better if you don’t read it, because it’s supposed to be a heavily guarded cheat sheet of life. One that I’m reluctant to share.

All in all, the book is a good introduction for everything about Robert Greene’s thinking. In fact, I already gave 1 copy to a friend while I was still reading the month of May (yeah I read the book in one go, instead of reading one page a day).

“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West” by Dee Brown

This is a meticulously researched book, that puts the faces and names behind the statistics of the Native American genocide in the 19th century American West.

It is the stories of the many Native American tribes such as the Cheyenne, Sioux, Dakota, Apache, Ute, and many others, including their famous chiefs and heroes such as the wonderfully named Little Crow, Big Eagle, Mankato, Tall Bull, Lone Wolf, Black Kettle, White Horse, Dull Knife, Kicking Bird, Two Moon, White Bear, Little Wolf, Crazy Horse, Bald Head Tatum, Big Tree, Little Robe, Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, Wabasha, and Black Bear.

The book shows how the Native Americans were living, the organization of tribes, the names, the heroes, the folklores. And how the White Settlers gradually grab power, created unequal laws (such as Manifest Destiny), displaced the Natives from their lands, and ended up conducting a mass-scale genocide towards them when they resisted.

It is the tail end of an already brutal history since Christopher Columbus arrived in the continent in the 15th century, which have seen approximately 56 million Natives slaughtered in North America alone. It is told through tales such as the Little Crow’s war, the war with the Cheyenne, the Powder River invasion, Red Cloud’s war, the rise and fall of Donehogawa, the story of Cochise and the Apache guerrillas, the war to save the buffalo, the war for the Black Hills, the flight of the Nez Perces, and the Cheyenne exodus, among others. All of which are really tough to read, so very heart breaking, and have no happy ending.

“During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed,” the author Dee Brown remarks, “and out of that time came virtually all the great myths of the American West—tales of fur traders, mountain men, steamboat pilots, goldseekers, gamblers, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, harlots, missionaries, schoolmarms, and homesteaders. Only occasionally was the voice of an Indian heard, and then more often than not it was recorded by the pen of a white man.”

This book, however, is different. First published in 1970, it revealed history from the Native Americans’ point of view, how their ancestors’ land that have been handed down from many generations were not shared but systematically robbed, which clearly shows that the story of the Thanksgiving is actually a blatant lie.

But of course the reality is much more complicated than just a bloodlust massacre. The book shows how some friendships between the Natives and White Settlers were genuinely formed, how several trades were established, and occasional friendly games were also held. But nevertheless, the good bonds were all broken at one point or another, and they largely became a tale of broken promises, backstabbing, cheating, framing, raids, famine, diseases, and segregation of villages, with the mass killing conducted gradually through complicated truces, bogus new regulations and abuse of power.

Dee Brown then continues, “The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890—the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.”

And the cherry on top? The United States of America has never officially admitted that they conducted a genocide. And almost nobody is demanding for any accountability.

4 million copies of this book have been sold since it was first published, and the book has been translated into 17 languages, as well as made into a movie with the same title. The book is so good of illustrating the genocide that it gives me a bitter aftertaste where I felt hopeless and powerless, towards a series of events that happened more than a century ago, over people that I did not even know existed.

“Letter to His Father” by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka had an unhappy life, filled with anxiety and hidden rage. And it’s not hard to figure out where the source of his misery was coming from: his overbearing father.

Hermann Kafka was a narcissistic strict disciplinarian who raise his children using emotional abuse, double-standard, hypocritical actions, threats, explosive temperament and sarcastic comments, which, in his own words, made Franz feels “rejected, put down, oppressed.”

But it was the father’s disapproval of his engagement to Felice Bauer that became the last straw for Franz, and prompted him to express his feelings towards his father in the best way possible for him, through writing. Something that his father disprove of.

And in this letter Franz pour it all out, at the age of 36, all the emotions that have been building up for the past 3 decades.

It’s amazing how by looking into this meticulously written letter we can see the inner thought and feelings of Franz Kafka and what makes him human. And we can unintentionally see the biography of his life, the occurrences in his childhood that made a mark on him, and what helped to create his Kafkaesque world view.

“My writing was about you,” Franz wrote in the letter, “indeed I was only confiding my troubles to a book because I could not confide in you.”

The letter was never read by his father, however, where Franz gave the letter to his loving mother but she never revealed it to Hermann.

“The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” by Norman Finkelstein

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events ever occurred in history, where approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. However, after the World War II ended, the Jewish genocide was actually regarded as only another casualties among other mounting World War II casualties and nothing more.

As the author Normal Finkelstein remarks, “Between the end of World War II and the late 1960s, only a handful of books and films touched on the subject. There was only one university course offering in the United States on the topic. When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, she could draw on only two scholarly studies in the English language – Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg’s masterpiece itself just managed to see the light of day.”

It wasn’t until 1967 that it became a global horror, more famous than the genocides in China, Soviet Union, Cambodia, Bosnia, East Timor, Ottoman Empire, Zaire, or the slaughtering of the Native Americans even though some of these genocides had much more death toll. And it even had a special word assigned to it: the Holocaust. How can that possibly be? Enter the Holocaust Industry.

This is by far the most comprehensive book that I’ve read to really understand Zionism and the machine behind it, the Holocaust Industry. It shows the core idea behind their Hasbara propaganda, how they fund their movement, and how they can be the most powerful ethnic group in the United States that controls key areas in modern economy but yet can still acquired the victim status.

“The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel”, explains Finkelstein. “The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state.”

We can see this dogma reflected in the very creation of the Holocaust Industry immediately after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Israel badly needed a good PR. That year was when Israel staged a war against its neighbouring countries and captured the Golan Heights from Syria, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan. And they needed a justification and/or excuse for these violations of international law. As Finkelstein elaborates, “This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: Intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense.”

The book then goes into a great length of providing meticulous evidence at seemingly every other paragraphs, as well as citing multiple names and their works, over the development of this Holocaust Industry. From obscurity, to gaining momentum after the 1973 war, to a complete dominance in the US and in the world stage.

It also addresses some of the hoaxes created by the Holocaust Industry to enhance the illusion of their suffering and downplaying their criminal acts. Hoaxes such as The Painted Bird, a book written by Polish émigré Jerzy Kosinski that was supposedly about Kosinski’s autobiographical account of his time as a solitary child in rural Poland during World War II, which described the sadistic sexual tortures and insults perpetrated by Polish peasants towards the Jews.

However, in reality Kosinski lived with his parents throughout the war and he made up almost all the horrific episodes that he wrote, and the Polish peasants even harbored the Kosinski family although they were fully aware that they are Jewish and they themselves will get into trouble if caught. Nevertheless, “The Painted Bird became a basic Holocaust text. It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into numerous languages, and required reading in high school and college classes.”

Another example of fabricated Holocaust memoir is Fragments by Binjamin Wilkomirski, with a depiction of a Nazi concentration camp filled with sadistic guards and more crucially a depiction of life after the Holocaust, with all the trauma, the Holocaust deniers, and anti-Semitism still very much haunting little Benjamin. And just like Painted Bird, “Fragments was translated into a dozen languages and won the Jewish National Book Award, the Jewish Quarterly Prize, and the Prix de Mémoire de la Shoah. Star of documentaries, keynoter at Holocaust conferences and seminars, fund-raiser for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Wilkomirski quickly became a Holocaust poster boy.” However, historians such as Raul Hilberg and an exposé by the New Yorker show that the book was indeed a fraud.

And these two are examples of first-hand sources. The secondary sources within the Holocaust library are even more filled with hoaxes and false propaganda, sources that are still cited widely till this day. One notorious false information is on the stance of Jerusalem’s mufti. As Finkelstein explains, “Although the Mufti of Jerusalem didn’t play “any significant part in the Holocaust,” Novick reports, the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (edited by Israel Gutman) gave him a “starring role.” The Mufti also gets top billing in Yad Vashem: “The visitor is left to conclude,” Tom Segev writes, “that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plans to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.””

The Holocaust Industry also altered the facts in history. For example, where the Jews became the first political victims of the Nazis instead of the real first victims the communists, and the first genocidal victims weren’t the handicapped but the Jews. And the half million gypsies that were also slaughtered by the Nazis? They heavily downplay the gypsies’ suffering: “Multiple motives lurked behind the museum’s marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply couldn’t compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for Gypsy representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council as “cockamamie,” executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel doubted whether Gypsies even “existed” as a people: “There should be some recognition or acknowledgment of the gypsy people . . . if there is such a thing.””

Why do they downplayed the gypsies genocide? Enter the second and third points: “Second: acknowledging the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish “moral capital.” Third: if the Nazis persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the Gypsy genocide? In the museum’s permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of Nazism receive only token recognition.”

And what did they do with these sole victimhood propaganda? They use it for blackmail in order to get compensations. At the end of World War II there were around 100,000 Holocaust survivors, which consist of those who suffered the trauma of the Jewish ghettos, the concentration camps, and the slave labour camps. However, in practice many Jews who spent the war elsewhere also claimed to be a camp survivor, simply because the postwar German government provided compensation to the Holocaust survivors. And so a lot of Jews fabricated their past to meet the eligibility requirement.

The label Holocaust survivor also became a distinctive special honour, which through time spread into a family honour, like one contributor to a Holocaust web site reportedly “although he spent the war in Tel Aviv, he was a Holocaust survivor because his grandmother died in Auschwitz.” Naturally, therefore, the number of Holocaust survivors became inflated from 100,000 to nearly a million people.

This came in handy when Germany reached a deal with Jewish institutions and signed indemnification agreements and paid out to date around $60 billion. Finkelstein compared this with American compensation towards the Vietnamese, where “Compare first the American record. Some 4–5 million men, women and children died as a result of the US wars in Indochina. After the American withdrawal, a historian recalls, Vietnam desperately needed aid. “In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets, 25 million acres of farmland, 12 million acres of forest were destroyed, and 1.5 million farm animals had been killed; there were an estimated 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and 1 million widows; all six of the industrial cities in the North had been badly damaged, as were provincial and district towns, and 4,000 out of 5,800 agricultural communes.” Refusing, however, to pay any reparations, President Carter explained that “the destruction was mutual.””

And here’s the kicker: “Whatever benefits (if any) the actual Jewish victims received were indirect or incidental. Large sums were circuitously channeled to Jewish communities in the Arab world [i.e. Israel] and facilitated Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. They also subsidized cultural undertakings such as Holocaust museums and university chairs in Holocaust studies, as well as a Yad Vashem showboat pensioning “righteous Gentiles.””

The Holocaust Industry also went after the Swiss Banks and German firms. As Finkelstein remarks, “In a widely reported story, an Israeli journalist cited a document – misread, as it turned out – proving that Swiss banks still held Holocaust-era Jewish accounts worth billions of dollars.” Specifically, “The Holocaust industry first alleged that Swiss banks had systematically denied legitimate heirs of Holocaust victims access to dormant accounts worth between $7 billion and $20 billion.” Chapter 3 of the book then covers their attempt to extract as much money as possible from the Swiss, using lies and deceptions, using political pressure and of course using the Holocaust victim card and use this against their portrayal of a “greedy Swiss Bankers.”

The Swiss eventually settled for $1.25 billion, which covers three classes: claimants to dormant Swiss accounts, refugees denied Swiss asylum, and victims of slave labor which Swiss benefited from. However, once the Swiss signed away the money, again, more than a year later there was still no distribution plan. In fact, “as of December 1999, less than half of the $200 million “Special Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust” established in February 1997 had been distributed to actual victims.” And instead, after paying the lawyers, the majority of the funds were sent into the coffers of “worthy” Jewish organisations.

Even Finkelstein’s own mother – who is a real Holocaust survivor alongside his father – only received peanuts compared with others who are fake Holocaust survivors but get more money and even pensions.

Finkelstein then adds, “The Jewish Claims Conference’s official Guide to Compensation and Restitution for Holocaust Survivors lists scores of organisational affiliates. A vast, well-heeled bureaucracy has sprung up. Insurance companies, banks, art museums, private industry, tenants and farmers in nearly every European country are under the Holocaust industry gun. But the “needy Holocaust victims” in whose name the Holocaust industry acts complain that it is “just perpetuating the expropriation.” Many have filed suit against the Claims Conference. The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the “greatest robbery in the history of mankind.””

Today in the US there is an Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust, while all 50 states are sponsoring commemorations and often in state legislative chambers. Moreover, the Association of Holocaust Organizations have over 100 Holocaust institutions, 7 major Holocaust museums, with the centerpiece of this is the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Pretty bizarre if considering that they are commemorating an incident at another part of the world, and they don’t even have this much museums and organisations for the Native Americans.

As Finkelstein commented, “why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the nation’s capitol. Its presence on the Washington Mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the wailing accusations of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi genocide but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans.”

So, what’s the point of all of this? Finkelstein argues that “The Holocaust museum signals the Zionist lesson that Israel was the “appropriate answer to Nazism” with the closing scenes of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine.”

And as we can all see, the Holocaust victim card, that was first created after the Arab-Israeli war 1967, has proven to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel. Today, we can hear almost repeatedly that Israel have the right to defend itself, any criticism towards Israel is quickly labelled as anti-Semitic, and the horrifying image of the Holocaust through movies, books, diaries, museums, etc constantly remind us that the attacks on Jews should never happen again. Even though they are now the ones who are committing the crimes.

“Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast” by Oscar Wilde

This is a small book filled with Oscar Wilde’s amusing one liners. It is probably what it would look like if Wilde is still alive today and have a Twitter account. It’s smart, it’s witty, sometimes bizarre, but overall wise and covers an impressively wide range of observations on human behaviour. I expect nothing less from an Oscar Wilde book.

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka

Gregor Samsa is a conformist man. He works tirelessly, never take a day off sick, and live his life like a clockwork down to the seconds. He is also the bread winner of his family, that consist of a retired father, a house wife mother, and a teenager little sister (Grete), a family that have grown to take him for granted.

But then one strange day he wakes up in a horror, when realizing that he has been transformed into a monstrous vermin. And that’s when everything is starting to fall apart.

This short story shows the nature of Gregor as a responsible but submissive man, where the first thing in his mind after the transformation is how he would still go to the office, his fear over how his ungrateful employer can easily replace him, and how the family can possibly survive now with him unable to work and eventually lost his job.

It also shows the characters of the other family members and how they react to the disaster, with the father projecting anger, the mother helplessness, and the sister showing compassion and care at first but later when she got overwhelmed she turned into the one who wanted to get rid of him. And true to his submissive nature, even in great pain Gregor still complies with the family’s unspoken wish for him to disappear, and he starved himself to death.

So many interpretations and philosophy can be extracted from this story, since it is very much relatable to the real world. It is a great example of how an ordinary family responds to a disaster, where following Gregor’s transformation the family suddenly need to generate other means to get an income. Something that, as it turns out, can be arranged after all without placing the burden of the family solely on Gregor’s shoulders, now with his father going back to work and they can rent out a room in the house for guests.

Of course, over the decades there have been numerous interpretations and lessons coming out of it, which is a testament to Kafka’s brilliance. Some observers argued that “the metamorphosis” is more of a Grete’s story rather than of Gregor’s, where throughout this ordeal the little sister is indeed transformed from a little girl into a young woman that takes over care and responsibilities.

Moreover, some see Gregor’s transformation into a monstrous vermin to be more of a metaphor of his deprived existence, with his presence in the world is reduced to merely becoming a corporate robot in his professional life and a money-making machine for his family. Meanwhile, other observers suspect that Gregor’s transformation is nothing more than a case of leprosy, which would fit into the narrative of the story and the people’s reactions towards Gregor, especially the 3 guests at the house.

Whatever the real intention behind the story is, it will forever be a mystery and remains open for interpretation because Kafka never revealed it. The book was also never meant to be published.

And true to Kafka’s style of writing, the story does not really have a conclusive ending, and instead it just ends with a bitter after taste where the family can easily move on without Gregor after they’ve figured out how to live life without his money and now without the burden of a vermin living in their house. Now that’s Kafkaesque.

“Journal of an Ordinary Grief” by Mahmoud Darwish

This is a poetic book about life as a Palestinian, in an autobiographical prose written by its most celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwish.

In the book, Darwish tells a story about being a citizen without a country after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the loss of a family land in al-Birwa in 1949 after it was confiscated by the settlers, and what it is like to be a refugee in his own land and to be a second class Arab Israeli living among the occupiers.

It is a very vivid description of what had happened from an ordinary person’s vantage point, struggles that are as relevant today as in 1949 or when the book was written in 1973.

Through this book and his many other writings Darwish’s story then becomes the Palestinians’ story, a representative of the many voices that are often silenced. His stuggles reflect their struggles. His pain is their pain. And in this autobiographical book he poured it all out. The “Journal of an ordinary grief” chapter in particular shows how the harsh daily lives look like for Arab Israeli living in the apartheid state.

Here are some insights from the book, in Darwish’s own words:

• We do not long for a wasteland, but for a paradise. We long to practice our humanity in a place of our own.
• The difference between a lost paradise in its absolute sense and the lost paradise in its Palestinian meaning is that the former understanding would keep the condition of longing, and psychological and rightful belonging, out of the sphere of the conflict.
• As long as the struggle continues, the paradise is not lost but remains occupied and subject to being regained.
• Some years later, I searched for my sweetheart but she was getting married to another man. I searched for work but poverty was my lot. And I searched for my people but found a prison cell and a rude officer. Acre was the last border to the world, and the beginning of effort and failure. Its wall was eroding with time.
• You weren’t able to hold back your anger in exile when your classmates reminded you that you were Palestinian and had no right to excel. Those insults were the first clues to an awareness that would take hold of you in a few years, when you realized that your situation was not simply a matter of asking for equal rights, or a question of getting hold of more bread in a crisis.
• Twenty years later after many Arab cities had fallen, the thoughts I was sharing in Hebrew with a friend at a restaurant did not please a man sitting there, and he set to defending Israeli oppression with what he considered an irrefutable argument. He said you don’t know these Arabs, and if you knew them, you wouldn’t speak about justice in this manner. I asked him to tell me more. He knit his brow and said, “Have you heard of a village called al-Birwa?” “No,” I answered. “Where is it?” “You won’t find it on this earth,” he said. “We blew it up, raked the stones out of its earth, then plowed it until it disappeared under the trees.” “To cover up the crime?” I asked. He corrected me, protesting, “No, it was to cover up its crime, that damned place.” “And what was its crime?” I asked. “It resisted us,” he answered. “They fought back, costing us many casualties, and we had to occupy it twice. The first time we were eating dinner, and the tea was hot. The villagers surprised us and took it back. How could we accept such an insult? You don’t know the Arabs, and now I’m telling you.” I told him I was Arab, and that it was my village.
• This is the way they are. They commit the crime, deny it, and when the victim confronts them they sidestep the question by talking of peace.
• I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you have lived in them; you are eating of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant.
• They called us “present-absentees” so we would have no legal right to anything. At the same time we found out that thousands of these returnees were shoved into trucks as soon they were arrested and immediately dumped on the border like damaged merchandise. We knew that hundreds were shot dead so that others would stop thinking of returning. We also knew that my aunt’s husband, who tried to steal in from Lebanon, had not yet arrived.
• Villages were closed off by a set of military regulations whose violation would cost you a prison sentence and a fine. Scores of villages were destroyed because of their fertile land, or as punishment for their resistance to the sword emerging from the Torah. Their inhabitants were forbidden to go near them, no matter what changes may have occurred in the security fence of Israel. Because of this, it was impossible to visit our village.
• On the road from Deir el-Asad to Acre stands al-Birwa still on the same rise. I did not find it by means of the government list that gave it another name. What led me to it was the huge carob tree where, many years ago, I started the search for my mother and the pieces of my heart that were saturated with rain and longing.
• A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.
• On searching for his childhood home: I continued on the path of stones and longing, searching for the boy I had left here. I didn’t find the mulberry tree he climbed or the courtyard where he used to lose himself. Nothing!
• In why the Darwish family exiled themselves to Lebanon during the Nakba: My father said they didn’t fully grasp what was happening. It was going to be a quick battle with guaranteed results, they had imagined. The departure from the villages was a way of saving the body from death, with no corresponding awareness of what leaving the land meant.
• The prevailing impression – or ruse if you wish – was that the exit would be temporary, for a few days only. So, why should children, women, and old people die for nothing if the departure was going to be temporary, with victory and return guaranteed? The Israelis used the exit as an excuse to claim we had no attachment to our homeland and were therefore not worthy of one if we could so easily leave it behind. But they deceive only themselves when they believe their own claims, for they supplemented the prevailing rumor that the exit was temporary with guns and daggers that gave the Arabs a strong incentive to leave.
• Emptying Palestine of its Arab inhabitants was not an emergency measure imposed by circumstances, but part of an ongoing Zionist strategy before the establishment of the state, during the [1948] War, and after. They carried out this strategy violently with their weapons, and justified it on religious grounds from the example of Joshua Son of Nun and the text “The Day of the Lord is a day of terror.”
• And in all the villages they occupied afterward they gathered the inhabitants in the main square and made them stand in the sun for several hours. Then they chose the handsomest young men and shot them dead in front of the other villagers in order to force them to leave, in order to let news of the massacre spread to villages not yet occupied, and to purge their repressed historical resentment.
• They also found legal justification in the claim that the Arabs sold their land. Sadly, it is possible to find certain Arab groups that have believed this Israeli lie while making no effort to learn that until 1948 the Jews owned no more than six percent of the total land of Palestine.
• He who left for Lebanon and returned in a year or two is not a citizen, but he who came from Warsaw after two thousand years does have rights and a homeland.
• Late one night a police captain struck the door of our adobe brick house with his truncheon. He woke up the family – grandfather, grandmother, my parents, and four children – all crowded into a single room that served as sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen. The captain directed a question at my grandfather, “Did your children return from Lebanon?” Grandfather confessed to the “crime,” and the captain hauled the father and uncle away under arrest on the charge of stealing back into their own country.
• The guns attacked her home, and she grabbed something she thought was her baby and rushed into the nearest boat in terror. While on the sea to Acre she discovered that the baby was only a pillow, and from that day she lost her mind. How many infants became pillows? And how many pillows were taken for infants? So, what is a homeland? The homeland of a mother is her child, and the homeland of a child is the mother.
• It would not be an exaggeration to say that Israeli Zionist behavior toward the original inhabitants of Palestine is similar to the practices applied by the Nazis against the Jews themselves.
• You ask for a passport, but you discover you are not a citizen because your father or one of your relatives had fled with you during the Palestine War. You were a child, and you discover that any Arab who had left his country during that period and had stolen back in had lost his right to citizenship.
• You obtain a certificate that proves you exist, and you do eventually obtain a laissez-passer, but the question is, “How are you going to pass?” You are in Haifa, and the airport is near Tel Aviv. You ask the police for a permit to pass from Haifa to Tel Aviv and they refuse. The lawyer intervenes, and some members of the Knesset, but the police still refuse. You think you will be more clever and devious than they are, and decide to leave by way of the sea at the Port of Haifa on the understanding that you have the right to pass to the port. You rejoice at your cleverness. You buy a ticket, and you pass through passport control, the health department, and customs without any hindrance. Then, when you are close to the ship, they arrest you and take you to court. This time, you insist that the law is on your side. But in court you discover that the Port of Haifa is part of the State of Israel, and not part of the city, and they remind you that you are forbidden to be in any part of Israel outside Haifa, and the port according to the law is outside the city. You are found guilty.
• Israel makes a great show of sensitivity to any practice that it sees as oppressive to Jews anywhere in the world, but such practices quickly become legitimate and humane when practiced against the Arabs. And what was considered savagery when directed against Jews quickly changes into a Jewish national duty when undertaken with the “pure” Jewish arms against the Arabs.
• The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.
• You tell them that the mere sight of water does not satisfy the thirsty man but bloodies him.
• The homeland is at its most beautiful when it is on the other side of the barbed wire.
• And Gaza is not the most polished of cities, or the largest. But she is equivalent to the history of a nation, because she is the most repulsive among us in the eyes of the enemy – the poorest, the most desperate, and the most ferocious. Because she is a nightmare. Because she is oranges that explode, children without a childhood, aged men without an old age, and women without desire. Because she is all that, she is the most beautiful among us, the purest, the richest, and most worthy of love.
• I did not say goodbye to anyone or anything. The butt of a rifle rolled me down from Mount Carmel to the port of Haifa. I was clinging to God’s waste and crying at the top of my voice until I lost my voice and my mind. But the world promised me some alms in exchange for signing a truce with myself (because a truce with the killer cannot be accomplished without a truce with oneself first). And the world did give alms: it gave flour, clothes, and many tents for me and my children, who were not born in exchange for homeland and peace. When I felt cold in my exile, newspapers of world public opinion protected me from the rains and from shivering with cold.
• History is not a judge. History is a functionary. What would the Red Indians have said if they had defeated their conquerors? Those who boast of being cultured and civilized are most often the killers.
• Consider this threesome. The first annihilated a people in the past. They have detonated the great sign of their civilization – the atom bomb – in the streets of the world, and are now annihilating a people and a land in Southeast Asia. They are demanding that I exit from the human race and the globe because I am a terrorist. As for the second, it is best not to remind them of their past. They have burned tens of millions of people in the name of culture and civilization. And now, the killer and the victim embrace and give birth to a new offspring, who is the third. What can come out of the marriage of terrorist with terrorist except terrorism? The third, armed to the hilt with the Hebrew Bible and the sword, came and uprooted me from my hills and valleys and rolled me out of civilization down into the depths. This threesome is now demanding I exit from the earth because I am a terrorist.
• This is how the world goes to sleep, and in the same way it wakes up. It is armed with weapons to the hilt, and we are armed to the hilt with shackles. The powerful are civilized, and the weak are savage.
• In saving yourself from being a displaced refugee, you forced the other side to the point in the circle from which you started. Seen this way the equation no longer holds. When you find yourself canceling me out of my being, and when I insist on keeping it, the relationship between you and me becomes one of conflict. Not because I object to your being or to the possibility of a shared existence, but because I object to the negation of my being that arises from the way you carry on with yours.

Now, I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like to be a Palestinian. But as an ethnic cleansing is currently taking place in Gaza I too feel heart broken, feel defeated by the rigged international system, and if I’m doing anything normal or happy in my life I feel guilty considering people in Gaza are immensely suffering. But reading this book has somehow mend the feeling of powerless and the frustration from the inability to help.

Darwish has this aura in his writing that gives hope to the otherwise awful occupation. It does not make it acceptable, but bearable. It does not solve any problem, but put things in their right perspectives that show what we’re really facing. It provides a clear line between right and wrong despite all the propaganda and brainwashing that are trying to justify the crimes.

And his glittering words send a sense of strength and calmness that I’ve never encountered before, words that come from contained deep emotions that take a new form in weighted poetry. Something that we will immediately feel once we read it.

Now I get it why he is considered as one of the biggest voices of the Palestinians.