The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif

23Mar09

There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.

-p.40

Something there is moves me to love, and I
Do know I love, but know not how, nor why.
– Alexander Brome

-p.47

How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think ‘I love you’, you know – or at least imagine you know – what it is you love? How can it be that a set of shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a string of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow?

-p.48

Old people are starved of touch: no husband, no lover, no child to slip a hand into a hand, to plant sticky kisses on nose and cheek to mouth, to snuggle and fit into the curves of the body. I watched my grandmother – my mother’s mother – in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread.

-p.53

So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you’re blown away.

p.82

But still the heart doth need a language
– S. T. Coleridge

-p.47

Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

-p.217

It can’t be that bad. Surely it can’t be that bad. There must be a way, only we can’t see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves – we just can’t quite see it. But things move on and by the time you’ve plotted your position the world around you has changes and you’re running – panting – to catch up. How can you think clearly when you’re running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you – unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.

-p.234

In the act of love there is decreed for every part a portion of pleasure: so the eyes are for the pleasures of looking and nostrils are to smell sweet perfume. The pleasure of the lips lies in kissing, and of the tongue in sipping and sucking and licking. The teeth find their pleasure in biting, and the penis in penetration. The hands love to feel and explore. The lower half of the body is for touching and caressing and the upper half is for holding and embracing – and as for the ears, their pleasure is in listening to the words and sounds of love.
– Al-Imam Jalal Al-Din Al-Sayti

-p.327

‘Hubb’ is love, ‘’ishq’ is love that entwines two people together, ‘shaghaf’ is love that nests in the chambers of the hearts, ‘hayam’ is love that wanders the earth, ‘teeh’ is love in which you lose yourself, ‘walah’ is love that carries sorrow within it, ‘sababah’ is love that exudes from your pores, ‘hawa’ is love that shares its name with ‘air’ and ‘falling’, ‘gharam’ is love that is willing to pay the price.
I have learned so much this past year, I could not list all the things I have learned.

-p.386

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment
Tags: ahdaf soueif, book, novel, the map of love