Naguib Mahfouz: Khan Al-Khalili

Either that sort of thing, or else, “Who are these literary types, the ones who write for newspapers and journals? How can it be real literature if the only way to succeed is to meddle in politics and party feuds? Is it only a person of honor who is incapable of achieving the phony prestige they have earned?”

“By God,” he would say angrily, “I couldn’t be a person of prestige in Egypt now, even if I wanted to … but may God Himself launch a campaign against the very idea of dignity!”

This anger kept burning away inside him until all that was left was an unholy flicker of flame and a pile of ashes. However, life cannot endure anger on a continuing basis; there have to be some intervals of calm, even if the calm involved is actually more akin to resignation. Thus, whenever his anger got the better of him, he would resort to despair.

“What’s the point of stubborn persistence in this world of ours?” he would tell himself. “If we’re all going to die like animals and rot in the grave, what’s the point of thinking like angels? Just suppose I’d filled the world with writings and inventions. Would the worms in the grave respect me? Would they instead devour me like some common murderer? No! The whole world consists of lies and vanities; in such a context the quest for glory is the acme of lies and vanities.”

Therefore, he surrendered himself to a bitter isolation of mind and heart. He despaired of life in general and fled from it. But, even as he was turning his back on it in impotent despair, he was still arrogant enough to imagine that he was in fact the one who was depriving life of the benefits of his own personality. For that reason he did not give up reading, the idea being that books were the things that provided man with the kind of life he wanted. He used the world of books as a way of looking down on the ordinary world and adopted them as a kind of salve to treat his wounded pride. From them he derived a kind of strength, one that he kidded himself was personal. It felt as though the ideas they contained were actually his own; their authority and eternal validity were his too.

After his succession of failures, he stopped reading things in an organized and goal-oriented way, and started reading whatever fell into his hands. He had a particular fondness for old volumes with yellowing paper because they were valuable and hard to find. He now began to read voraciously and quickly. He felt on edge and no longer enjoyed reading anything useful or serious; it gave him a kind of mental indigestion. He may have learned all sorts of different things but he was master of none of them. His brain was not used to indulging ideas in and of themselves, and he relied on books to do the thinking for him. Ideas and reflection on them did not interest him at all; his only real concern was that he be able to address the morrow on the basis of what he had read the day before and to harangue his friends and colleagues (all in a learned philosophical tone) with the inspired fruits of his memory. For that very reason the employees working in the archives section of the Ministry of Works nicknamed him “the philosopher.” That delighted him, even though the gesture was as much one of derision as of respect.

This “philosopher” had no fixed views on anything because, while he may have been reading things, he never reflected on them; he might well forget what he had said the day before and even totally contradict everything he had said earlier. He would always rush to adopt an opinion that served to boost his own arrogance, delusion, and total concern with superficialities. He relished confrontation and argument. If an interlocutor said “right,” he would say “left”; if the former said “white,” he would reply “black.” He would then plunge headlong into an argument, becoming more and more angry and worked up until he would almost be grabbing his opponent’s lapels. None of this implied that he was stupid; in fact, he was of average intelligence. His mind was one that never sank to the level of stupidity, but neither did it rise to any kind of excellence, let alone the notion of genius. The thing that totally deceived him about his own person was his crushing ambition to achieve prestige and his delusions of genius, all of which led him far from the path of reason. What made his sense of misery even more acute was that he was extremely sensitive and easily roused. Patience, perseverance, reflection, and contemplation — these traits were in short supply where he was concerned. As a result, his brain was full of an intellectual mixture of facts rather than being the focused mind of a penseur. There can be little doubt too that the insomnia that had afflicted him for fully six months of his life had had a negative effect on his mental make-up. It had brought him to the very brink of madness and death; he had spent countless nights wide-awake and raving. But then God’s mercy had descended on him, and despair had been replaced by cure. He attributed the reason for his illness directly to a risky venture that he had embarked on without considering the possible consequences.

He had long believed in magic and never doubted the veracity of the tales he had heard about it. One day he happened to meet an old civil servant who was a fervent believer in magic and demons, so he began to devote himself assiduously to getting to know him better. Once their friendship was firmly established, the old man lent him some ancient tomes dealing with magic and the invocation of demons, such as Solomon’s Ring, The Magic Bottle , and O Mighty Lords . He had been utterly thrilled and treated the entire subject as the loftiest kind of knowledge and truth that he had yet laid hands on. With the enthusiasm of conviction he embarked upon a process of solving its mysteries and penetrating its secrets; with all his heart he longed for the arrival of a time when he would gain control over the forces of the universe and acquire exclusive possession of the keys to knowledge, power, and authority. The idea almost drove him crazy, and the desire took complete hold of him: when would he be given infinite power to take and leave whatever he wanted, to toy with whomever he wished, to raise and lower, to make rich or poor, to give life and death? But his nerves could not stand the prolonged efforts involved, and he was incapable of spending long nights in seclusion with demon spirits. His confidence let him down and his nerves collapsed; he found himself hounded by fears and delusions. His health deteriorated rapidly and he felt the approach of insanity and death. At this point he realized that he had to stop these activities and give up his plans. He returned the books to their owner and for the last time gave up on the idea of achieving glorious heights now that he had tried every single avenue in an attempt to get there.

“What’s my problem?” he asked himself sorrowfully. “Is there any solution for a corrupted soul? Why is it that I am forever struggling when only an arm’s length separates me from my goals?”

He now collapsed beneath the rubble of his failed initiatives, dashed hopes, and lost illusions. As day followed day, he grew older without ever losing that profound sense of injustice; quite the contrary in fact, he even began to feel some obscure sense of pleasure in the pain it still gave him. He would now imagine injustice to be occurring, with or without due cause, and would proceed to counter it with this same peculiar blend of pain and cryptic pleasure.

“Isn’t it just great,” he would tell himself with a defiantly sarcastic tone, “that the entire world rises up in order to fight the individual?”

Didn’t his disillusioned self find great comfort in the thought that the abundance of bad luck he had suffered was an indication of other people’s envy and fear? Indeed he managed to surrender to the ancient notion that genuine misery is the lot of all rare geniuses in this world.