A step into the unknown

I've been reading Scheherezade Goes West by Fatema Mernissi, which Clare lent to me. There are a lot of interesting ideas in it about men and women and art and culture, some of which I'm skeptical of - but as Clare and I were saying to each other today, one of the author's main points is that travelers and scholars need to let themselves hear ideas contradictory to their own minds and cultures, maybe live in those ideas for a little while and get uncomfortable. So I'm trying. And, as usual, I tend to zero in on sections of books that I find the most relevant or interesting, regardless of their relation to the whole work, so here's a passage that I felt like coming back to:

One fourteenth-century writer, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya, who took the trouble to count up the words in Arabic that can be used to say "I love you," came up with a list of sixty, which he compiled into a book....On his list were many words that refer to love as a dangerous moment of mental confusion (khabal), or disorientation (futun)...love as a plunge in to the void...as a privileged friendship....
Love pushes you to go beyond your usual routine and into directions you might not otherwise have taken. Which brings us back to our list. Many of the sixty words describe love as a compelling voyage (huyam), a step into the unknown (ghamarat), an adventure in alien territories.
(pp. 125-127)

This reminds me a little of an electronic conversation I was having recently about people's belief in the capacity of love to change situations, minds, or lives. It's something (in my experience) that people are often willing to believe in fiction (e.g., every ridiculous romantic comedy ever made), but not in real life - where sacrifice and upheaval for the sake of love can be viewed as weak or dependent. Then, of course, there are cases of real dependence, but - I think I'll stop this chain of backpedaling here. My point is: the second paragraph, especially, of the above passage resonated with me. Not that I'm thinking of anything specific.

I'm allowing myself to think that things are looking up. I have a few job leads, and a backup plan in case none of them pans out. Tomorrow, I'm going to the Newberry Library Book Fair for the fourth year in a row, though I probably shouldn't be buying a lot of books at this point. In the next month, I'll be traveling to Louisville and Rochester, and hopefully (finally) editing my school paper on indexing Sylvia Plath's poems down to a publishable size. I'm also reading (alongside Mernissi) Radclyffe Hall's classic The Well of Loneliness - which is a nice light beach read. So I'll let you know how that goes.

Also, just for fun, here's my last.fm entry about the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Quotation from: Mernissi, Fatema. Scheherezade Goes West. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001.