Untitled — “You Live in a Third-World Country”

Translated from the Persian original.

You live in a third-world country with nth-rate thoughts. If you're sitting on a bench on the cobblestones along a river that runs through the middle of a city, waiting for morning to come, sometime in a city you've traveled to and don't belong to at all, enjoying the pleasant air and not even knowing how you ended up there, at times like these, when we find ourselves in circumstances that have no explanation, we feel we're in the middle of a dream, and it's like secretly, suddenly opening a letter and, without reading the opening, skipping to some part of it, and suddenly the door of the room opens and you have no choice but to close the envelope quickly and spend all day wondering how things got to that point, because the letter isn't yours, and neither is that life, nor that experience.

You live in a third-world country and you're thinking how nothing is where it should be. Everyone thinks they deserve good things without ever having tried for them, and everyone who has good things, even by inheritance, thinks how self-evidently it's all their right, and that surely some extraordinary gene must have been in them.

You live in a third-world country and you look at life too, and if something looks good to you, you either want that very thing or a better one, or you don't even know whether you'd enjoy having it at all, or whether you were made for it at all. In a third-world country you're in a race with one another, with people who, in their mental and physical, spiritual and psychological makeup, live exactly alike, and even if aliens had dropped us on Earth to gauge how we perform, it would confuse them.

You live in a third-world country for a long time just like this, and like fish you always experience movement as horizontal, across the surface of the sea, and you pay attention only to how vast it is, not to how fixed and horizontal your own movement is. Once I saw a fish that had gone mad, heading upward with a snakelike motion.

I said, this route you're taking, is it some kind of exercise? It said, no, I'm moving up. I laughed and said, you can expand on the surface of the water too. It said, I want to be different. I said, being different takes resolve and practice. It said, no, it takes something else, something your world ignores. I said, what? It said, change. It said, change is different from expansion, and up there, though there are few fish to keep company with, I can try my own way and my own life. The fish left and I went on my way. I thought it was being too hard on itself, or hadn't understood the circumstances well, or wanted to shirk the effort, or to be alone with itself like a madman. Probably we all run into one another somewhere in life without having read the opening of each other's letters, and usually, having no choice, we put them back in the envelope half-read, and well, what we see is sometimes tempting, and yet ..

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