“I drink from a small spring, / my thirst excedes the ocean.”

This coming and going of the inner life – because this is what it is – is a curse and a blessing.

Once in a while it vanishes – in the sense that I become deaf to beauty for a week or two or three.

But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

Cities at daybreak are no one’s, and have no names. And I, too, have no name, dawn, the stars growing pale, the train picking up speed.

Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing.

There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness.

I don’t need to explain why it’s a curse.

And also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.

This day’s nothingness as if from spite became a flame and scorched the lips of children and poets.

What’s astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter’s perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems.

Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely.

The odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed.

Gabriel Levin’s book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East.

And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease,