Sadegh Hedayat

Tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, the narrator, who sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that "the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life. If at times we come to a halt, we do so to hear the call of death... Throughout our lives, the finger of death points at us." The narrator addresses his murderous confessions to the shadow on his wall resembling an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story.

The Blind Owl

maia

In this mean world of wretchedness and misery I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight, but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me, in the form of a woman-or of an angel. In its light, in the course of a second, of a single moment, I beheld all the wretchedness of my existence and apprehended the glory and splendour of the star. After, that brightness disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear. I was unable to retain that passing gleam.

Am I a being separate and apart fron rest of creation ? I do not know. But when looked into the mirror a moment ago I did not recognise myself. No, the old T has died and rotted away, but no barrier, no gulf, exists between it and the new one.

One thing I do know: my wife, the bitch, the sorceress, had poured into my soul some poison which not only made me want her but made every single atom in my body desire the atoms of hers and shriek aloud its desire. I yearned to be with her in some lost island where there would be nobody but us two. I wished that an earthquake, a great storm or a thunderbolt from the sky might blast all the rabble-humanity that was there breathing, bustling and enjoying life on the far side of the wall of my room and that only she and I might remain.

For that space of time I was severed from nature and the phenomenal world and was prepared to accept effacement and dissolution in the everlasting flux. I murmured again and again, Death, death ... where are you ? The thought of death soothed me and I fell asleep.

I often used to recall the days of my childhood in order to forget the present, in order to escape from myself. I tried to feel as I did in the days before I fell ill. Then I would have the sensation that I was still a child and that inside me there was a second self which felt sorry for this child who was about to die. 

No, the fear of death would not let me go. People who have not known suffering themselves will not understand me when I say that my attachment to life had grown so strong that compensated for long hours of palpitation and anguish. the least moment of ease 

I saw that pain and disease existed and at the same time that they were void of sense and meaning. 

I thought to myself, “If it is true that everyone has his own star in the sky mine must be remote, dark and meaningless. Perhaps I have never had a star at all.”

Your pain is so is so profound that it has settled in the depths of your eyes ... and, if you weep, the tears will come from the very depths of your eyes or they will not come at all. 

akshita

There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker.

One glance from her would have been sufficient to make plain all the problems of philosophy and the riddles of theology. 

One glance from her and mysteries and secrets would no longer have existed for me.

The Blind Owl quotes

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