When I Travel, I Feel More Like

The Monolithic View That Many Americans Have Of Pakistani Culture Is As Inaccurate As The Monolithic View That Many Pakistanis Have Of American Culture.

For Me, Language Is About The Impossibility Of Communicating What We Precisely Wish To Communicate And This Gorgeous Attempt That We Make To Do That Anyway. I Love That We Will Never Say Exactly What We Mean, But We Will Forever Keep Trying.

I Took A Couple Of Creative Writing Classes With Joyce Carol Oates At Princeton University, And In My Senior Year There, I Took A Long Fiction Workshop With Toni Morrison. I Fell In Love With It.

I Think That We Live In A World - And This Is Something Which Living In Pakistan, Perhaps, Has Taught Me - And, You Know, We Live In A World Where There Is A Constant Feed From Social Media, The News, Etc., Of Things That Can Scare Us. And We Become So Anxious Because Human Beings Are Meant - Are Designed To Be Sensitized To Dangerous Stuff.

In A World Of Intrusive Technology, We Must Engage In A Kind Of Struggle If We Wish To Sustain Moments Of Solitude. E-reading Opens The Door To Distraction. It Invites Connectivity And Clicking And Purchasing. The Closed Network Of A Printed Book, On The Other Hand, Seems To Offer Greater Serenity. It Harks Back To A Pre-jacked-in Age. Cloth, Paper, Ink: For These Read Helmet, Cuirass, Shield. They Afford A Degree Of Protection And Make Possible A Less Intermediated, Less Fractured Experience. They Guard Our Aloneness. That Is Why I Love Them, And Why I Read Printed Books Still.