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    The Sun InterviewBy Judith HertogTo RemainRaja Shehadeh on Living through Destruction in Palestine

    I have been thinking that people all over the world these days are feeling a sense of despair because, like me, they are seeing the destruction of the world as they knew it. But it has occurred to me that the real destruction of my world happened in 1948, when the Palestinians lost Palestine.

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    Readers WriteBy Our ReadersDistractions

    Reading at work, listening to music during labor, swatting gnats while meditating

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Tom Ireland

Tom Ireland is best known for his ability to balance things on his nose. (A drinking straw is difficult. A broom is easy.) He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

The Woman In Question

Then, while visiting friends in New York City, I sat next to the woman in question at dinner. We drank wine and ate sushi. She was so lovely, so warm, so rich in her attention to everyone and everything that I knew there would be consequences for me of one kind or another: soaring bliss or abysmal misery; probably both.

April 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Past Imperfect

My first impulse was to correct her English: it might be better to say, “I have fallen in love with Lawrence.” We had been over the difference between the past perfect and the past imperfect tens of times, and she still didn’t get it. In the past perfect, the action was over and done with. But imperfect action had a continuing and vital connection to the present, which I knew was the case here: she had fallen in love with him and continued to be in love with him, at that very moment.

August 2000
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