Dan Writes

naw nihaal ka bacha, jab kabhi rota hai, honsla de kar, baap yaheen hota hai, maa ke aansun aur bache ki pukar, kar deti hai koh e himalay mein daraar. jab baap ke haathon mein bacha kahin aata hai, bache ka noor beshumar lehrata hai,aansuon ki nadi mubtada nahi hui jab, baap kehta hai, kya mard bhi kabhi rota hai? na maaloom us jaan ko farq e jins, phir bhi fikar o khalqat se mamoor hota hai, jins ho. na ho, rooh toh khudai hai. ruswai e yunus se bhi koi cheez pyaari hai? jo fikar mein ho dam ba dam, woh kya jaane aalam e illahi ko, pukar e abd se bhi maghfirat pyaari hai? toh phir aansu lipat ke rukhsaar se jo tapke gein, shaayad, khuda ko yehi chaa momin e saari hai

Rukhsar, in dino chain nahi aata tujhe dekh kar kya azmat hai yeh kabhi awaazon ne bhi kisi ko tanqeed kiya hai dil mein utarna ek shaks ki pehchan se hoti hai nikalna uski fitrat dikha deti hai juft khuda khoob likhta hai nibhane wale insaan hai na kabhi aaina dekh rukhsar mayoosi cha chuki hai uspe chalo aaine ki khaatir naam ke sadqay muskurah de rukhsar aarsa guzar gaya hai teri mohabbat mein ab dil ko insaan parakhna nahi aata jo dekhta hoon yun mehfil mein, kirdar tera sa nazar nahi aata le phir tu dil se kiraya rehne ke liye kabhi toh honsla ban mera mannat maangi Maalik se teri, na maloom tha dil ko hijrat karni padegi

THE TWIG AND THE RAILS On What We Cannot Know, and Why That Matters By Danial Abbas --- There is a question that has followed us from the moment we became aware  enough to ask it. Where does all of this come from. What is it, really.  Not in the way a textbook answers it, with diagrams and terminology that  give the impression of an answer without actually being one. But genuinely;  what is this, and where did it come from, and what is on the other side  of the limit of everything we can see. We have built telescopes that see thirteen billion light years into the  past. We have split atoms. Mapped the human genome. Sent machines past the  edge of our own solar system into interstellar space. And at the end of  every one of those instruments, at the absolute boundary of every method we  have ever developed, the question is still sitting there. Unchanged.  Waiting. That is not a failure of science. That is a statement about the nature of...

  Chapter Seven: Fool's Gold Eli opened his hand. The ring sat in his palm under the amber light, simple and clean and patient, the way it had been patient in the display case for the past three weeks while the city moved around it and the snow came and went and two men stood at the window on separate evenings and looked at it and thought about what it meant and arrived, on the same Christmas Eve, at the same shop, at the same moment. He looked at James. He looked at Adam. Then he walked to James and held out his hand and James took the ring from him with both of his and held it the way a man holds something he has been moving toward for a long time without always knowing that is what he was doing. "Merry Christmas, James," Eli said. James looked at the ring in his hands. He did not say anything for a moment. When he looked up his eyes were the same pale gray they had always been, but something in them was different, some quality of tension that had been there all...

Chapter Six: The Jeweler Speaks Eli Saron had not intended to say anything beyond what a judge is required to say. He had intended to listen, which he had done. He had intended to observe, which he had also done. He had intended, at the end of the evening, to make a quiet decision about the ring and deliver it without ceremony and send both men home to whatever was waiting for them there. He had not intended to talk about his wife. But there is a thing that happens sometimes, in rooms where honest things have been said, where the honesty becomes a kind of gravity and pulls more honesty toward it, and Eli had been in this shop for twenty-three years and had felt that gravity many times and had always, until tonight, managed to stay on the correct side of it. He looked at the two men across from him. The young one with the Iraqi blood and the inherited determination and the company balanced on a wire. The old one with the gray eyes and fifty-one years and the bottle he had put down...

  Chapter Five: The Descent and the Return James was quiet for a moment before he began the second half. He picked up his coffee cup, found it empty, set it back down. He looked at the window. The snow was serious now, the kind that accumulates, the kind that changes the sound of the street outside by absorbing it. Halsted was quieter than it had been an hour ago. The city was going home. He turned back and looked at Adam. Then at Eli. Then at his hands. "The medals," he said. "You want to know about the medals." Neither man had asked about them. "I had a box of them," James said. "From the Gulf, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. A box you keep in the closet because you don't know what else to do with it and putting it on the wall feels like something you're not ready to claim." He paused. "I threw the box away in 2011. Not because I was ashamed of it. Because I needed to stop using it as a reason not to look at the rest of my life...