... Fleeting pictures from around us... from the very heart of our lives — we pass them every day, every hour, aware of them or unaware, until a pen gathers them up for us. ... Pictures that stir our conscience and rouse in us smiles, or the ghosts of smiles... And the graceful pen that gives these pictures body for us on the pages of The Woman's Voice is the pen of a friend whose work, in colors other than these, we have read in the literary magazines... May we have with her, every month, flights of fancy other than these, full of wit and full of delight..
A Good-Hearted One!
No, it was not strange that someone should come and whisper in the ear of one of my good-hearted friends that a certain (S.) had said of her what Malik said of wine. Not strange, because "picking" at other people, with right or without any right, is a general phenomenon, and once a thing takes on the quality of generality there is no longer any warrant for wonder. What is truly wondrous is that my good-hearted friend did not flare up and repay the measure with two measures — that her generous nature did not fail her, so that she smiled as she said: "(S.) would have done better to take me on a point of weakness more prominent in my character and worthier of attack — namely, that I am too helpless and too cowardly to be what he was pleased to imagine that I...!!"
A Lesson!
A lottery-ticket seller, nailed to a small chair near the Capuchin
church in Beirut, plants hope in your soul and encourages you to wish — until you find yourself asking for skyscrapers, or luxurious motorcars, or something simpler than either, if you are modest in your wishes, like me.
A lottery seller whose voice never rests. Buy a ticket. Good luck. The drawing is tomorrow. You may be a dreamer who buys hopes for piasters, and so you buy a ticket from her; or you may be realistic to the point of disbelieving in chance, and pass her by without sensing her existence.
What matters is that she is a woman; that she sells you hope to find her fill of bread; and that she seeks a life of dignity in a world where feet slip. And then... I forgot to say that she is blind!!
O Man of Honor...
A corner of the road — and many corners besides — from which hideous smells rise to assail the noses of taste and feeling in the city... and then, above those foul yellow puddles, black letters sprawl across the walls, hideous.. also: (O man of honor, do not urinate here). As for the men of honor, they still urinate here and there, for reasons the simplest of which is the absence of sanitary public urinals for whoever might seek them out.. and our lack, as a community, of the principles of social conduct... And this will come to us only after a long struggle, in which the factors of time, culture, enlightenment, and respect for the community all join forces..
And last but not least: because
(the men of honor..) have been denied yet another blessing besides the blessing of public lavatories... they are illiterate — they do not read!!
Men...
I can understand a woman adorning herself, if she is enamored of adornment, and even — if she is silly — showing herself off to the point of making of her hands a jeweler's display window.
But it pains me to try to understand why the manhood of some young men has sickened, until they have found aims and purposes in enormous rings, and in gold bracelets engraved with the noble name, and in assorted trinkets dangling over the thick-haired chest on a shiny yellow chain... One wonders — have these men not felt that they are merely counted among the men?? As for us women.. we have felt it!!
A Jest...
I read in a newspaper that the proportion of pipe smokers in America has fallen, following the report that the contact of the "pipe" with the lip gives the addict cancer..
One wonders what the reaction would be if it pleased somebody to jest and say that a husband's fingers do to the lip just what the pipe does?? The least of it is that the houses of beauty preparations would rest and be at rest, that husbands would breathe a sigh of relief — and that a large number of painted-up dolls would remain without husbands..!!
(Sin.. wa-Ayn)