Standing While Falling

Quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche

"He who wrestles long with monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Man is not destroyed by suffering, but by the meaning he makes of it."

Standing Fall

When I read at length from a philosopher's chapter—Nietzsche, I believe—

I teetered on the edge of collapse,

contemplating the abyss daily,

discerning within his words:

"He who wrestles long with monsters..."

I never wrestled.

I am, by temperament, a tender beast.

I need not be wary, so long as the beasts stumble through the meanings of chaos.

I fear not becoming a monster,

since we already dwell in a monstrous world.

And if I gaze long,

I welcome the abyss,

and embrace it,

as though it were a world born of me.

I finished a cigarette on the brink of collapse,

then rose once more,

and continued my path toward the bottomless.

Who among you believes it an abyss without ground?

All of you.

As for me,

perhaps it is a summit,

or perhaps the world knows no other way to live

except to fall while standing.

Let fate's hammer tell me

that the devil was a fallen angel,

not metaphorically, but in truth.

His wings were broken,

crushed at the earth's floor.

So what groundless abyss do you speak of?

The devil took upon his shoulders the task of populating the earth,

and birthing demons.

How many monsters were slain by his hand,

to be hurled into the abyss,

the depths of hell.

As for me,

amid the chaos,

I remain a beast,

As for me,

the one I have long dreaded.

In Defense of Silence

In one of his earlier writings,

without musical cadences,

it was not tedious,

but clamorous.

Even in the shadows cast by silence's reality,

my thoughts remained ablaze

with hidden musical dialogues.

The rhythm coils around your ear

like a butterfly's chrysalis,

pressing into your mind's crevices

with every note unheard.

It was familiar yet striking,

as if the cosmos possessed a music

not of human craft for events,

but a flowing of truth itself,

its fragments scattered upon your hearing,

shackling your limbs;

you hold no power over it.

As for your actions,

they are but a humming blended

with a wooden, leathery rhythm,

primitive at its core.

And suddenly the bell's chime

knocked upon a door that was once my friend,

requesting entry, with musical earphones of modern design in his ears,

to tell me:

"Without music,

life would be a mistake."

But...

Have we rendered life meaningful or meaningless

in a musical note?

And does silence possess its own rhythm,

or is music

merely an insulator

behind which we shield ourselves from the void of our selves?

Without it,

life was not a mistake...

we were.

This piece was originally written in Arabic.

The English version is not a literal translation,

but a philosophical transposition—

an attempt to preserve rhythm, rupture, and silence

rather than syntax.

L.L