Growing up, my parents would always question whether or not I had read the Bible that day. Some days I would have and would respond with some meaningful tidbit, but more often than my parents knew (at least so I sneakily believed) I did not and had approximately 30 seconds of pretending not to have heard the question to look up a verse. There are thousands of verses in the 66 books of the Bible, but my go to book was always proverbs. If I did a open and read, I might end up with the genealogies or a list of materials for the temple. It was always the safest to go with proverbs, short, sweet, and simple... so I thought.
Actually this is not true of proverbs. While short, they are often bitter and never simple. So how did Mafouz choose to write his autobiography? You guessed it... proverbs. Profound truths hidden within simple vignettes that more often than not extracted Mafouz. Some autobiography... right?
Some are easy. Others take thinking aloud. Still others, take chucking the book, moving on and coming back when I am old and wise to take another crack at them. But that is the point. Some lessons are easy to learn, others take time. Still others we try to understand, and try to apply what we think it may mean only to figure out that we were wrong in a continuous cycle of failure... only to maybe one day finally recognize the truth. At first I thought Mafouz was crazy (who writes a biography so?) and now I know that he is. But in doing so, by exposing his lessons learned through other stories, we too might also understand.
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