A UCLA prof, a Pakistani writer, a Stanford radio host: making bridges across the world
Tuesday, February 1st, 2022
Thomas Harrison grew up next to the oldest bridge in the world, on the Aegean in İzmir, Turkey – a city known as Smyrna in the ancient world. The bridge marked the western endpoint of the “Assyrian Route,” the 1500-mile stretch that was the most important trade route in the ancient world. (Legend has it that Homer crossed it as a boy.) The UCLA professor has just written a book about bridges: Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account, (University of Chicago Press). We wrote about that endeavor here.
Which brings to mind another “Harrison” who also grew up in İzmir, next to the same bridge: Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, who is his brother. Thanks to the Robert’s celebrated radio/podcast series, Entitled Opinions, they found a spiritual ally half a world away. Aqsa Ijaz was teaching literature in Pakistan when she discovered the show in 2012. “The show was a strange expansion of my world,” she said. So much so that she’s now a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, where she teaches all levels of Urdu. The writer and translator’s academic focus is the North Indian reception of a 12th-century Persian poet, Nizami Ganjavi and his love stories. She’s also featured in an Entitled Opinions interview on Rumi here.
She’s written a review of the Thomas Harrison’s book. It’s over at Marginalia and begins:
“Bridges, of all kinds, have traditionally represented our desire to know and connect with what’s on the other side. They symbolize our hopes to traverse vast and sometimes impossible distances across time and space. As I finished reading Thomas Harrison’s fascinating new book, entitled Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account, I remembered that it was the image of the bridge that my grandfather gave me when, as a young girl, I asked him about the nature of our existence and the life hereafter.
“Fond as he was of metaphors, he explained to me that our journey here is like walking on a bridge (pul) a kind of crossing over to the other side. He wanted me to understand the transitory nature of life, which like a bridge allows us only a passage to the other side–not a home. Reading Harrison’s meditations on ‘word bridges’, it struck me that my grandfather used the ultimate bridging capacity of language, i.e., the metaphor to make me comprehend what was essentially incomprehensible. Through the inherent paradox of a bridge; he connected me to the other side in a figure of speech but essentially kept me separate from it. In language, he joined for me what was essentially apart.”
She points out that the Urdu word for death (inteqāl) actually means “crossing over to the other side”, or more accurately, “to transfer.”
Which is in a sense what all three of them have been doing all along. Making bridges of all kinds, whether via books, podcasts, radio shows, or teaching – across continents, linking minds.
Read Aqsa’s article over at Marginalia here.
