Quarantine Notes: Aphorisms on Morality and Mortality

By Yahia Lababidi. Fomite, 2023. 168 pages. $12/paperback; $4.99/eBook.

Yahia Lababidi’s Quarantine Notes is a book of 520 aphorisms. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, one definition of aphorism is “any precept or principle expressed shortly and pithily.”

When I considered what aphoristic literature I had read in my life, I was surprised to discover that I could at first only think of French writers: Montaigne, la Rochefoucauld, and Pascal: little—sometimes not so little—gems of wisdom expressed in striking and often paradoxical ways that made you think for days and sometimes for years. Then I realized that the Tao Te Ching, the Book of Proverbs, and various collections of Zen thoughts and haikus had the same effect on me.

The aphorisms in this book were put together during the COVID lockdown, a time that made many of us reflect on what inner resources we relied upon when the external world narrowed and offered us fewer means of support.

Lababidi is an Arab American of Palestinian origin who lives in Florida. He is the author of more than ten books of poetry and prose. Quarantine Notes was published in 2023. His latest anthology of poems, Palestine Wail (2024), is described by him as a love letter to Gaza. His writing is thus a passionate and compassionate response to the contemporary human condition.

Lababidi is well-versed in the writings that feature the great sages of history, as well as spiritual texts from many traditions. These aphorisms are a sort of distillation of such wisdom, combined with discoveries during the lockdown.

Not all the aphorisms are immediately striking or paradoxical. Some even have a homespun feel to them or a feeling that they were notes the author had written to himself to encapsulate the situation he found himself in, such as “Pandemics are also tests of emotional intelligence” (appropriately the very first aphorism listed), and number 481, “The secret inscribed upon our inner tablet takes a lifetime to decipher.” Some denote a life reflecting on the spiritual path: “Strange that truths for some are blasphemies to others.” Others are just challenging and make me wonder why he wrote what he did: “Let he who is without sin complain about injustice.” Yet others have the feel of a koan, something not understood immediately by the mind but grasped at another level of perception: “Between decadence and mysticism, a line as fine as a fissure—the depth of an abyss . . .”

I then reflected on aphorism as ministry. Sometimes I sit in meeting for worship and hear words that deepen the silence; at other times, what is spoken seems rational and logical but leaves me in my head. Sometimes the fewer words the better: words that speak to the imagination or to the heart, like number 52, “Wisdom is recovered innocence”; number 71, “Questions as quests”; and number 167, “Walk so that you don’t frighten small birds away.”

And like ministry itself, some of the aphorisms leave one with a challenge, not a question with a yea or nay response but reflection to illuminate your day: “We are haunted by the ghosts of who we meant to be.” As Lababidi himself writes, “Aphorisms are seeds carrying orchards.” Quarantine Notes offers us a real harvest worth savoring.

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Harvey Gillman was for 18 years outreach secretary for Britain Yearly Meeting. He gave the Swarthmore Lecture “A Minority of One” in 1988, and has written several books on the Quaker way and language. During the COVID lockdown, he published Epiphanies, an anthology of poetry written over a lifetime.