Whispers of Madness

“What is madness? It seems to be a mysterious state, like life and death. You can learn a lot about it if you look at it from the outside. As for the inside, the essence is a closed secret. Here, he now knows that he was a guest for a while in the Khanka. He remembers, now too, his past life as all sane people remember it, and as he knows his present. As for that short period, it was short, thank God. His consciousness stands before its memories, bewildered and confused, not knowing anything about it that would reassure the soul. It was a journey into a strange, ethereal world filled with fog. Faces, their features unclear, appear to his eyes. Whenever he tries to shine a glimmer of light on them, they flee, swallowed by darkness. His ears sometimes hear something resembling a murmur, and as soon as he strains his ears to discern their locations, they flee, retreating in silence and confusion. That magical period, with its abundance of pleasure and pain, is lost, even to those who lived through its strange era. They have drawn a thick curtain of silence and ignorance over it for a wisdom that is not It disappeared, disappearing without a reliable historian to recount its wonders. How did it happen?! When did it happen? How did people realize that this mind had become something other than reason? And that its owner had become an abnormal individual who should be isolated from the public like a predatory animal?
Naguib Mahfouz said in one of his interviews that his greatest pleasure was those hours when he would sit on the corner of a working-class neighborhood. And that is truly what the reader feels when reading Naguib Mahfouz through his short story collection, “Whispers of Madness.” This writer was not merely a transmitter of the images that animated the scenes of his narratives; rather, he was skilled in his depiction of the human psyche, with the diverse characters that populated his stories. He was so truthful that the reader, dislocated from his place, and the writer, transported into his world, filled with these stories that, with their analyses and digressions, represent a part of reality, indeed, the entirety of reality.