![]() ![]() ‘Quatrains’) were still fresh in my mind. Khayyam-inspired illustrations that hung about my great-uncle Heshmat’s house in my childhood days (and still do) and his massive, ever-open copy of the Rubáiyát (lit. A year earlier, I wrote about some of his mathematical contributions in a report for a twelfth-grade statistics course from Hell. Back in the sunshine on the high street, I looked for a cafe where I could sink my teeth into The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam - and also enjoy a much-needed pee.Īlthough I’d never read any of Khayyam’s poems before, the eleventh-century Iranian polymath was no stranger to me. I left Prospero’s with the little book in my sweaty hands, and it would change my life rather than kill a few good afternoons. One pretentious (and very pretty) girl or other was most likely responsible for that mad idea of mine. To my seventeen-year-old self, cleverness meant reading piles of boring old books and thus being able to quote their authors sans guilt at dinner parties. In those vast rows of books, I saw a reflection of my utter ignorance of all the things I thought I needed to know to be considered ‘clever,’ which I’wined resolved to become at a particular point that lingering, aching summer. As a teenager, bookstores terrified me as much as they fascinated me. ![]() During my last summer vacation before the start of my studies at university, I nervously walked into Prospero’s Books in Crouch End. ![]()
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