on distance
More from Amran Gowani on satire and relatability.
It’s easy for the world’s concerns to seem incredibly distant. As if noise across the ocean, muffled underneath the ice that separates us.
When I recently spoke to debut author Amran Gowani, he claimed that this distance was a kind of crushing: of our mindset, our hope, our humanity. Why would there be a space, a distance, a sea if there was nothing but a force pushing us away?
Distance breeds distrust and distrust breeds dysfunction. As Gowani notes in Leverage, the distance between his hedge fund protagonist and the rest of the world seems incredibly distant, unrelatable. Two entirely separate habitats, forced to coexist. It tempts us into believing that a middle ground doesn’t exist, into thinking that the world is black and white.
It tempts us into silence. Into thinking that if we cannot shout over the noise, we may as well have nothing to say. But silence is not neutrality — it is often an inheritance, a debt passed down from those who chose the easy comfort of distance before us.
Yet breaking this inherited silence requires more than just speaking louder. It demands what French philosopher Simone Weil called the deepest form of attention: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Silence, then, is not a void but a posture, a way of turning the body from the burden of recognition.
To resist that inheritance is to risk discomfort. To speak, even haltingly, is to fracture the illusion of distance and expose the nearness of our shared breath.
For we must learn from music – it is not the notes themselves, but the space in between them that speaks.