“Bassam … loves the films of Tarkovsky and most of all Mirror. I leaf through his very worn copy of Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, which has travelled with him, and find the passage that I discovered in a bookshop in New York when I was twenty-one: “The goal of all art, unless it is aimed at the consumer, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him, what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington