Life & Mortality Quote by Abdulah Sidran

It is a prayer, but not for salvation. Sidran asks for death with a single outrageous reservation: let desire outlive the body. That twist gives the line its voltage. The speaker is ready to surrender everything except sight, and not sight in some abstract, poetic sense, but sight trained on a public square, on women passing through Piazza Duomo. The sacred appeal to God collides with the earthly, almost mischievous insistence on beauty, flirtation, spectacle, life.

That clash is the point. Sidran, the great Bosnian writer shaped by Sarajevo's bruised history, often understood survival as a form of stubborn attention. To keep looking is to keep belonging to the world. The line sounds comic on first encounter, even rakish, but its comedy is defensive: eros becomes an argument against annihilation. Faced with mortality, the speaker does not ask for wisdom, purity, or remembrance. He asks for one last tether to the city, to movement, to ordinary human radiance.

Piazza Duomo matters because it is not a private fantasy. It is civic space, theater, a place where history and daily life brush against each other. The women going by are not just objects of longing; they stand in for the endless procession of living humanity. Sidran compresses appetite, urbanity, and grief into one line. The subtext is that even at the edge of death, what makes life worth clinging to is not grandeur but the passing, unrepeatable scene: bodies in motion, light on stone, the world continuing.