کویر

The کویر has a particular hold on the Iranian literary imagination. It is the country of solitude, of stripped-down clarity, of the soul confronting itself without distraction. The Iranian poet سهراب سپهری (Sohrâb Sepehri) wrote a long prose-poem titled "Kavir" in his collection هشت کتاب (Hasht Ketâb), and Ali Shariati wrote a famous philosophical essay of the same name. For both, the desert is not emptiness but a different kind of fullness: the place where the noise of the city is removed and what remains is the encounter with self and silence.