This is an incredibly enjoyable book!

He wrote with the ink of a heart that loved the meaning of writing and reading, and the meaning of the letter, the idea, and productive awareness. Writing that incites the pleasure of thinking in the context of effective cognitive reception.

It was truly enjoyable, and I wished the pleasure of reading would last longer as I approached its last page.

It is the kind of writing that is truly enamored with the art of mental and spiritual living, and the meaning of immersing oneself in the silence of writing and reading, and never tiring of touching and inhaling the scent of books, touching the pen, or more recently, typing on the laptop keyboard!

What does it mean to read? What does it mean to write and produce a new awareness?

Is there anything more beautiful than living in the depths of ideas, their conflicts and debates?!

Therefore, he is the writer who is knowledgeable about the dynamics of the writer, his psychology, the effects of his writings and creations, and his influences and impacts.

Hassan Madan is an exceptional writer and creator in his own way, and a thinker who seeks knowledge through his distinctive literary writing style.

His elegant style, his simple yet profound language, and his unique approach to his compelling subjects all testify to his latent creative talent. He possesses a distinct style in approaching the spirit of creative writing. And in my view, literary creativity is not limited to those who write novels, poems, or reflective texts, but rather encompasses those who have grasped the secret of writing, understood its absolute essence, and appreciated its power to heal the human spirit.

He was able to deconstruct its formative structure and understand its aims, implications, and signs, like a critic. The creative critic produces a statement upon a statement and writes a parallel text... producing knowledge of the criticized text that is no less valuable or conscious.

Hassan Madan writes his meticulously crafted articles with the spirit of a creative critic. He is an avid reader, following all Arab and international literary, intellectual, and creative works. His interests are broad, and when he wrote "Restoring Memory," his captivating autobiography, he did so with the spirit of an artist-storyteller who captures minute details with exquisite sensitivity, not with the spirit of a politician preoccupied with immediate issues. He is a writer who understands the act of creation in his reader—its mechanism, its meaning, and its wonder—while remaining at a distance of insightful contemplation between imaginative similarity and the dissimilarity of reality. He occupies a middle ground between the absent and the possible, and the hoped-for presence at the heart of the act of writing. I believe that if he were to return to his old notebooks, as Umberto Eco did, he would write us a profound creative work, given his daily engagement with intellectual, political, and journalistic work, and his extensive life experiences.

Hassan Madan’s book here (Writing in Black Ink) is a complete quartet in the writing process and its elements, starting from its doer: the writer, to its product: the books, and its recipient: the reader.

This quartet: “writing, the writer, books, and reading,” was skillfully woven by Hassan Madan, creating for us a wide and beautiful tapestry of knowledge in its creative colors and undulations.

And here I will contemplate this carpet woven with letters, imagining it hanging like a painting on a wall, to stand for a long time contemplating the most prominent and important threads of the fabric in the depth of its colors and gleams, and the emanations of its ideas in its four spectrums; meaning that I will not be able to stop in my reading at every material of this cultural quartet, despite its importance and distinction, but I will undoubtedly stop at everything that arouses productive contemplation and stimulates creative dialectical interaction.

In the first part of the tetralogy: (Writing), the writer paints a picture of writing in its most vibrant features, multifaceted, multi-sourced, deep-shadowed, like a living being of flesh, blood, and spirit, “insightful, affectionate, and harsh, a balm for sore souls, clear, mysterious, and flabby…”, a being of letters that is affected by place, time, history, and memory, and affects them in a dialectical embrace that is not without its paradoxes, contradictions, and oddities at the borders of imagination and liberation from the absolute of the pressing subject to the absolute of the idea and imagination.

When writing surpasses its first sentence/birth, and overcomes the difficulties and dilemma of the writer’s confusion, it declares itself and proceeds in its contexts until its end. It seems that the suffering of putting forward the first sentence, as Hassan Madan mentions in his book, was experienced by all true writers and creators such as Gabriel Marquez and Hemingway, as its writing was linked either to recalling a memory or a specific story or to the psychological state of the writer when he sits at the writing table with his mind completely empty of any ready idea, as Naguib Mahfouz faced due to the daily habit of starting a new work.

Or as the poet Mahmoud Darwish used to suffer when writing the first line of a new poem, as if he had never written a poem before!

From here the writer leads us to the springs of writing in his enjoyable chapter of this book. The first of these springs undoubtedly comes from the insight of the heart, from those “secret chambers of the heart,” as the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende spoke when she began writing the first sentence of her famous novel (The House of the Spirits) while she was suffering from a swoon of sad heartfelt emotions.

But the wellsprings of writing are not always tangible, clear, and readily available. Even if we consider the mind, feelings, and imagination to be its primary sources, there is also what is called inspiration. These wellsprings alone are insufficient to create writing unless they are represented within the context of lived experience, or drawn from the wellspring of life and its various facets. In reality, the fabric of writing is woven from all of these elements and is inseparable from the wellspring of lived experience that lies dormant for the writer at every juncture of the writing process.

We go to the second part: (the writer), and I consider it one of the most important parts in this quartet, as he is the main driver of the entire writing process. He is the one who writes and accumulates writing in books that subsequently lead us to the meaning and concept of reading, reading in its various dangerous forms: enjoyable and productive, enlightening and dark, teaching and flattening, constructive and destructive, and so on.

So how did our writer view the writer?

A writer is either socially open (organically) or a dreamy, homely recluse, and both often produce distinguished literature. When a writer is socially open, he only writes in open spaces, like Muhammad Shukri, Samir al-Fil, Yahya al-Tahir Abdullah, or Amal Dunqul, and he often draws his creative material from life and lived experience and reshapes it in his imagination. If he is a homely recluse, his literary material is drawn primarily from his mental thoughts and philosophical reflections, with a thin, invisible, and unbroken thread connecting him to reality and the outside world, like the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who might not leave his house for long days, taking refuge in the familiarity of the place, immersed in the familiarity of poetic creation, and living in harmony with his linguistic beings

Elsewhere, Hassan Madan tells us about the professional writer who does not write for himself, but rather writes necessarily with the reader in mind, even if that reader is only one

The committed writer who adopts public issues and big ideas is often keen to shape and create public opinion, but in my view, some of this type of writer slips into ideological positions, especially when the political field is the source of his writings.

This draws our attention to the prolific writer (the "bookworm"), who writes easily and prolifically, producing a number of books that no one can match, such as the philosopher-writer Abd al-Rahman Badawi, the journalist-writer Anis Mansour, or the young novelist Ibrahim al-Musallam. The former wrote 70 classified books, and when the Egyptian thinker Mahmoud Amin al-Alam asked: When and how did all this come about? He attributed it to his patience, diligence, and perseverance. Not everyone who writes many books offers creative philosophical, intellectual, and creative contributions, as Badawi did with his high-level contribution. As for Anis Mansour's writings, despite their abundance, their literary and intellectual contribution was of average level, although some of them were distinguished and important, including the book (Around the World in 200 Days). But the question I pose here is:

How and when did Ibrahim Al-Muslim write his thirty novels so far, when he is not yet thirty years old?

What real addition did he make to the novel in terms of language, narrative, and technique? Except for his additions to the huge number of teenagers who are eager to sign his novels in more than one place on the Arab map, which Naguib Mahfouz himself, the producer of nearly fifty truly creative works, could not achieve.

Perhaps that was enough for him.

In the third part, which Hassan Madan dedicated to books, these friendly, living, silent beings that look down on us with their pride and greatness from the shelves of our libraries store all of human development; its history, cultures, sciences, arts, and literature in a silence that does not leave its silence except when the covers of the book open in our hands.

The writer quotes some of the most insightful sayings about books, including those spoken by novelists such as Borges and Kafka, which invite you to reflect upon them and identify with them.

Marcel Proust said, “A book is better than a friend and more useful than the talk of wise men,” while the Argentinian writer Borges said, “A bookcase is like a magic room where the best human souls, the finest minds, and the strongest reside.”.

In the fourth section of the book, "Reading," the author addresses the profound phenomenon of "intellectual illiteracy," which is more significant and dangerous than the illiteracy resulting from a lack of reading or writing skills. He defines it as the intellectual's or writer's cessation of reading new material and keeping up with the work of their contemporaries, contenting themselves with their existing readings and established literary or intellectual standing. They become trapped in a cycle of outdated concepts and ideas that have lost their relevance, unaware that knowledge is a continuous, evolving process that knows no stagnation and is nourished by the pursuit of the new and beneficial. Hassan considers this kind of illiteracy a "real predicament in Arab culture," and indeed it is. It also deepens and becomes more entrenched when the intellectual or writer confines themselves to a single area of ​​knowledge without cultivating the necessary connections through diverse fields. Their intellectual ties to the political, historical, economic, and artistic are severed, resulting in a strange aversion to rich sources that could enrich their writing or creative work.

Also in this last part of his enjoyable book, the writer tells us in words brimming with sweetness about his attachment to the writings of the Russian short story writer and novelist Anton Chekhov, and he wrote a sweet critical reading that lacks neither depth of vision nor warmth of interpretation:

“I became attached to Chekhov’s literature, and over time I realized that we return to it when we are bored, when we are happy, and when we love… Chekhov is a friend of writing and reading and a companion of the soul,” and so he is, my friend… How much you resemble me in this shared love and in this passion for Chekhov’s short stories, plays, and novellas, in the power of their irony and “their deceptive simplicity,” as Hassan says, and their wounding sweetness that still constitutes for me an inspiring source to which I resort whenever my soul thirsts for narrative expression and whenever I want to restore the laws of storytelling, its origins, and its aesthetics that have been disrupted and violated in our contemporary times, and narrative writing has become stripped of its soil and the spirit of its beings and its realities that walk on the earth, those that run in the fog of the ailing self, neither making us happy nor resembling us, but rather increasing our boredom and weariness.