Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's "al-Saq `ala al-saq" (Paris, 1855) commemorates a loss. Yet it is not that this text marks the decisive leaving of a past behind, but that it mournfully reiterates and repeats the sorrow which occasioned the irreparable loss of his brother. The story of As`ad al-Shidyaq is the story of his conversion to Protestantism and of his imprisonment, torture, and death. It is a story which is told in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's "al-Saq `ala al-saq" and in Butros al-Bustani's "Qissat As`ad al-Shidyaq." It is a story which Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq was compelled to repeat--in his departure from Lebanon, in his citation from al-Bustani's "Qissat As`ad al-Shidyaq," and more. And it is a repetition--and a departure, a conversion of sorts--which occasioned the beginning of a literary career. It is not that literature, may be said to leave the past behind, but that it entails the restating and redisposition of something or someone--an idiom, a lexicon, a person who has died--which is said to belong to the past and to be no longer. And it is not that the present remains prisoner to a past from which it may not escape, but that the story of As`ad al-Shidyaq's imprisonment may be said to work like a parable of the modern in Arabic letters: if the forces of consolidation and violent appropriation which the prison occasions desire to clearly separate the past from the present, the secular from the religious, the pure from the impure, and more, literature may be said to occasion an unsettling force of dis-propriation--a force of disproportion and discombobulation--without which nothing new may be said to take place at all.