Sunday, November 17, 2013

Gaps and walls and needs to know






    How was your time
    last night?
    Fine.
    Who'd you see?
    No one you know.


Every dawn that follows Saturday rises with such a filial, incompetent question. What cherishes incompetence before inherent hunger?

We are getting answers now, that lift false tissue, not just from history, but from the protected mind.







         The problem with divorcing vengeance from its wid-
         er context is that it makes it impossible to under-
         stand why people acted the way they did in the af-
         termath of the war. From a modern, political point 
         of view it also creates a competition over victim-
         hood.. Sooner or later the arguments tend to break 
         down along national or political lines.



  

  They stood in the street
  not looking at one anoth-
  er.

  'Why did you ask that ques-
  tion, the question about 
  her father?'

  Sometimes Leclerc seemed
  neither to hear nor to
  feel; he drifted away,
  listening for a sound,
  like a man who having
  learnt the steps had 
  been deprived of the mu-
  sic; this mood read like 
  a deep sadness, like the
  bewilderment of a man be-
  trayed.

  'I don't want anyone to
  know.' 
























Ian Buruma
Year Zero
  A History of 1945
Penguin Press, 2013©

(i) Keith Lowe
Savage Continent
  Europe in the After-
  math of Word War II
St Martin's Press, 2012©
Picador, 2013©

(ii) John Le Carré
The Looking Glass War
1965
Penguin Books, 2012©










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