This year’s life expectancy number is 85 which is down from last year but up from two years ago.
As I think about the last year, I note that I’ve had a lot of fiction acceptances and a poetry acceptance. I’m beginning to feel like I’ve hit my stride as a writer, although there is, of course, still room for growth. It doesn’t help that right now bedtime with my kids consumes pretty much from 6p until 8 or 8.30 which doesn’t leave me a lot of writing time.
We listened to the teenager next door with his basketball in the driveway, two quick bounces each time, followed by a lonely thump off the backboard.
Siel Ju, Cake Time.
And the words have to have a rhythm. A rhythm as the words have in Saint John, for example. Only then, only when they are poetry, do they really shed light on things.
Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon.
Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples, and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of free men against slaves!
Tadeusz Borowski, “Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter)”
Why? Why did we walk like meek sheep to the slaughterhouse? Why did we not fight back? What had we to lose? Nothing but our lives. Why did we not un away and hide? We might have had a chance to survive. Why did we walk deliberately and obediently into their clutches?
I know why. Because we had faith in humanity. Because we did not really think that human beings were capable of committing such crimes.
Gerda Weissmann Klein, All But My Life: A Memoir.
“Save us. We are going to the gas chambers! Save us.”
And they rode slowly past us—the ten thousand silent men—and then disappeared from sight. Not one of us made a move, not one of us lifted a hand.
Tadeusz Borowski, “Auschwitz, Our Home (A Letter)”
You never even stopped to notice the dead; they weren’t men any more They lay along the roads, in the fields, in the streets of villages, under the trees, like old dirty laundry sacks, nothing, just dead. You never knew how much of nothing dying was until you saw the shapeless, nameless, meaningless dead.
Martha Gellhorn, Point of No Return.
In group photographs of the Central Committee of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, the murderer-members look to me as if they’re lonely in the same way as Rabier—the solitude of cholera victims, or worse, with moth-eaten souls, each loneliness its own disguise, its teeth chattering for fear of its neighbor, for fear of tomorrow’s execution.
Marguerite Duras, The War.
El pelo que le faltaba en la cabeza le sobresalía de las orejas, cuyas matas de vellos negrísimos irrumpían, agresivas, como grotesca compensación a la calvicie del Constitutucionalista Beodo.
Mario Vargas Llosa, La Fiesta del Chivo.
It would not have been a crime, of course. But it would have taken us over that edge of irreversible violence where, whether in a pattern of years or in the flicker of an oversight, crime begins.
Renata Adler, Speedboat.