longing for happiness”; now, in his old age, he quietly observes “the reflections of a dawn whose sun I will not see rise.”
Douglas LePan, writing to me in the fall of 1995, shortly before his death, had this to say: “I regard it as slightly unfair that I must be preparing to take my leave at just the moment when the game here is beginning to become interesting.”
I read Chateaubriand as my contemporary.
TUESDAY
I have a literary interest in religions. I have no formal training in any of them, so my religious practice (or rather, lack of it) is piecemeal and haphazard. Yehuda Elberg gave me, a few years ago, an eighteenth-century silver mezuzah which I fixed onto the right-hand doorpost of my writing room, as the injunction in Deuteronomy commands. Following tradition, I placed it diagonally, a compromise reached between those medieval talmudists who argued for the horizontal position and those who preferred the vertical.
I read somewhere of a debate on whether Jewish prison cells should carry a mezuzah, since only permanentresidences require one and it is hoped that residence in a prison is not permanent. The scripture inside the mezuzah promises, among other things, rain in due season: “the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.” In my case, I take these to be metaphors of writing.
Chateaubriand, wondering whether God is satisfied with one’s work as with one’s life, succinctly asks, “Is a book enough for God?” I should hope so.
WEDNESDAY
A year ago today, my daughter Alice called me from Ottawa to tell me the unbelievable news, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Throughout the day she called back, sobbing, with updates. She was alone in her apartment and needed to share the horror. Since I didn’t have a television set, I listened to the radio. Not seeing the images allowed me room, I believe, for reflection while the carnage was being described. The hatred explicit in the act seemed overwhelming. How far does someone need to be pushed to breed such hatred of the Other?
The Other, defined in two lines by Browning that have troubled me since school:
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain
.
The nineteenth century called terrorists Nihilists, those who care for nothing. They are not afraid of dying; their slogan is the one chanted by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War:
!Viva la muerte!
That evening, before going to sleep, I opened Chateaubriand and read how he confesses that the Revolution would have caught him up in its flow, had he not seen the first head carried at the end of a pike. And then I came upon this: “Murder will never be in my eyes an object of admiration and an argument for freedom; I know nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.”
THURSDAY
On the train, a week ago, I read Thomas Harris’s sequel to
The Silence of the Lambs
. The hero-monster with no purpose in life except his own satisfaction: has that character been created at any other time in history? Hannibal Lecter is our egotistical role model, and ours a society in which an acceptable image of revenge is literally eating your enemy’s brains out. How can we then complain of other people’s madness?
I mention this on the phone to Katherine, who says that I always exaggerate.
AFTERNOON
The West recognizes the Other only to better despise it, and is then astonished at the answer reflected back. Ferdinando Camon once said to Primo Levi, “There is something in Christian culture that recommends relations with ‘the Other’ with the sole purpose of achieving his conversion. … The fate of’ the Other’ is considered as nothing compared to his conversion. If you look into this assertion, at the end of a certain time you can see extermination.”
The old truisms still hold: that violence breeds violence; that all power is abusive; that fanaticism of
Douglas LePan, writing to me in the fall of 1995, shortly before his death, had this to say: “I regard it as slightly unfair that I must be preparing to take my leave at just the moment when the game here is beginning to become interesting.”
I read Chateaubriand as my contemporary.
TUESDAY
I have a literary interest in religions. I have no formal training in any of them, so my religious practice (or rather, lack of it) is piecemeal and haphazard. Yehuda Elberg gave me, a few years ago, an eighteenth-century silver mezuzah which I fixed onto the right-hand doorpost of my writing room, as the injunction in Deuteronomy commands. Following tradition, I placed it diagonally, a compromise reached between those medieval talmudists who argued for the horizontal position and those who preferred the vertical.
I read somewhere of a debate on whether Jewish prison cells should carry a mezuzah, since only permanentresidences require one and it is hoped that residence in a prison is not permanent. The scripture inside the mezuzah promises, among other things, rain in due season: “the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.” In my case, I take these to be metaphors of writing.
Chateaubriand, wondering whether God is satisfied with one’s work as with one’s life, succinctly asks, “Is a book enough for God?” I should hope so.
WEDNESDAY
A year ago today, my daughter Alice called me from Ottawa to tell me the unbelievable news, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Throughout the day she called back, sobbing, with updates. She was alone in her apartment and needed to share the horror. Since I didn’t have a television set, I listened to the radio. Not seeing the images allowed me room, I believe, for reflection while the carnage was being described. The hatred explicit in the act seemed overwhelming. How far does someone need to be pushed to breed such hatred of the Other?
The Other, defined in two lines by Browning that have troubled me since school:
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain
.
The nineteenth century called terrorists Nihilists, those who care for nothing. They are not afraid of dying; their slogan is the one chanted by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War:
!Viva la muerte!
That evening, before going to sleep, I opened Chateaubriand and read how he confesses that the Revolution would have caught him up in its flow, had he not seen the first head carried at the end of a pike. And then I came upon this: “Murder will never be in my eyes an object of admiration and an argument for freedom; I know nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.”
THURSDAY
On the train, a week ago, I read Thomas Harris’s sequel to
The Silence of the Lambs
. The hero-monster with no purpose in life except his own satisfaction: has that character been created at any other time in history? Hannibal Lecter is our egotistical role model, and ours a society in which an acceptable image of revenge is literally eating your enemy’s brains out. How can we then complain of other people’s madness?
I mention this on the phone to Katherine, who says that I always exaggerate.
AFTERNOON
The West recognizes the Other only to better despise it, and is then astonished at the answer reflected back. Ferdinando Camon once said to Primo Levi, “There is something in Christian culture that recommends relations with ‘the Other’ with the sole purpose of achieving his conversion. … The fate of’ the Other’ is considered as nothing compared to his conversion. If you look into this assertion, at the end of a certain time you can see extermination.”
The old truisms still hold: that violence breeds violence; that all power is abusive; that fanaticism of
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