We're getting married a week from today, so my head/life kind of feel like this!
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Under this noiseless drift / The path of trains softly blocked
We're getting married a week from today, so my head/life kind of feel like this!
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wikileaks.
The roads were too greasy and the buses running too late for the debate tonight, but I think that a government that plots and acts without real fear of being held accountable for its actions or revealed in its deceptions is an inherently dangerous thing. There is nothing such a government can't do, no check on its power - not even limits imposed by resources when no one cares that these resources are been expended, wasted, thrown away.
It's snowing, just the same as a year ago when the big blizzard struck and ground the dailiness of Madison life to a stand still and let everything else run giddy and wild.
It's snowing, just the same as a year ago when the big blizzard struck and ground the dailiness of Madison life to a stand still and let everything else run giddy and wild.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The right number is not enough.
From Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity... It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. With all of its complexity, history is what we all have, and can all share. So even when we have the numbers right, we have to take care. The right number is not enough.
Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon with the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual. The one very large number that withstands scrutiny is that of the Holocaust, with its 5.7 million Jewish dead... but this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one.
To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity... It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible. With all of its complexity, history is what we all have, and can all share. So even when we have the numbers right, we have to take care. The right number is not enough.
Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon with the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual. The one very large number that withstands scrutiny is that of the Holocaust, with its 5.7 million Jewish dead... but this number, like all of the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one.
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