#181
you & me
“And I — my head oppressed by horror — said:
"Master, what is it that I hear? Who are
those people so defeated by their pain?"
And he to me: "This miserable way
is taken by the sorry souls of those
who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart.
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —
even the wicked cannot glory in them.”
Dante
We’ve become accustomed to death, benumbed and unmoored, incapable of holding anger or focus for longer than a news cycle. Emotionally cauterized, we watch nukes be dangled and go on with our days, too busy to stop what we’ve always done and too afraid to start what needs to be done. If the nuke drops, I said, Americans will just wait for their favorite podcaster to unpack it for them next week. Sarah is standing at the counter making us our second coffees. She nods. There’s nothing else to say. The next day, Israel bombs a funeral in Lebanon and Americans sigh in relief; la violence quotidienne, the devil we already know, oh, we can work through this. We’ve been doing it for decades.
Wedded to our routines. The truth is deformed and forced into content, a terrible prostitution. This is how we like her. Chekov wrote, “Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.” This is what we witness, every and all day, in the background of ourselves.
No one’s death can reach us, not even our own.
My question is no longer how do we come back to ourselves. Now it’s: do we deserve to?
Someone is reading this and rolling their eyes, and that’s all you need to know about Us.
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