Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

But what needed to be understood was not how all Germans were as evil and guilty as their leaders: clearly, they were not. More troubling was how the ordinary bourgeois German had turned executioner not because there was a gun at their head, but because they had persuaded themselves, with remarkable effortlessness, that a job was a job and feeding the family came first. How had evil been organized so that it became so commonplace? That was the question. 

— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature. 

— Susan Sontag / “The Art of Fiction No. 143” / The Paris Review

We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death. 

— Jacqueline Harpman / I Who Have Never Known Men

It seems apt. A melting glacier made from tears.

— Rebecca Priestly / End Times

We are living in an age of mass migration.

Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.

The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration. Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.

— Lydia Polgreen / “Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World” / New York Times

People talk and talk more
about black holes.

I believe the blackest hole
is the one we inhabit . . .

— Eugenio Montale / “People talk and talk more …”

There was a palpable sense of relief that it was now possible to leave the earth behind. This was mad, she thought. The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition. The world that men wanted to escape was the one which they had made themselves. 

— Lyndsey Stonebridge / We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

What I’m Listening To:

That Californian sun on my face
All those drugs they
They fogged his brain

— Squid / “Blood on the Boulders”