Nelson Ascher comments
Don’t miss Nelson Ascher’s
comments!
UPDATE: This is the sound of a dying worldview. From
Nelson’s blog:
| #15 |
Aug 05 2004, 03:02 am |
Nelson,
Thank you for your comments. I enjoyed them, and appreciated them.
Now, if your strength doesn’t fail you, and if you are willing to
share it, there is one last thing I would like to know: How was it
during that time, when you “spent a month or so coming to terms with
the fact that I had to change my whole worldview”? Was it distressing
and confusing, like drowning and looking for a shore? Or was it more
like dropping a veil, and seeing yourself for the first time, finding a
self previously hidden by cultural norms (for culture imposes on us its
worldview, without our knowledge or permission, whether we like it or
not)? |
| #16 |
Aug 05 2004, 04:42 am |
During the first week at least, I was more than distressed and
confused. I was actually dizzy and kind of sick in an almost physical
way. I was scared not the least because I distrusted deeply the Bush
administration and I thought it would react like the preceding one. I
still their reaction was too timid, too civilized. The things around me,
the city itself (Paris) seemed unreal (TS Eliot: Unreal city/ Under the
brown fog of a winter dawn/ a crowd flowed over London bridge, so many/
I had not thought death had undone so many). At that time it was David
Rieff (Susann Sontag's son) who gave the best formulation for the whole
thing: "species fear". For some days I actually lost my fear
of death, because it seemed our whole species was close to extinction. I
remember when in the 70s or 80s there was a train bombing in an Italian
tunnel. One of the policemen, who rescued the survivors and saw the
carnage, committed suicide shortly afterwards and left a note saying
something like he didn't want to live in such a world. I always admired
NY and saw it not only as the capital of the civilized world, but also
as the materialization of what's best in mankind much, much more than
any other city I know. I felt personally aggressed. My greatest surprise
was to see that in a couple of days people didn't seem surprised
anymore.
|
| #17 |
Aug 05 2004, 04:43 am |
| In the following weeks I was unable to write but tried to work hard in
my mind, I tried to incorporate within it the enormity of what had
happened. Then, from October to December I wrote half a dozen long
essays about it and the Afghan war for my paper's new website. I had
read a lot about the Holocaust and talked to people who survived it, but
I could never, in a way, feel the depth of hatred it implied. And
suddenly I felt in my very bones how much hatred there was out there.
Yes, as they say in the X-files: the truth is out there. Common people
who survived the Holocaust, though very deeply wounded, were able to go
on living. But many intellectuals who survived it, Paul Celan, Peter
Szondi, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, killed themselves sooner or later.
Let's say that it was not exactly my view of fanaticism, Islam, Europe,
many of my friends, international politics and so on that changed, but
rather my view of human nature. Later, surrounded by people for whom 911
became "normalized", I had to fight against the temptation of
putting the whole thing aside, I had to fight against oblivion. I'm
still trying to impede reason from eclipsing my physical revulsion.
Forgetting that physical revulsion seems to me much more dangerous that
whatever Al Qaeda can do, though I know that people who planned,
perpetrated and dreamt with 911, or those who in some way approved of it
are capable of things I couldn't imagine as real. There are films which
I could watch because I was sure they were only fiction. Now I know they
are the real reality. |
| #18 |
Aug 05 2004, 04:48 am |
| In short: I thought I knew there were evil persons, but I had never
actually believed in evil itself. Now I do. |
| #19 |
Aug 05 2004, 04:58 am |
| Or, to put it another way: I believed in evil as an adjective, not a
noun. Before 911 I considered Osama evil, he was the noun, evil was the
adjective. After 911 I began to see Osama as a manifestation of evil, he
became a circumstantial adjective qualifying a much more concrete noun.
I know: though I'm an unbeliever, that's an almost religious or
metaphysical formulation. But evil exists.It is the real root-cause. |
Posted by David Boxenhorn at August 5, 2004 09:33 AM