“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
I have been trying to write about this for days. Words are not adequate. They create too much distance. William Gass once said that one package of hair collected from a warehouse at Auschwitz has more moral heft and meaning than Hamlet. I cannot stop thinking of the 165 children and of their teachers at the Shajarah Tayyebeh school who were torn to pieces by a US missile. These are their graves. […]
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We’ve seen so little of it, and the cold of these last 6 weeks has been intense. Sometimes I wander between windows, a wide-awake pudding faced bear ready to go out and forage. The older I get, the less I can bear this enforced sequestration … and the gray. Two Saturdays ago, I stepped outside the Store during a lull and tilted my face up to the Sun. It had […]
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The last 20 minutes of Hamnet take place at the Globe Theater during the initial performance of Hamlet. Agnes and her brother push their way to the front, so close she leans on the stage. Hamlet looks like an older version of her dead son, Hamnet. Shakespeare, her husband, plays the Ghost, as he was supposed to have done in real life. I will not go beyond this except to […]
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The manager of a Dollar Store near me has been there for at least the last five years. Every time I’ve come in he has been manning the register. I’ve watched him treat each customer with warmth and consideration, as if he or she counted for something more, not as a customer but as a human being. There is an almost evanescent qualitative line between being merely polite and however […]
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