William Styron Quote
One of the things I cannnot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective, Steiner writes, is the time relation. Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox-Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be-that I puzzle over time.
One of the things I cannnot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective, Steiner writes, is the time relation. Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox-Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be-that I puzzle over time.
Related Quotes
Children are being killed, because some "adults" think life is a game.Something is amiss.When children shoot up other children in school, it's a national tragedy, and a week of mourning.When grown men...
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that...