Tuesday, September 3, 2013

C An Empty Sky

I can't really believe I have posted 100 of these, and I'm still not sure why. I hope the next 100 days, chronicled or not, see good news, if about nothing else, about some proper remembrance, big, impressive, permanent as anything of this world, for one of those small miracles that make life bearable. A monument not to an unusually large tree, but to the fragility and the eternal life in each of us that it reflected.


It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.
Primo Levi, Se Quest E Un Uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) 

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