thisnewday

Music, literature, the arts are all such fragile things. For some reason that came to me as an almost random thought. I say almost because it was in the aftermath of reading a few more pages of Michael Cunningham's The Hours.

Clarissa has just been to Richard's apartment to remind him of the party she'll be giving in honor of his winning a literary prize. And he needs her reminder because, inside of his AIDS-ravaged body, his mind has been most grievously affected as well.

Maybe that's where the thought about the fragility of our human arts, of any human enterprise, really, came from.

And then mutated into thoughts of the intentional destruction, wrought by those like ISIS, of centuries-old achievements of human civilization.

Which in turn brought the realization that it's hate that has destroyed those things. And how, although we may have regretted their destruction, devoted an abstracted, momentary thought to this or that expression of our regret, we had actually felt ourselves safe from it, beyond its reach.

But now, only a day or two in the past, the terror has returned to the streets and sidewalks of one of our oldest, most iconic cities.

And in that aftermath, we the citizens of this once-great nation have, to console us in this moment of terror and loss, a home-grown terrorist, a shameless speaker of the language of hate, in our own White House...

LPK
Dreamwidth
11.3.2017