If you faint in the day of adversity,
your strength is small.
Rescue those who are being taken away to death;
hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.
If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?
Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it,
and will he not requite man according to his work?My son, eat honey, for it is good,
and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste.
Know that wisdom is such to your soul;
if you find it, there will be a future,
and your hope will not be cut off.Proverbs 24:10-14
Comment followed Philip Graubart’s piece with a very needed one from Kate Schmidgall on “the dangerous labour of choosing humanity in Israel and Gaza.”
Hunched at a picnic table beneath an olive tree in the side yard adjacent to the Combatants for Peace office in Beit Jala, Avner’s tone is low and voice weathered. “It’s like a huge machine grinding everything in Gaza. You literally see it,” he says. “And there’s nothing we can do to stop it—nothing. We live it literally 24/7. From the time I get up till the time I go to sleep, it is constantly with me—whether I’m in a demonstration or a rally or a protest or another webinar, whatever—it’s always with me and I dream about it. The hopelessness is a very, very strong feeling.” His shoulders press lower as the words hang heavy. “And then there’s shame.”
The question of whether Israel is committing war crimes—let alone genocide—is not a question many Israelis are willing to face. And likewise, many Palestinians deny the sexual crimes committed on October 7. It’s very human to want to look away, says Avner, “and the media helps us to avoid everything uncomfortable. We live in a bubble with a kind of mental iron dome protecting us.
[…]
Here, given the dynamism and intensity of the challenges they face day to day, I find myself far less interested in questions of “impact” than with questions of endurance, steadfastness, and their commitment to non-violence as the only viable option.
Also from the piece, two documentaries to add to the must-watch list: Disturbing the Peace (2016) and There Is Another Way (2025).
You’ll notice one line that jumps out from both of those trailers, from Avner Wishnitzer: “We find that we actually have something in common: a willingness to kill people we don’t know.”
The quote from Weil yesterday — “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” — came from a letter to Joë Bousquet. (I’ve quoted it before.) Bousquet was a quadriplegic, wounded in WWI, and became friends with Weil in 1942.
In her May 12, 1942 letter to Bousquet, written in Marseille, she describes the war-torn world as being more of a reality for him, “perhaps even more so than for those who at this moment are killing and dying, wounding and being wounded. … As for the others, the people here for example, what is happening is a confused nightmare for some of them, though very few, and for the majority it is a vague background like a theatrical drop-scene. In either case it is unreal.”
She explains,
But you, on the other hand, for twenty years you have been repeating in thought that destiny which seized and then released so many men, but which seized you permanently; and which now returns again to seize millions of men. You, I repeat, are now really equipped to think it. Or … you have at least only a thin shell to break before emerging from the darkness inside the egg into the light of truth. It is a very ancient image. The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love, the Love which is God himself and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart. The spirit, leaving the miserable body in some corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, which has no perspective, but from which this world is seen as it is, unconfused by perspective.
Here’s an excerpt from the analysis of Yeats’ poem “Paudeen” that I mentioned in the footnotes the other day:
On the “lonely height,” the speaker imagines a vantage where “all are in God’s eye.” This isn’t a comforting pastoral heaven so much as a severe equality: everyone is equally seen, including the irritated speaker and the “old paudeen” he has been scorning. The phrase “God’s eye” carries a quiet pressure. Under that gaze, the speaker’s earlier indignation starts to look like a local, blinkered reaction—one voice mistaking itself for a verdict.
Yet the poem doesn’t deny the reality of human confusion; it names it plainly as “confusion of our sound.” What changes is the scale. The speaker imagines that, from the height, this confusion can be “forgot”—not erased as harm never existed, but overtaken by a more essential truth about each person’s capacity to sound like something clear.
… The “crystalline cry” is presented as something buried under “confusion.” That leaves an unresolved contradiction: if everyone has this clear cry, why does the speaker meet so much fumbling and spite? The poem’s answer is not psychological detail but perspective—get to the “lonely height,” and the deeper note becomes thinkable.
And speaking of Disturbing the Peace…
My childhood feeling of exclusion, or of the instability of my place in the world … could not but have an influence on the way I viewed the world — a view which is in fact a key to my plays. It is a view “from below,” a view from the “outside,” a view that has grown out of the experience of absurdity. What else but a profound feeling of being excluded can enable a person better to see the absurdity of the world and his own existence or, to put it more soberly, the absurd dimensions of the world and his own existence?”
Havel is talking about the outside feeling of growing up in a well-off, well-known bourgoise family around poorer, much less advantaged kids and families. But the insight is one that applies more broadly, even in his own life as a dissidant and playwright. “Sometimes I even wonder whether the original reason I began writing, or why I try to do anything at all, was simply to overcome this fundamental experience of not belonging, of embarrassment, of fitting in nowhere, of absurdity—or, rather, to learn how to live with it.”
Consider one of Havel’s most well-known anecdotes, the greengrocer. “The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ Why does he do it?”
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper ‘decoration’ in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society’, as they say.
To be outside of that “tranquility” and able to see, that is the important and necessary thing. But we shouldn’t miss the dirtiest detail of the greengrocer:
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan, ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient’, he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, ‘What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?’ Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high.
“It is a veil,” he says, “behind which human beings can hide their own ‘fallen existence,’ their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.”
The flip side of that shameful coin, however, is a hopefulness for the one who breaks free and shines a light. “The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence,” as Havel puts it. “Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth.”
[The initial confrontation] does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings’ repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore, does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were—-that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment … by the force of truth.
Adam Zagajewski (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh):
Try To Praise the Mutilated World
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Schmidgall again, in the opening of her essay:
In the everyday shock and swirl it’s the peace activists I find most riveting. They are oxygen rushing when breathing feels hard. They are voices of clarity and conviction cutting through the noise of droning pundits and endless opinions. Their authority stands apart from the politics of power—moral courage and inner freedom their highest reward. They have no time for despair and can’t afford cynicism. The marrow of hope thrums in their bones, inherited from stories long lived and treasured within family lineage and Holy Scripture from times before, when people suffered greatly but held on to a vision of love and a better day. And prayed. For us. The future generations.
Try to praise the mutilated world.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Praise the mutilated world…
… There will be a future,
and your hope will not be cut off.