Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
Because in these books [Rachel Cusk] is very specifically exploiting the public conversations of men, which they consider genial and beneficent, but which women very often consider a burden or an intrusion. It is an inversion of that public spectacle: a man bending a woman’s ear. She bends the ear now, on the page. In fact the talkingness of men is something I have always counted on; I love it as perhaps only someone raised Catholic can love it. Men are helpless in the face of female listening. If you sit for it, as for a portrait, they will tell you anything. There is a price for these encounters, though.
