Good for a single journey

No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.

---Simone Weil.

Was reminded of this when reading the harrowing accounts of what happened in Vienna, 1938. Harrowing in the sense that what was taken to be the ordinary fabric of living was torn asunder. The daily rituals that sustain what can only be called the illusion of our civility to one another and our sense of continuity are destroyed. The Jew becomes, is made into, a stranger in his own home. De-politicisation, invalidations, cancellings. No, not just that. De-humanisation, as if it was simmering there, under the surface, all along...

'This process of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes, or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shetel, stripping you back to your essential character- wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back.'

Houses are ransacked, people are roughed up. This is how it begins. Again and again.

'This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.'

There's something awful and almost universal in this brutality: the bulldozing of homes, resettlements, the denial of property rights to slum-dwellers, the creation of 'reservations', expulsions (good for a single journey), the rootless vs those bound by blood and soil, the saved and the damned; it goes on, and on...

'All the disturbances of the city continued outside our window, but we felt isolated and safe, as if the street were a river, and our room a raft...these small shared pleasures were, and remain, no less moving, or beautiful, or real for being so precarious...

A life whose meaning lies not in a faith in the past, or in an after-life..to reconcile their own habits of pleasure with the violence of the world.'

--Adam Gopnik, preface to A London Child of the 1870's.