Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him alive again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments – he who laughed at monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains – nothing but words, precisely.
If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.
We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still posses one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.
Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.
One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?
Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion.
I do not know what I will think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.
But formulas are holy as prayers, decree-laws, and dead languages, and not an iota in them can be changed. And so my ammonium chloride, the twin of a happy love and a liberating book, by now completely useless and a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the short of that lake, and nobody knows why anymore.
The institution represented an attempt to shift onto others – specifically, the victims – the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.
This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.
The latrine is an oasis of peace.
Het lijkt me overbodig hieraan toe te voegen dat geen enkel feit verzonnen is.
Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.
The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.
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.
Qualcuno, molto tempo fa, ha scritto che anche i libri, come gli esseri umani, hanno un loro destino, imprevedibile, diverso da quello che per loro si desiderava e si attendeva.
Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study.
Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.
He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come.