the hour of the star

"I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was." 

The Hour of The Star is the first book I finished this year and I think I have found my favorite book of the year on the first week of the first month. I highlighted passages almost on every page on the first half of the book. I am in awe with how Lispector wrote the interiority of her characters, how she could translate her feelings and thoughts into words. And how I could find myself in the many words she strung into sentences gave a bewildering feeling. The passage above reminds me of what I wrote about writing some time ago. If only I possessed a small tiny amount of capacity to write so beautifully.

I fell even deeper into admiration when I read the afterword. I have known that her writing is something special before I read any of her books but I had never read about her political activities, although of course this book displays her deep empathy for the marginalized people. Reading her son's words about her gave me the same exact feeling as when I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed. It's this feeling of yearning to belong to a family that stands on the right side. It strangely gave me two kinds of longing. 

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universal moral law

I had been avoiding The Zone of Interest because I didn't feel like watching yet another film about the nazi holocaust, especially when there is an ongoing genocide happening right now. There have been so many medias on the nazi holocaust that many people especially in the west have an impression that it is a singular most horrific atrocities ever committed to humankind. It isn't. 

But the director Jonathan Glazer's speech at the Oscar ceremony got me really curious and I found his approach to the film to be very interesting. He shared the perspective of Primo Levi on how the nazi in cinema were often portrayed as "mythologically evil". Levi wrote, "Monster exist. But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." He also drew from philosopher Gillian Rose who envisioned a film "that could make us feel 'unsafe', by showing how we're emotionally and politically closer to the perpetrator culture than we'd like to think" and a film seen through the "dry eyes of grief" that is unsentimental and "forensic".

It is unsettling how eerily close to the present the feeling is when watching the film. Very recently a close friend for almost twenty years said that genocide, mass killing, rape, kidnapping, murder, were just parts of our dark history and were necessary "price to pay" (quoted verbatim) for political stability and power. She also talked about a particular murder of an alleged dissent with such glee like it's just a usual and necessary procedure to do within the military. She believes that she's immune and isn't in the slightest worry that all those atrocities could happen to her because a certain family member was a high rank in the military. 

I have been questioning since what exactly "morality" is when people don't seem to have the same code of standards to uphold. It is disturbing that I can't see the difference between her living in the present day among us with the SS commandant's wife living by the wall of Auschwitz. 

C.S. Lewis on his book 'Mere Christianity' defended the existence of God because there is a universal moral law, we know what is good and what is bad. But is there really? 

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quando l'anarchia verrà

Quando l'anarchia verrà / tutto il mondo sarà trasformato 

(When anarchy comes / the whole world will be transformed)

e nei governi sarà il ricordo d'infame passato. 

(and governments will be a memory of the infamous past)

L'aborrito confin sparirà / così pure preti e soldati 

(The abhorred border will disappear / as will priests and soldiers)

e nel mondo sol resterà l'ideale in cui siamo animati. 

(and in the world will only be the ideal in which we are all lively)

E allor nel cuor / pensando all'avvenire 

(So then in our hearts / let's think of the future)

cesserà lo strazio ed il soffrire

(the torment and the suffering will cease)