Velvel

“Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

“But turning your head away or remaining silent in the face of injustice and crime means collaborating with a politics whose program is death and destruction. And whether it is willing or unwilling collaboration doesn't really matter, because the result is the same.

More than a decade after the beginning of the war in the Balkans, it is essential that we understand that is it we, ordinary people and not some madmen, who made it possible. We were the ones who one day stopped greeting our neighbors of a different nationality, an act that the next day made possible the opening of concentration camps. We did it to one another. Maybe this is a good reason for considering whether it is too easy to put a hundred men on trial in The Hague. What about the others who embraced the ideology that led to the deaths of two hundred thousand people? Perhaps they did not believe in it, but they certainly did not protest against it. If it is true that there is no collective guilt, can there be collective innocence?”
― Slavenka Drakulić, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague

“A dark man with a burning torch ran down the street on a dull night in late fall. The little girl saw him from the window of her house, having awoken from a dull dream. Then she heard a sharp rifle shot and a pitiful despondent scream — they must have killed the man running with the torch. Soon she was hearing other shots, many and distant, and the clamor of people in a nearby prison… The girl fell asleep and forgot everything that she would see later, on subsequent days: she was too young, and the memory and reason of early childhood were overgrown forever by her future life. But well into her old age the nameless man rose up sadly and unexpectedly and ran within her — in the dim light of her memory — and died once more in the darkness of the past, in the heart of the grown up child. Amidst hunger and sleep, in a moment of love or of some youthful joy — suddenly in the distance, in the depth of her body there rose again the despondent scream of the dead man, and the young woman instantly altered her life — stopped her dance, if she was dancing, grew more focused, more reliable in her work, if she was laboring, hid her face in her hands, if she was alone. That stormy night of late fall saw the start of the October revolution — in that town where Moskva Ivanovna Chestnova had lived at that time.”
― Andrei Platonov, Happy Moscow

“I just checked that crosshead, Alexander Vassilievich,” I told him once when he started to examine the block between a piston rod and a connecting rod just after I had done the same thing.

“And I want to do it myself,” Maltsev answered, smiling, and there was a kind of sadness in his smile which startled me.

I later understood the meaning of this sadness and the reason for his always holding himself aloof from us. He felt a superiority over us because he understood the locomotive better than we did and because he didn’t believe that I or anybody else could learn the secret of his skill, the secret of seeing at the same time the swallow flying by and the signal ahead, being aware at the same moment in time of the track, the whole train, and the power of the locomotive. Maltsev realized of course that we could outdo even him in our zeal, but he couldn’t imagine that we could love the engine more than he did or drive the train better - anything better, he thought, would be impossible. And this was why Maltsev was sad with us; he was lonesome with his talent, as if he lived all by himself, not knowing how to express it to us so we could understand.”
― Andrei Platonov, The Fierce and Beautiful World