Status Updates From The Wild Place

“There was a nun walking in camp today leading a goat by a string but you wouldn’t wonder for a moment about the goat, only about her pleated headpiece snowy white and starched in the middle of a soapless and starchless Germany...”

“Not weariness but wrath had altered my teammates, a burning wordless wrath directed against nothing in sight because the population maps with the colored pins in them and the military personages who moved those pins around, trimly “consolidating” the displaced masses, were as far away as God seemed to be just then.”

“I began then by seeing the DP’s (displaced persons) one by one. The first impressions entered with such sharp shock that never again would I be able to look on a refugee mass, even in pictures, and see it collectively, see it as a homogeneous stream of unfortunate humanity that could be handled with the impersonal science of the engineer who does not ever think of the drops of water when he is controlling a flood.”

"But like everything else where humans are concerned, it is one thing to read about it and quite another to witness it, especially when women and children are looking out the cattle car doors. A sense of shame invades you. A feeling of objective guilt crystallizes and you stare at the humiliation as if you were responsible for it in some intangible fashion. The impression is unique each time." p. 21

"But like everything else where humans are concerned, it is one thing to read about it and quite another to witness it, especially when women and children are looking out the cattle car doors. A sense of shame invades you. A feeling of objective gilt crystallizes and you stare at the humiliation as if you were responsible for it in some intangible fashion. The impression is unique each time." p. 21