W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > The Tavern at the End of History > Status Update

I>...although this wasn’t what Arendt had meant when she coined “the banality of evil,” Jacob was, in fact, alarmed by a powerful man who was fussy about his [Birkenstock] sandals.

“Jacob,” she said, “how did I find myself in a Dostoevsky novel?”

... a painting occurred at the intersection of different gazes, or converging intimacies. The tensions, the energy, the sensuality of a work caught like a message on an electric wire, between who was seeing whom and how...

Near the end of her life, Akhmatova had written directly about
meeting Modi[Gliani], We both did not understand one important thing: everything that happened was for both of us a prehistory of our future lives: his very short one, my very long one. The breathing of art still had not charred or transformed the two existences; this must have been the light, radiant hour before dawn.

Intellectually she knew that grief masqueraded as unwarranted anger, but she still felt the shame of her resentment. You people don’t own loss, she thought, looking around. And it’s true, they didn’t. Loss owned them, and in this she felt another permutation of her grossness—she still coveted her wound, she clung to it as to Samuel himself.

The world was an impossible place to live in, but that’s all you could do there. Some knew this better than others.