All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > The Noise of Time > Status Update

“…he had always believed that love, as a force of nature, was indestructible; and that, threatened, it could be protected, blanketed, swaddled in irony. Now he was less convinced. Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? […] And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: […] that love's last days had come.”

“Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony — perhaps, some-times, so he hoped — might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. What did he value? Music, his family, love. Love, his family, music. The order of importance was liable to change. Could irony protect his music?”

“When truth-speaking became impossible — because it led to immediate death — it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony. Because the tyrant's ear is rarely tuned to hear it. […]
But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer.”

“Because, though tyranny might be paranoid, it was not necessarily stupid. If it were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive. Tyranny understood how some parts - the weak parts - of most people worked. It had spent years killing priests and closing churches, but if soldiers fought more stubbornly under the blessing of priests, then priests would be brought back […].”

“Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep’x as they say. […] Never a mass arrest; just one victim, and then the next night another — a system which ramped up the fear for those who remained, who had temporarily survived.”

“Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.”

„As a child, he had feared the dead — feared that they would rise from their graves and seize hold of him, dragging him back into the cold, black earth, his mouth and eyes filling with soil. This fear had slowly disappeared, because the hands of the living had turned out to be more frightening. […]

But then there was the opposite fear: of slipping from hands that kept you safe.“