Questions and Meditations

But what has never occurred before is for such a living mass of humanity to be made entirely vulnerable to a concerted exploitation of its creature wants and instincts.

*

We are all each of us prisoners of our respective context = it is our context that determines our comprehension and appreciation of the state of the world – and of our position relative to it. Consenting and even grateful prisoners we are, since this context, whichever it may be, at once protects us and gives us structure and definition. If some breaches happen to tear our immediate horizon, they allow us to believe that our ignorance is thus somewhat mitigated, tempered and corrected by the sudden glimpses they give us of the vaster world and of its dangers = my husband, who must often go on tours of duty and returns each tine burdened with nightmares, the refugee ahead of me who does not understand the price of a baguette, the prostitute child who hails me from the shadow of a recessed entryway, the livid disheveled hulk who barges into my ashram, the river in spate that suddenly carries floating corpses, the flank of the hill that brutally splits and flounders at the end of my village…

***

35