@teandumplings / teandumplings.tumblr.com
“And where were you twenty years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you when I was new? When I was one of those innocent young maidens you always come to? How dare you! How dare you come to me now, when I am this!”
The Last Unicorn (1982)
Art by Morcante
…I should note that it is not the celebration of Christmas, per se, with which I take issue. Spending time with loved ones and exchanging gifts are lovely traditions, and while many of the particular traditions of Christmas are not quite to my taste, I’m thrilled to know they give others a great deal of joy…
What I do object to, however, is the culture that’s been built around Christmas, that has elevated one religious faith’s year-end festivity into an inescapable, weeks-long period of compulsory celebration for nearly everyone. If you’re Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or otherwise uninterested in participating in a Christian holiday, you can personally opt out of Christmas Day by declining to get a tree and spending December 25 at the movies — but all bets are off should you choose to leave your house (or even turn on the TV) at any moment between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
December in America is a constant onslaught of Christmas culture: Every store gets decked out in Christmas finery and puts carols on full blast, seemingly believing that it encourages shopping. Television shows that normally avoid any discussion of anything approaching religious observance suddenly get into the spirit, devoting extra-long episodes to stories about the generous spirit inspired by this time of year (a generous spirit that, apparently, people who don’t celebrate Christmas know absolutely nothing about). Ostensibly secular offices and schools are suddenly awash in Santas and sleighs and reindeer, all in the name of bringing everyone a little extra joy, the fact that it’s their own definition of joy be damned.
It would be bad enough if this aggressive Christmas assault were purely the domain of the rabid right wing; if the only people I needed to worry about fending off were the types who see cries of “Happy Holidays” as an affront to their religious freedom, or the switch from red to green holiday cups as some sign of an Islamic agenda. But the truth is that liberals — even ones who ostensibly embrace religious diversity — can be just as bad as their conservative counterparts when it comes to enforcing the oppressive Christmas climate.
And at a time when religious minorities are increasingly under attack within this country, we to take a long hard look at the way Christmas is used to send the message that America is a nation primarily for Christians.
When I tell a liberal Christmas fan that I just don’t want to get into the spirit, it usually doesn’t end well. If they’re not insistent that I’m missing out (and just no fun), they tend to see my lack of enthusiasm for Christmas as an indictment of their own enjoyment of the holiday.
I’ve heard so many arguments for why my stance that compulsory Christmas is forcing me to participate in Christianity is unfounded — It’s not religious, it’s a secular celebration of consumerism! It’s not Christian, it’s actually Saturnalia dressed up in Jesus drag! They love it in Japan! — none of which seem to take into consideration that, as a Jewish woman, I’m probably pretty well versed in what sorts of celebrations are and aren’t within the scope of my religious practice. (And, let’s be serious, a holiday whose name commemorates the birth of Jesus has, at the very least, some intense Christian heritage that might feel uncomfortable for me).
It’s a reaction that’s disappointing any Christmas season, but this year, as the celebration ramps up in the shadow of the most fatal anti-Semitic attack in American history, it’s particularly disheartening. With white nationalism on the rise, and a president who takes great pleasure in using cries of “Merry Christmas” to bludgeon religious minorities, being non-Christian in America feels more isolating, and unsafe, than ever.
…And above all, please remember that Christmas doesn’t have a monopoly on generosity and joy, anymore than Passover has a monopoly on being anti-slavery. Not everybody needs, or wants, to get into the Christmas spirit, and that’s totally okay. Christmas is not for everyone, but the freedom of religion, and celebration of diversity, that allows for that recognition is — and that is what truly makes America great.
I spent a good hour trying to compose a reply/addition to this, only to finally click on the actual link and found that Alptraum already articulated most of what I wanted to say.
But one thing I think could be added is that, for a lot of people, celebrating Christmas is the norm. It’s assumed. There’s no need to question or interrogate the religious or alienating aspects of the holiday because “everybody” celebrates it. And when you identify yourself as someone who doesn’t, when you reply to their jolly “Merry Christmas!” with a weary “Happy holidays!” you can see the change in their eyes.
Oh. You’re not one of Us. You’re one of Them. You’re Other.
And as if Othering people isn’t dangerous enough, not only have they Othered you, you’ve damaged their worldview. The “most wonderful time of the year” has been dimmed by the presence of this Other. Sometimes there’s awkwardness, a bit of shame at having forgotten that Other people exist, sometimes there’s anger that they do exist at all. Often they will blame the Other for inflicting these feelings on them. After all, if the Other were not here, the response would be an equally jolly “Merry Christmas!” and everyone would be on their way. How dare the Other attack their good holiday cheer with these feelings? How dare the Other make them feel bad for not remembering that everyone is not just like them.
Anyway, Christmas is a tainted holiday for me, for this reason and for all the reasons outlined in the article. My friends, who are very secular, sometimes invite me to their celebrations. They want to celebrate with me, to be part of their family and their joy, and I always feel honored and loved that they want me there. It’s not their fault society treats Christmas this way. But for reasons that are not their fault, the holiday rarely feels anything but alienating to me.
[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff - she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that - but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject - well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters - people thought griffins were legit - real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point - except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins - art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know - they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals - wow and amaze - you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils - and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah - as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
listen i also hate those dumbass political cartoons about kids and their phones but at the same time you’re a fool if you flat out deny there are negative aspects to the way we communicate in the social media age
facebook and instagram strategically time your notifications after you post something to make you waste time scrolling. those two platforms also come to mind as being particularly performative (“look at this beautiful picture-ready thing i’m doing today”) although any social media encourages that. snapchat’s streak feature, as well as those stupid emojis next to people’s names, exist solely to suck you into using the app every day. twitter and instagram display your follower count, and facebook displays how many friends you have. tumblr cultivates a culture of oversharing, and although you can have one-on-one conversations on here, most “communication” takes the form of shouting from a soapbox. all of these things are related to the problem of privacy online, which many of us simply assume doesn’t exist and should therefore be tossed aside so that we can dissect and manufacture every detail of our selves and desires online. you can’t honestly tell me these things are of no concern for the way we understand ourselves and others, and our relationships to the world.
I love this post. Also note that social media (the Internet truly), in a way that TV hasn’t been able to achieve, allows advertisers to be more intimate and targeted than they’ve ever been before. Through platforms like Instagram and Facebook, we basically declare to them the things we desire, interact with most often, the places we go, etc…
All that information is scraped from us and used for all sorts of stuff. To get us to buy things, to get us to watch things, to sway our opinions on so many things.
Chadwick, John. The Decipherment of Linear Bee. Cambridge University Press, 1958. Print.
It was a Friday when we woke up at dawn, phones dying, plugged into walls that lost power sometime in the night, and we looked for plumes of smoke. On the west face of the mountain, we’re audience to every sunrise, blind to every sunset. The day was clear. We knew the fire was burning somewhere, but without power, we had no way to check. No way to call out. So I put on my cycling kit, and I prepared to descend the canyon to the coast. I kissed Ben, and I told him I would call him when I was able to get news at the bottom of the canyon. Topanga Canyon Boulevard was backed up with cars. It happens sometimes when there’s an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway where the road dumps out at a single stoplight, but drivers were being erratic and rude. People were turning around, pulling over, and I kept swerving to avoid their desperation. I heard a loud pop and knew I’d broken a spoke. I stopped, opening my brakes, and kept riding, the rear tire still rubbing against the brakes and forcing my effort. I would need to have it fixed in the city. When I reached the coast, the stoplight was out. Something was wrong. There was tumult at the gas station. Aggression was palpable. I turned left in the shadow of a car going the same way over the freeway, and then saw them: the cars pulled over, cameras pointing back toward me. I stopped and unclipped, looking over my shoulder to see what was worth getting out of your car on your morning commute to see.
The smoke was unbelievable, like the earth had mirrored itself in the sky. The smell was unmistakable, emerging from the notes of gasoline and exhaust to pronounce itself as nothing short of chaos. I pulled out my phone to call Ben, but there was no service. Power was out everywhere. There was no way to call him until I got further into the city. Malibu was on fire. We couldn’t see the plumes on our protected western face, but the fire was coming. It was unbelievable.
I passed hundreds of cars on my way into Santa Monica, traffic backed up for miles. The whir of my bicycle making music with the wind against the open spaces between the cars. I kept pulling out my phone to see no bars, No Service. All along the coast, phones pointed toward the horror behind me with jaws agape behind them.
I checked the news at stoplights, desperately looking for a fire map. Over 10,000 acres and spreading fast. Evacuations notices pouring in. Winds becoming increasingly erratic, fire raging through a range deeply dehydrated by drought. I needed to go home. I needed to be there. But I thought I had time. I took my bike to the shop to fix the spoke. 12,000 acres. I went to work, and I tried to call Ben.
“Hey, this is Ben. Leave a mes—”
All my calls, straight to voicemail. Without power, our WiFi calling didn’t work. He would charge his phone in his car, I knew he would. 15,000 acres. I dropped my bike off at the shop, walked to the office, and continued to check the fire news. The Santa Anas blew hard and fast, pushing the fire through the Santa Monica Mountains. People kept leaving work, talking of back alleys, throughways to home. Text messages came in emojiless and short.
“Are you in Topanga?” “Do you know if we’re in danger?” “Have you guys left?”
I tried to call Ben again. Nothing. I tried to call our landlord, Jerry. Nothing. I kept trying to call as more people kept trying to call me. Gchats from best friends. Slacks from coworkers. Emails from parents. And a text from a neighbor:
We can’t go home. Do you think Ben could get Sax from our house? I think the bedroom window is unlocked.
My phone rang. I was already holding it.
“Hello?” “Hi, this is Helen’s Santa Monica, your bike is ready.”
It was time to go home. I told work, I’m sorry, but I need to go, it’s fastest by bike anyway, yes I’ll let you know but it should be fine, just want to be sure. I walked at a clip to the shop, but news reached me faster than I could reach home: mandatory evacuation of Topanga, all zones, immediately.
The canyon is broken into 9 zones. There are 3 primary outlets. One that goes to the valley, one to the coast, one deeper into the mountains. All zones needed to get out, splitting between the valley and coast exits. We’d seen a few evacuations, but this was first time it was mandatory, for everyone. No recommended, no voluntary — mandatory. For everyone.
I tried to call Ben — straight to voicemail. I got to the shop, and the fire was on the TVs.
“Miss?” “Sorry, I’m here for my bike,” I said, staring at the news. “Last name?” I looked back at the woman. “Sorry, what?”
Red flames, red news banners, red retardant falling from the sky.
“Your last name. For the bike.” “Right, sorry, Wright. W, R, I, H, sorry, G, or G, H, T.”
…Woolsey Fire grows to 20,000 acres…
“Ma’am? Your bike?” “Sorry! I’m sorry, just, these fires.”
I couldn’t go home, he couldn’t get the news, and I couldn’t stop apologizing for being lost in the smoke. The fire was growing and I stood wide-eyed in the slow commotion of the bike shop. And then he called.
“Hel—” “Benny! Benny, are you evacuating?” “What? — Hi Kelton!” “Is that Jerry?” “Yeah, we’re just hanging out. Trying to find where in the house has reception. Power’s still out.” “It’s mandatory evacuation.” “Really?” “Yes, the whole canyon, it’s mandatory. Our zones go out through the coast, zones 1-6 to the valley.” “We can’t even see any smoke. Is the fire close?” “They’re worried about a windshift.”
A pause.
“Ben?” “Sorry, moved from my reception spot. OK, well, I’ll get our stuff together, is there anything you’d like me to pack?” “I actually need you to go get Sax from the neighbors’ house. They can’t get home.” “The cat?” “Yes, can you get their cat?” “I’ll try. I’ll pack up all the animals and our stuff and call you when I’m out of the canyon.”
A long time ago, I was prepared for this. My father was a smokejumper — he jumped out of airplanes to fight forest fires in the great American west. Photos of him in his gear, young and strapping and cash-strapped, hung around my childhood home. Next to each photo of him was a photo of my mother, rifle in hand, never to be out done by my father. When I moved to the West, I knew forest fires well. Because of them, I knew all disasters well. I knew all about go-bags and tennis shoes at your desk and extra supplies in your car. I grew up with handguns in center consoles and spare keys hidden in wheel wells, with gas tanks always full and cash never low. I grew up checking exits and the wind.
I was prepared, but I wasn’t there. And it made me mad. God, it made me mad. I could see myself in my house, my cabin, my stretch of cliff and dirt and wood, and I could see myself moving through it with the efficiency and grace of deep responsibility and care, knowing so completely in my heart the list of what mattered and what didn’t, and playing the perfect game of Tetris in my truck with all the perfect pieces of my life. But I wasn’t there and it wasn’t my call.
Four hours and 15,000 acres later, Ben pulled up to my office in my truck, his heavily modified Subaru WRX left in the driveway at home. And in the truck, three animals, the passports and wedding certificate and wills, my engagement ring and the necklace my grandfather left me, my first target practice with my dad, the checkbooks, the emergency litter box I had bought months ago, and a duffel bag of my clothes.
It was a Friday night, the fire was devouring the thirsty earth, we were taking refuge in a friend’s place, and I was going through the duffel of how my husband imagined I dress. He packed my favorite jeans, a pair of badly stained khakis, a sweater that didn’t go with either, another sweater that I wore every day on our honeymoon, a flannel I don’t wear, two technical t-shirts meant for riding bikes in the dirt, enough loungewear to clothe an elephant, only bras without underwire, and no shoes.
From the city, I could see he had time, but from where he was, all he could see was that I had called 15 times and he needed to break into the neighbors’ to save their cat after their other cat had gone missing in that canyon only a few months after moving in… and only a few months earlier. He packed some funny things, but he packed the right things.
Seven days later, we were able to go home. Topanga had been spared. Malibu had not. Paradise, much worse. I saw my father in the faces of those men on the news. I saw his friends. I saw their proximity to loss, the weight of what they saved on their shoulders, the permanence of what they couldn’t on their souls. And I saw my home in the ones that burned. When we walked in, our house smelled of cedar and fir and tobacco, as if the warmth of a home well-loved found a way to melt our candles, the fire miles and miles away. I stood in the doorway of the cool evening, holding Finn, looking at this strange rental I call my home. A painting of our first place together. A blanket I’ve never unfolded on the back of the couch. A pile of dismembered stuffed animals in the dog’s bin. Three homemade cookbooks. “One free massage” handwritten ticket. The Topanga Survival Guide sitting on the shelf. All the things that would have been gone forever, forgotten for years, etching themselves into a picture of what I would always remember as the home I didn’t want to lose.
One day, this canyon will burn again. But I know my exits. And my go-bag is pretty simple: it’s a cat, a dog, and a boy that leaves his sports car behind to save his girl’s truck.
I wrote this piece listening to City on Fire by Tyler Hilton, and My Day Will Come by James Francies & YEBBA.
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some iconic dialogue that sounds like its from the great canon of literature but are actually from memes
feel free to add more!
• you kneel before my throne unaware that it was built on lies
- take this gift, for the gods surely won’t
I am sure you will go on taking advantage of these fine people with your lies and your greed, but know that when you are gone, the same worms will eat you too.
“Face your mortality. Choose your requiem.” is one of the greatest things i’ve ever read, ngl
When God gives you lemons, you find a new God
cuz it’s that time of year again!
basically just don’t make us think about our own immediate stuff and it’s all god
I’ll probably get at least three trolls creeping out of the woodwork on this post.
There are a bunch of people for whom bubble baths, scented candles, and chocolate is self-care.
There are a bunch of people for whom early-morning yoga, vegetable smoothies, and aggressively minimalist redecorating is self-care.
There are a bunch of people for whom playing with kids is self-care, and a bunch of people for whom dressing up and going to a fancy restaurant where no kids are allowed is self-care, and a bunch of people for whom sleeping in late is self-care and a bunch of people for whom getting up early is self-care.
Lately I’ve been moving from ‘yeah, humans are vast and varied’ to a sense that there’s a similar underlying thing in all of these cases.
I think something tends to be more restorative - to be an activity that leaves you more energized than you started it, more okay than when you started it - the more of these criteria it meets:
- restorative things are often things you associate with being prioritized, valued and valuable. This is why some people find chores restorative - it hits ‘valued and valuable’f or them - while other people find them draining - their association with doing chores is being incapable or not-good-enough or ordered-around,
- restorative things are usually things that don’t draw on the resources you feel constrained on - if you’re tired from being on your feet all day, running sure won’t do it, and if you’re lonely and isolated then bubble baths probably won’t help. Dong stuff that causes you anxiety won’t often be restorative.
- restorative things tend to fit into your understanding of what a good life for you looks like. early-morning yoga works for people who find it empowering to think of themselves as someone who does early-morning yoga. prayer and attending religious services tends to work for people who are like ‘my best self attends religious services’ and not so well for people ho are like ‘ugh I’m supposed to do that’ or ‘doing that just reminds me how much I disagree with my community about what my best self looks like’
- restorative things are pleasant in their own right. It’s astonishing how often this one gets passed-over. If you do not enjoy something - if the experience of doing it isn’t a good experience - then it’s really unlikely to be restorative. Making yourself do yoga when you find every minute awful will not be restorative. It might sometimes be valuable but it won’t be restorative. (Things that are unpleasant to start, but pleasant and rewarding once you’re doing them, can be restorative).
I think there are a couple takeaways from this framework. One is hopefully to make it easier to identify things that’ll be restorative for you. The second is that people attach a lot of moral valence to which activities other people find restorative - accusing people of being consumerist or selfish or lazy or privileged - and I’m hoping that there might be less of it if people are aware that the things that work for them won’t work for everyone. (Related to that,of course privilege plays a role in which things you experience as making you valued and valuable, and which things you conceive of as being part of your good life. So it’s a terrible idea to try to impose one version of ‘self-care’, like employers signing employees up for exercise programs in the name of self-care; people of a different class background get particularly screwed by this.)
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly NOW. Love mercy NOW. Walk humbly NOW. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.”
—
From the Talmud
Pirkei Avos (Ethics/Chapters of the Fathers) 2:16
Hey friends, if you’ve been following the reports about the fire in Northern California and have been wondering what you can do to help, please consider donating to this fund if you can (and/or sharing with others)!
My uncle is a Chico resident and this is what he’s recommending. North Valley Community Foundation is the local NGO which serves as an umbrella to the various local nonprofits and will get the funds to the right places.
People love dead Jews. Living Jews, not so much.
…Here’s how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank’s diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into 70 languages and has sold over 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year, with reserved tickets selling out months in advance. But when a young employee at the Anne Frank House in 2017 tried to wear his yarmulke to work, his employers told him to hide it under a baseball cap. The museum’s managing director told newspapers that a live Jew in a yarmulke might “interfere” with the museum’s “independent position.” The museum finally relented after deliberating for six months, which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.
…[The] runaway success of Anne Frank’s diary depended on playing down her Jewish identity: At least two direct references to Hanukkah were edited out of the diary when it was originally published. Concealment was central to the psychological legacy of Anne Frank’s parents and grandparents, German Jews for whom the price of admission to Western society was assimilation, hiding what made them different by accommodating and ingratiating themselves to the culture that had ultimately sought to destroy them. That price lies at the heart of Anne Frank’s endless appeal. After all, Anne Frank had to hide her identity so much that she was forced to spend two years in a closet rather than breathe in public. And that closet, hiding place for a dead Jewish girl, is what millions of visitors want to see.
…And here is the most devastating fact of Frank’s posthumous success, which leaves her real experience forever hidden: We know what she would have said, because other people have said it, and we don’t want to hear it.
The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary—“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—is often called “inspiring,” by which we mean that it flatters us. It makes us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift, it is worth noting, at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” three weeks before she met people who weren’t.
Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: They murdered six million of them. Anne Frank’s writings do not describe this process. Readers know that the author was a victim of genocide, but that does not mean they are reading a work about genocide. If that were her subject, it is unlikely that those writings would have been universally embraced.
We know this because there is no shortage of texts from victims and survivors who chronicled the fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents has achieved anything like the fame of Frank’s diary. Those that have come close have only done so by observing the same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors. The work that came closest to achieving Frank’s international fame might be Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir that could be thought of as a continuation of Frank’s experience, recounting the tortures of a 15-year-old imprisoned in Auschwitz. As the scholar Naomi Seidman has discussed, Wiesel first published his memoir in Yiddish, under the title And the World Kept Silent. The Yiddish book told the same story, but it exploded with rage against his family’s murderers and, as the title implies, the entire world whose indifference (or active hatred) made those murders possible. With the help of the French Catholic Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel later published a French version of the book under the title Night—a work that repositioned the young survivor’s rage into theological angst. After all, what reader would want to hear about how his society had failed, how he was guilty? Better to blame God. This approach did earn Wiesel a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as a spot in Oprah’s Book Club, the American epitome of grace…
im not INTERESTED anymore in seeing men’s perception of what female leisure time looks like, how we lounge around hairless and small and beautiful on our beds and couches in oversized shirts and lace underwear, unaware and unassuming and all the more beautiful for not Trying to be beautiful, i’m TIRED of it. even our most basic freedom of privacy, time alone with the self, has been butchered and ripped from us by the gaze of male photographers and artists
Lizard in Baltic Amber (Eocene) | #Geology #GeologyPage #Fossil
