The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

All is in your own hands, just as much as God’s. And whatever your hands may do, do it with all your strength and will.

Music eases every pain we don’t know we carry. It banishes the fear that is so commonplace now, we have grown inured to its shadow and chill.

These agonies and ecstasies—they can break us, use us up, burn us away unless we shield our hearts with music.

The Party is too thoroughly entrenched, and the people are too cowed, too frightened to resist. They are all too willing to shut their eyes, to pretend nothing evil has happened. They are even willing to accept that these things Hitler does, these things he says, are normal—that the Party has the right of it, and has been right all along. They are ready to believe, now, that mankind was always meant to hate his neighbor, to kill the weak and the outcast, since God first dreamed us into being.