Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

The days hardened like loaves: he ate them without appetite.

If you divide death by life, you will find a circle.

It will not be over until we talk.

time. ~ Borges ~

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilization from the hovering menace of war?

It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

Rumi: Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I have begun to change myself.

In a letter to Rami, Bassam wrote that one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

This is not a call for violence. Violence is weak. Hatred is weak. But today we have one side, the Palestinians, who are completely thrown to the side of the road. They don’t have any power. What they do is out of incredible anger and frustration and humiliation. Their land is taken. They want it back.

It’s a Sisyphean task to create any sort of hope.

Being Jewish means that you respect justice and fairness. No people can rule another people and obtain security or peace for themselves. The Occupation is neither just nor sustainable.

it will not be over until we talk to each other—that’s

I began to realize that violence is exactly what our opponents wanted us to use. They prefer violence because they can deal with it. They are vastly more sophisticated with violence. It’s nonviolence that is hard to deal with,

Rumi, the poet, the Sufi, said something that I will never forget: Beyond right and wrong there is a field, I’ll meet you there.

it’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.

Satyagraha: the revelation of truth and the confrontation of injustice through nonviolent means.

Hillel the Elder, author, in the first century before Christ, of the ethic of reciprocity: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow

The beatings went against proper jihad. A man who requires revenge should dig two graves.

Ullmann had once written that the secret of every work of art was the annihilation of matter through form.