Apeirogon

by Colum McCann

Traitor: one who betrays a country, a friend, a principle.

Collaborator: one who cooperates traitorously with an enemy.

It was Bassam’s job, as commander, to punish the prison collaborators.

From the beginning the beatings didn’t feel right. He didn’t want to become the jailer.

It was important to remain nonviolent but not to seem weak.

In 1361—639 years before the third millennium—the first permanent pipe organ was installed in the Saint Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany.

The organ, with its twelve-note claviature, became a local treasure, the pride of the town.

Seven centuries later, a John Cage piece was due to be performed at the cathedral.

eight-page score was titled As Slow as Possible.

stretch the notes so they would sound out, uninterrupted, for...

The beginning of the performance was slightly delayed but opened with silence in 2001.

The first full chord vibrated through the cathedral in 2003. Seventeen months later a note was added and the tone changed.

Another chord sounded in 2006 and went on until 2008.

Each movement of As Slow as Possible lasts about seventy-one years.

music will last until September 5, 2640,

Borges’s short story The Aleph, a manuscript written by Sir Richard Francis Burton is discovered in a library.

Rami had long learned to embrace the confusion. Chaos was the fuel of Israel. It

He knew that he lived in two Israels: a small one which admired him, and another one, a larger one, bursting with disdain.

Rami underlined a passage in Edward Said’s collection of essays Culture and Imperialism,

Survival, in fact, is about the connection between things.

one of Nurit’s favor...

Bassam knew the corruption. The capitulation. The isolation.

He was difficult to pick apart: those who criticized him were forced to criticize themselves too.

He had a habit of opening his hands wide when he spoke. Take me on. Try anything at all. The worst has been done to me.

So many times people would come up to him after his lectures and say that they wished there were more like him. What do you mean?

As if he were the only sort of Palestinian they could stomach.

One of the most beautiful works of Islamic art ever produced was the towering wooden staircase and pulpit that sat for eight hundred years in the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

the minbar of Saladin, was built originally in Aleppo in the twelfth century

considered a masterpiece of sacred geometry, wood carving, marquetry and calligraphy.

The German writer Goethe

tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music—that

Music is liquid architecture, he wrote, and architectur...

minbar stood for eight hundred years without a single nail or screw or any glue holding it together.

early morning of August 21, 1969, an Australian tourist, Denis Michael Rohan,

doused the pulpit with benzene and then set it all alight.

Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center

built on the site of Deir Yassin. The village—a

outskirts of Jerusalem.

early 1948 the residents

village signed a nonaggression pact with the neighboring Jewish vil...

April rogue elements of the Jewish militia broke the peace and over one hundred Palestinian men, wome...

event helped to set off ...

Albert Einstein wrote to the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel—known

Stern Gang—to

after the massacre in De...

no longer be willing to assist them with aid or help raise mo...

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

From the Greek, apeiron: to be boundless, to be endless.

As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle,

magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight