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Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.
He was aware, he said, that humiliation was a deep wound. We are Semitic, both of us, Israelis and Palestinians together. Your generation is in jeopardy, he said to Rami. There was a time for war, I admit it, he said, but no more. He himself carried the burden. He had created so much of it. The Occupation, he said, was a corruption. And the aid from the United States for military equipment had become a plague. Freedom, he said, begins between the ears.
You come back home, the house is filled with hundreds and hundreds of people coming to pay respect, offering condolences. These are the seven days of shiva. You are enveloped by these hundreds of people, thousands actually—they lined the pavement, they had to put up orange cones to close the street off. Traffic cops for your daughter. But on the eighth day, everybody goes back to their normal, everyday business, and you’re left alone. Without your daughter.
What are you going to do now, with this new, unbearable burden on your shoulders? What are you going to do with this incredible anger that eats you alive? What are you going to do with this new you, this father without a daughter, this man who you never thought could have existed?
In his lectures Rami told the audience that there wasn’t a minute of his waking life—not a single minute—that he did not dwell on Smadar. He knew the idea must have sounded exaggerated to his listeners—nineteen years, every minute of the day—but every now and then another parent would come along, or a brother, or an aunt, and he would look at them and recognize the grief carried within them like clocks.
As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible. At the same time, one can arrive anywhere within an apeirogon and the entirety of the shape is complicit in the journey, even that which has not yet been imagined.
