Lessons

by Ian McEwan

To stop now would be to concede he had been wrong all along.

So often what maKe people persist!

“Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct.”

Pay attetion! Same mentality is happening under our nose.

So when Heinrich spoke of national redemption by way of constructing a history of anti-Nazi sabotage, his prospective son-in-law did not say what he thought—that nothing, not a score of White Rose movements, a million saboteurs, a trillion ill-tooled screws, could redeem the industrialised savagery of the Third Reich and the tens of millions of citizens who knew and looked away.

Sometimes, you can only admit what happened and not change the subject!

Roland thought the only redemptive project was to know everything that happened and why. And that could take a hundred years.

That's what the Germans had the courage to do.

in the prosperous West, after the mass carnage of two world wars, to live without death became the peculiar privilege and vulnerability of a protected generation.

So our generation has lived carelessly because we never faced the ultimate sacrifice.

You think of your child as your dependant. Then, as he starts to pull away, you discover that you are a dependant too. It had always cut both ways.

As you age, it becomes self-evident.

By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?

Have we lulled ourselves that we held the moral superiority and forgot to remain vigilant?