Ladan’s Reviews > Human Acts > Status Update

What a thing it is to be young and be able to read such fine print without glasses.

Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered-is this the essential fate of humankind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel?

Some memories never heal. Rather than fafing away with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one.

I thought about whether I really had it in me to carry a gun, to point it at a living person and pull the trigger.

Our experiences might have been similar, but they were far from identical.

After you died I couldnt hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.

We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us. All the same, there was sth infinately noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad. Mine, on the other hand, crushed out of shape beneath a tower of others, was shameful, detestable.

My body seemed to slide beneath my wavering grasp, as though trying to shuck me off, but I clung on with a strength born of desparation.