Michael’s Reviews > The Years > Status Update

“Individuals, whether or not they were intellectuals, were entitled to speak and be heard. They needed only represent a group, a condition, an injustice. The fact of having experienced something as a woman, homosexual, class defector, prisoner, farmer, or miner gave one permission to speak in the first person. To think of oneself in collective terms brought a certain exaltation.”

At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think — no less by books or ads in the Metro than by funny stories — are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things.

Everything will be erased in a second […] All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.