The Book of Calamities Quotes

“Because Americans don’t know how to suffer, we are inflicting great suffering on others, and in all likelihood we will bring further suffering upon ourselves.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning

“This fantasy of immunity arose out of traditional American exceptionalism but became prevalent only amid the euphoric abundance of the postwar years. It is a child’s fantasy, and it has made us a nation of children.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning

“A common feature of many theories of trauma is the idea that the causative—the wounding—event is not remembered but relived, as it is in the flashbacks of combat veterans, experienced anew with a visceral immediacy that affords no critical distance. To remember something, you have to consign it to the past—put it behind you—but trauma remains in the present; it fills that present entirely. You are inside it. Your mouth is always filled with the taste of blood. The killers are always crashing through the brush behind you. Some researchers believe that trauma bypasses the normal mechanisms of memory and engraves itself directly on some portion of the brain, like a brand. Cattle are branded to signify that they are someone’s property, and so, too, were slaves. The brand of trauma signifies that henceforth you yourself are property, the property of that which has injured you. The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi believed that trauma is characterized by the victim’s helpless identification with the perpetrator, and elsewhere in the literature one often comes across the word “possession.” The moment of trauma marks an event horizon after which memory ceases. Or else memory breaks down, so that the victim can reconstruct the event but not the feeling that accompanied it, or alternatively only the feeling.”
― Peter Trachtenberg, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning