Human Acts

How is it, she wonders, that a face can so effectively conceal what lies behind it? How is not indelibly marked by such callousness, brutality, murderousness?

I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? 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?

Burdened by nightmares and insomnia, numbed by painkillers and sleeping pills, we were no longer young. There was no longer anyone who would worry over us or shed tears over our pitiful lot. We even despised ourselves.

Burdened by nightmares and insomnia, numbed by painkillers and sleeping pills, we were no longer young. There was no longer anyone who would worry over us or shed tears over our pitiful lot. We even despised ourselves.

At the time, death seemed as though it would be something refreshing, like slipping on that clean new uniform. If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.

Eyes wide open yet seeming not to see the waking world

After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.

After you died I could not hold a funeral,

And so my life became a funeral.

She had no faith in humanity. The look in someone’s eyes, the beliefs they espoused, the eloquence with which they did so, were, she knew, no guarantee of anything.