Elie Wiesel's Night came back to me today, with its pictures of a terrible suffering that challenges every human hope for meaning through all history, and even the remote possibility of lasting peace. It reminded me that the suffering I know directly will always be lengths shorter than this triumph of brutality. It also suggested that the worst might always be yet to come, and I cannot ask why or how.
A discussion of Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Wreck of the Deutschland with references to the Holocaust, here.
Not out of His Bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt—
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt—
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).
[Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland]
The ride through time is real enough, but are there any that can escape the "fable and miss"?
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