2025 Readings 68

 "To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same."

Yesterday I started, and today I finished, Anne Michaels's Held, which probably gives you a pretty good idea of how much I loved the novel. Oddly, I had never read any of her work before, but I'll definitely be reading more of it. Her writing is beautiful, and she doesn't go out of her way to make things easy for the reader, which I almost universally admire. Each chapter jumps forward and backward in time, and she's clever in how she shows, subtly, the relationship between the different characters. It's definitely not a book that you'd have success with if you set it aside and picked up after a while; rather, you need to be more inside the story or you'd missed the not always obvious connections between the different characters. I don't think it worked brilliantly and consistently throughout the novel (especially an appearance late in the novel of someone who just doesn't seem to fit at all, but maybe at my next reading I'll understand the logic more clearly). 

"To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognize the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body, will be read as war has always been read: stranger to stranger, parent to child, lover to lover. And, even if it is possible to return to one's city, even if one has never left, it will be a history told as it has always been told: far from home.

What was Alan's task? To write what no one could bear to read. What was anyone's task? To endure the truth. To act upon it. But even empathy, compassion, was to feel and think in terms of separation. And Alan could only feel and think now in terms of entirety, or humanity as a single organism, a single entity of cause and consequence, the human union of breathing and being we are born to. A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb. a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre."

Living in an age where Trump callously supports Putin's slaughter of Ukrainians and Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a shield for his own crimes, these words seems almost painfully prescient.