On Reading Hannah Arendt (1st draft)

Collective guilt, it seems,

should start

at the beginning:

Adam and Eve, not

one or the other, were both

guilty.

 

(No matter how delicious the fruit,

they should never have eaten it.)

Then it extrapolates outward, until

finally, it reaches all of

humanity.

 

Collective innocence works the same way,

but perhaps in reverse: a newborn

cannot be blamed for mass murders, genocide,

rape.

 

(All the children are innocent, are they not?)

 

So we have the children, and Adam, and Eve,

and everybody else, hovering under the weight

of God: floating on earth with every

footstep, every breath

taken.

(There is a problem. The problem is humanity.)

 

I think what Hannah Arendt meant, or tried

to mean, was this:

What do we do when morality is discarded?

What is our response to

atrocity?

 

(After a while, we become numb, and then we

forget.)

 

I remember this:

 

A poet once said something about

how the heart of darkness

was never in

Africa.

 

It was in the white

fires of the

Holocaust.

 

(Maybe that’s what Hannah meant all along.)