I
called Peter Gutman. How does it happen, I asked him, that our civilization
brings forth monsters? Thwarted life, he said. What else. Thwarted lives. I
don’t know, I said. Maybe we’re born monsters? A storm is blowing from
paradise, Peter Gutman said. It pushes the angel of history backward ahead of
it. But it doesn’t turn him into a monster. But he doesn’t have eyes in the
back of his head, I said. No, he doesn’t, Peter Gutman said. That’s just it:
he’s blind. Blind to history, I said. Blind to horrors, if you prefer, Madame.
Thank you very much, I said and hung up. I thought: Being blind to horrors
would be a good thing, who could live keeping all the horrors in mind. There
has to be something like an expelling, extruding, exorcising of horror, I
thought. I remembered how you couldn’t stop picturing your cleaning woman’s
young son who had gotten stuck under a raft while swimming in the Warta and
drowned, and how his mother had had to watch when they pulled the dead boy out
of the water, and you wondered how she could live with that, and I remembered
that you, as a child, wondered how you were supposed to endure hearing about
the suffering constantly inflicted on other people, and the fear of being hurt
yourself, for your whole long life long, but you didn’t then know, and would
not have believed, that people, without realizing it or wanting it, develop
protective techniques against self-destructive sympathy.
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