The Unforgiving Years | Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs

...But is it still permissible to believe in mankind? If our side alone were to blame, it would fill me with relief, it would help me to regain my trust. But I’ve seen too much to believe that... Is it all the fault of the system? Systems are such heavy chains that they exonerate the infinitesimal individual, the thinking reed, the trampled reed. What would Pascal or Spinoza have done in Dachau? Or at the front, under a helmet? The reed stops thinking, becomes malleable matter, identifies with its chains. The system is the work of men, after all, men who are made by it as much as they were makers of it. And not all of them are deranged, clearly; most aspire simply to live off it in peace, killing with the calculated, businesslike temperance of their mentors. I am wrestling with these problems, but, I am and I do not consent! Since I said these salutary words to myself, weak as I am, groping in darkness, I felt I was at the dawn of deliverance. And you’ll know that if I fall, the end will have been the lighter for it. Proof exists that a man need not necessarily consent to what he does. Obey and disobey. Submit to earthly solidarity—or to the crushing weight of the chain—while salvaging something more essential. If I woke up the men who are lying asleep around me in this derelict schoolroom and asked each one (even the incredibly brutal elite soldiers, prey to regressive neuroses): What do you wish for the most? they would all answer: The end! Some would unconsciously be including their own end in that of the nightmare. Of course, one out of three would turn me in, and I’d be shot before the day was out. A curse on the blind Seer, a curse on ourselves!