Word: past
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...imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.” Transcending these images is a dangerous prospect. By staring beyond the stills of history, we risk destabilising not only our ideas about the past but also our own place within that narrative. Despite this, W.G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz” stages such a staring contest, in which we—along with the protagonist—are challenged not to look away when those images dissolve, as devastating...
...when shadows begin to lengthen—what he called “the divine dusk.” But while for James this atmosphere was one in which history glimmered, offering up its inspiration, for Sebald, the impending darkness serves as a metaphor for the inscrutability of the past and the impossibility of self-knowledge. The narrator first realises this during his visit to the Breendonk fortress in Belgium, which was transformed into a concentration camp by the Nazis: “The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold...
...man’s struggle to prevent his own history from “lapsing into oblivion,” and metaphysical, in challenging our assumptions about the linear nature of time. Perhaps, says Austerlitz, “all the moments of time have co-existed simultaneously… past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them...
Europe's increasingly muscular brand of secularism has an unofficial capital: Strasbourg, France. Over the past decade, the quaint city of 273,000 near the German border - home to the European Parliament and other key international bodies - has been the site of a series of repeated slap-downs to those who are fighting to hold on to the Old Continent's fading religious impulses...
...Committee stated that Russia, which has positioned itself as a key player in any deal between Iran and the West, "has turned its back on Iran many times ... despite Russia's claim to be Iran's friend." This statement, one of many coming from conservative political circles in the past week, seemed to undercut the President's recent proclamation of the result of nuclear talks with the West as an Iranian "win." And when Ahmadinejad unexpectedly showed up in parliament on Nov. 3 to push for his version of a bill to reform Iran's food and energy subsidies, speaker...