...of history

After a few such laps round the circuit, the mind comes back to the dull geniality of the present day and lapses into helpless silence. These fine phrases explain everything and nothing. When confronted by the evidence of this night, this sleeping mass, with its smell of wet overcoats, weary bodies, alcohol fumes and warm tinned food, they fade away. For how can one sit in judgement on this old man as he lies there on this spread-out newspaper, a human being touching in his resignation, and quite insufferable for the same reason, a man who has doubtless lived through the empire's two great wars, survived the purges, the famines, but who nevertheless thinks he deserves nothing better than this resting-place on a floor covered in spittle and cigarette ends? Or the young mother who has just metamorphosed from Madonna into wooden idol, with slanting eyes and the features of Buddha? If I woke them and asked them about their lives they would unflinchingly declare that the country where they lived was, give or take a few delayed trains, a paradise. And if in steely tones the loudspeaker were suddenly to announce the outbreak of war, the whole mass of them would set off, ready to endure the war as a matter of course, ready to suffer, ready to sacrifice themselves, with an utterly natural acceptance of hunger, of death, or of life in the filth of this station, here amid the cold of the great plains that stretch beyond the tracks.

[A Life's Music, Makine, A.]