Bento's Sketchbook

the introverted category and the extroverted one.

There are two categories of storytelling. Those that treat of the invisible and the hidden, and those that expose and offer the revealed.

The problem is how to live time and again with the adjective inconsequential.

One protests because not to protest would be too humiliating, too diminishing, too deadly. One protests (by building a barricade, taking up arms, going on a hunger strike, linking arms, shouting, writing) in order to save the present moment, whatever the future holds.

every profound political protest is an appeal to a justice that is absent, and is accompanied by a hope that in the future this justice will be established; this hope, however, is not the first reason for the protest being made.

‘We write’, she once confessed, ‘on yawning gaps in the walls that once had windows. And people who still have windows sometimes cannot understand.’

The division between the poor and the relatively rich becomes an abyss. Traditional restraints and recommendations are shattered. Consumerism consumes all questioning. The past becomes obsolete. Consequently people lose their selfhood, their sense of identity, and they then locate and find an enemy in order to define themselves. The enemy – whateve

What is distinct about today’s global tyranny is that it’s faceless. There’s no Führer, no Stalin, no Cortés. Its workings vary according to each continent and its modes are modified by local history, but its overall pattern is the same, a circular pattern.

Vasily Grossman