[Paul flattens his hands on the table as Anna speaks, that knit-brow apprehension back in place more tautly than ever. He feels contained, pressurized, his seams creaking quietly under unseen but growing weight.
He knows the man Anna tells him about. He reads all sorts of things at the Archives, and one of his research paths led him down a long and bloody series of human tyrants and their atrocities. He didn't sleep those nights. He laid awake with stagnant sea and choking acid between his teeth, dreams churning undreamt inside his skull.]
I'm sorry that your family endured that. That your world did. I wish I could tell you the future turns out differently. That we improve ourselves, and learn to act when we see tyrants like that rise. [He speaks quietly, with a inflection of something only shallowly buried.] All we learn is new ways to destroy each other.
[A moment stretches into a longer silence than it should. Paul runs his fingers up the side of his glass, dampens them with condensation, and then, absently, like a habit, rubs his thumb between his eyebrows along the crease of thought there.]
Do you think God is blind because of their indifference, or indifferent because they're blind? Choosing not to see, or not being able to - there's a distinction, isn't there?
cw 1940s germany/the holocaust
He knows the man Anna tells him about. He reads all sorts of things at the Archives, and one of his research paths led him down a long and bloody series of human tyrants and their atrocities. He didn't sleep those nights. He laid awake with stagnant sea and choking acid between his teeth, dreams churning undreamt inside his skull.]
I'm sorry that your family endured that. That your world did. I wish I could tell you the future turns out differently. That we improve ourselves, and learn to act when we see tyrants like that rise. [He speaks quietly, with a inflection of something only shallowly buried.] All we learn is new ways to destroy each other.
[A moment stretches into a longer silence than it should. Paul runs his fingers up the side of his glass, dampens them with condensation, and then, absently, like a habit, rubs his thumb between his eyebrows along the crease of thought there.]
Do you think God is blind because of their indifference, or indifferent because they're blind? Choosing not to see, or not being able to - there's a distinction, isn't there?