a shandean commonplace book

 The tanks from the Past rolled in this morning. Our neighbors crowded the curbs to cheer though only yesterday, they were snitching: A has prior tendencies, B has backward dreams ... Already the old flag flies over the armory, the cathedral, the courthouse, Mercy, Parliament, Beaux Arts, a kindergarten. Already we tell ourselves, "The Past rules, but if we hold our breath we'll emerge safe in the present, vindicated, knowing we're steadfast, we passed the test of our lives." Troops file by, numberless as ears of wheat, gray with ash, so tired they give off light, eyes locked, forward, forward , never a glance for our linden-shaded side streets; and we watch, we force ourselves to peek, or not peek, we part the curtain a hand's breadth, a thumbnail. At nightfall, gunshots in a distant suburb, dry, faint, adamant as a cat's cough. For every twelve firing squad volunteers, rumor claims, one is issued blank ammo: so even in the Past, there must be shame. Nothing ...

Even when you know what people are capable of, even when you pride yourself on knowing, on not evading history, or the news, or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent and relevant examples of human cruelty—even now there are times it strikes you anew, as though you’d spend your whole life believing that humanity was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought, like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will, never chanted perversely, almost gleefully, the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes— solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short — even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed  even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,  which you had thought no longer existed, did, in fact, exist—that somewhere underneath your cynicism you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,  irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid that there is...