Open Letter

The following quotes are taking from a collection of the journals and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish mystic who recorded her life in depth, in the months leading up to her deportation to a transit camp, then to a death camp where she was murdered by the Nazis.  Her writings reveal how she viewed her fate; the fate of Jews collectively; her ideas of love and hate, and most importantly, how she prepared herself mentally and spiritually for the ordeal she knew was to come. I take her writings as a guide in today's parallel universe of global chaos, the rise of fascism, and extreme barbarity. Her body may have been killed, but her voice wasn't stilled; her spirit not defeated.  "More arrests, more terror, concentration camps, the arbitrary dragging off of fathers, sisters, brothers.  We seek the meaning of life, wondering whether any meaning can be left.  But that is something each one of us much settle with himself and with God.  And perhaps life has its ...

  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men David Foster Wallace.  B.I. #20 12-96  New Haven, CT  [story within a story: man picks up a "hippie chick" and when she shares with him a story of how she saved herself from dying at the hands of a psychotic killer through vulnerability and not defenses, he is transformed. 1. narrator's relationship to the hippie chick 2. hippie chick's relationship to her psychotic attacker. Many parallels and comparisons are drawn and made.] "...she was going to become just another grisly discovery for some amateur botanist a few day hence unless she could focus her way into the sort of profound soul connection that would make it difficult for the fellow to murder her...I just decided to presume that focus  was her obscure denomination's euphemism for prayer." "And that this was my first hint of sadness or melancholy, as I listened with increasing attention to the anecdote, that the qualities I found myself admiring in her narra...