The Apologizer

“Heading for your death, you don’t worry about what you’ve dropped along the way.”

“Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty—I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all. It’s a known fact. But how does that struggle work in a society that’s more or less civilized? People can’t just attack each other on sight. So instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on each other. The person who manages to make the other one guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime will lose.”

“the hatred of the gentle and physically strong coupled with the hatred of the courageous and physically weak.”

“Eve, the first woman. She was born not out of a belly but out of a whim, the Creator’s whim. It was from her vulva, the vulva of a navel-less woman, that the first umbilical cord emerged. If I’m to believe the Bible, other cords, too: with a little man or a little woman attached to each of them. Men’s bodies were left with no continuation, completely useless, whereas from out of the sexual organ of every woman there came another cord, with another woman or man at the end of each one, and all of that, millions and millions of times over, turned into an enormous tree, a tree formed from the infinity of bodies, a tree whose branches reached to the sky. Imagine! That gigantic tree is rooted in the vulva of one little woman, the first woman, poor navel-less Eve.”

“Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we’ve stopped seeing it and hearing it.”