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320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 2015
Of course there are Hells and there are hells, which is really a statement of banalities, for there are degrees of horror, of horrors, which we all witness and live through, sometimes directly, often indirectly, and it is the immediacy of horror, its sublimity and our incapacity even to reflect upon it, though we may indelibly remember it, that shapes our sense of what a particular hell, or Hell itself, may be.
Under the circumstances, are there any benefits to dedication, devotion, honor, responsibility? What. in this context, is the responsible action? Is it even possible to invoke a rhetoric of ethics? Only repetition produces tangible benefits, which include the stability of a routine (however precarious) and the forestalling of longer term considerations that might provoke the following emotions: fear, indecision, paralyzing despair. In the absence of a stable context, the question of ethics intrudes. What kinds of responsibility? The maintenance of the established order, that is: labor? What is the non-material or spiritual component? In the private sphere: to the ancestors, their memory, to the elusive community of the self and its desires - constancy or consistency. What is these are in conflict
Perhaps, I find myself recounting to Phedra, Marinette and others, it will be left to the patience of someone else more devoted to the genre of literature than I to record the noises that filled that hot and moonless night in Kentucky, or the taste that lingered on the tongues of the few survivors after the gunpowder stored beneath the printing press caught fire, or the particular stench of burning brick and plaster and ink fused with flesh and hair, or the feeling of being thrown far, far into the black air with nothing to halt your eventual fall back to the parched, grassless soil ... I personally will never forget how that scene—so distant from where I was then that it required all my powers to concentrate—reminded me of nothing less than a forget-me-not, white with bright scars of crimson and azure, holding fast like a last memory or reliquary of sorrows against the bluffs above a small, almost forgotten provincial island or inland colonial town.