Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And the fact that today is the day-after isn’t a good reason to forget everything. To switch our sensibilities on and off as if they were devices, to change our moods according to what happens to be on offer there, is one of the limitations of this day and age.
We’d like to tell you a story about ballerinas who survived the Holocaust, or about composer Olivier Messiaen who, at the age of 32 and while interned in the prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, wrote and performed his ”Quartet for the End of Time”…
Indeed, there must be a way of avoiding our memory faculty turning into sporadic or intermittent memories; of providing ourselves with stumbling blocks which we can inadvertently bump into all the year round.
That’s why, in order to ensure we do remember, we’re going to grant ourselves a somewhat “unpoetic” license by calling memory a zipper: a gateway between the past and the present, so that we don’t impassively wave yesterday goodbye.
Name Day
St Thomas Aquinas