And So They Are Ever Returning To

It Seems To Me Then As If All The Moments Of Our Life Occupy The Same Space, As If Future Events Already Existed And Were Only Waiting For Us To Find Our Way To Them At Last, Just As When We Have Accepted An Invitation We Duly Arrive In A Certain House At A Given Time.

I Feel More And More As If Time Did Not Exist At All... Only Various Spaces Interlocking According To The Rules Of A Higher Form Of Stereometry[the Geometric Measurement Of Solid Bodies], Between Which The Living And The Dead Can Move Back And Forth As They Like, And The Longer I Think About It The More It Seems To Me That We Who Are Still Alive Are Unreal In The Eyes Of The Dead.

Physicists Now Say There Is No Such Thing As Time: Everything Co-exists. Chronology Is Entirely Artificial And Essentially Determined By Emotion. Contiguity Suggests Layers Of Things, The Past And Present Somehow Coalescing Or Co-existing.

And So They Are Ever Returning To Us, The Dead. At Times They Come Back From The Ice More Than Seven Decades Later And Are Found At The Edge Of The Moraine, A Few Polished Bones And A Pair Of Hobnailed Boots.

As Far As I Know, The Question Of Whether And How It Could Be Strategically Or Morally Justified Was Never The Subject Of Open Debate In Germany After 1945, No Doubt Mainly Because A Nation Which Had Murdered And Worked To Death Millions Of People In Its Camps Could Hardly Call On The Victorious Powers To Explain The Military And Political Logic That Dictated The Destruction Of The German Cities.