My Number Is 174517; We Have Been

The Living Are More Demanding; The Dead Can Wait.

The Bond Between A Man And His Profession Is Similar To That Which Ties Him To His Country; It Is Just As Complex, Often Ambivalent, And In General It Is Understood Completely Only When It Is Broken: By Exile Or Emigration In The Case Of One's Country, By Retirement In The Case Of A Trade Or Profession.

The Butterfly's Attractiveness Derives Not Only From Colors And Symmetry: Deeper Motives Contribute To It. We Would Not Think Them So Beautiful If They Did Not Fly, Or If They Flew Straight And Briskly Like Bees, Or If They Stung, Or Above All If They Did Not Enact The Perturbing Mystery Of Metamorphosis: The Latter Assumes In Our Eyes The Value Of A Badly Decoded Message, A Symbol, A Sign.

Perhaps One Cannot, What Is More One Must Not, Understand What Happened, Because To Understand [the Holocaust] Is Almost To Justify...no Normal Human Being Will Ever Be Able To Identify With Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, And Endless Others. This Dismays Us, And At The Same Time Gives Us A Sense Of Relief, Because Perhaps It Is Desirable That Their Words (and Also, Unfortunately, Their Deeds) Cannot Be Comprehensible To Us. They Are Non-human Words And Deeds, Really Counter-human.

Conquering Matter Is To Understand It, And Understanding Matter Is Necessary To Understanding The Universe And Ourselves: And That Therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, Which Just During Those Weeks We Were Learning To Unravel, Was Poetry.