Alone together

We visited the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe while we were in Berlin. It's been a little while since we were there but we wanted to reflect on it here:

You enter the monument at street level and descend into its landscape of concrete forms through a series of uneven pathways. It is not a monument you approach and gauge from a distance. It's not a feature of the landscape set apart - it is landscape, a geography.

From whatever point you stand in this silent grid you are offered four views to the vanishing point. So where you stand is always both specific and infinite. A single, detailed piece of formed concrete beside you and then many, many more beyond you and everywhere you turn. Here and there. Now and then. A person and a people. Yourself and humanity.

People (your peer visitors) appear in the aisles and then, just as quickly, disappear. You glimpse them. They glimpse you. Like all history you are offered only a brief view into this single moment in a person's life. The mind tries to know them in that moment but where they've been and where they've gone is not on view. Each person is uniquely, finely herself. Each life vast in its breathing, moving, minute details. Details which extend in all directions and then... are gone. Each life gone. Each past. Each future. Gone.

People play and pose and photograph and seek and hide here. It's disconcerting at first. Shouldn't this place be somber, sacred rather than profane? Do these people know what this place signifies?

But then...we came to feel that this was an integral part of the site's performance. You can be somber, reflective, and sorrowful here - there are plenty of spaces for quiet and you are guaranteed that if some one comes by giggling their giggles will just as soon be gone and hidden behind silent grey.

This, I think, is what grief and reflection is actually like in the world - we grieve as the world continues. Life doesn't stop for our moments of silence. Nor should it. Horror happens and life continues. Conditions arise for unforgivable injustice and conditions continue to arise for a multitude of other things. People die. Babies learn to crawl.

We can reflect on history and learn from it and use it as a tool to inform our actions but, no matter how we might wish to, we can't make the whole world think and reflect as we do. Our thoughts, like our actions, are our own. Others come and go from their own reckonings in their own ways and times.

We humans are a collective acting individually. We are alone together. The past is present if we listen and the future better if we act.