Everything is Illuminated

“AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN’T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?” - 196

“Every schoolboy learned the history…from a book originally written by the Venerable Rabbi… and revised regularly by a committee… [it] began as a record of major events: battles and treaties, famines, seismic occurrences, the beginnings and ends of political regimes. But it wasn’t long before lesser events were included and described at great length – festivals, important marriages and deaths, records of construction… Soon, upon the demand of the readership – which was everyone… [the book] included a biennial census, with every name of every citizen and a brief chronicle of his or her life… summaries of even less notable events, and commentaries on what the Venerable Rabbi had called LIFE, AND THE LIFE OF LIFE, which included definitions, parables, various rules and regulations for righteous living, and cute, if meaningless, sayings. The later editions… became yet more detailed, as citizens contributed family records, portraits, important documents, and personal journals, until any schoolboy could easily find out what his grandfather ate for breakfast on a given Thursday fifty years before, or what his great-aunt did when the rain fell without lull for five months. [The book], once updated yearly, was now continually updated, and when there was nothing to report, the full-time committee would report its reporting, just to keep the book moving, expanding, becoming more like life: We are writing… We are writing… We are writing...” – 196

“We are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing… we are writing…” – 212

“How can you do this to your grandfather, writing about his life in such a manner? Could you write in this manner if he was alive? And if not, what does that signify?” – 179

“…her journal – which she must have kept and kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it…” – 80