Reading in the Dark
In the age of Trump, literature can sustain those searching for the courage to resist the politics of division.
by ADAM KIRSCH
Feb 01, 2017
4 minutes
On the eve of World War II, the German writer Bertolt Brecht composed the famous poem “To Those Born After.” Brecht addressed himself to a posterity that, he believed, would be unable to understand how it felt to live in a time of acute moral and political crisis. What defines such a time, he wrote, is that disaster becomes the only possible subject of thought, crowding out everything we think of as ordinary life: “What kind of times are these, when/To talk about trees is almost a crime/Because it implies silence about so many horrors?”
Brecht urged his readers to consider the actions of people living in these “dark times,”
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