On the first of May, the morning when, by every calendar of memory, our chestnut trees ought to be holding up their first delicate candles to the sun, I wake in Vienna to a thermometer of two degrees and to a sky so clear that it almost wounds the eye. Two degrees. The number itself feels like a small accusation. It is the kind of cold that hesitates between winter and a refusal to be summer; the kind that one notices on the back of the hand rather than in the chest. And yet it is not the cold of the room that moves me to write today. It is the cold of the news.
For a man of my generation, and I confess my generation by everything I am, by the very rhythm of these sentences, the morning paper has become a strange instrument. It no longer brings news in the old sense, that is, the small and intimate adjustments of an orderly world; it brings, instead, a daily inventory of foundations giving way. One rises from one's desk each morning a little less certain of the ground.
Today the ground is uncertain in many places at once.
In Tehran, the Supreme Leader has declared that Iran will retain her nuclear capabilities and impose her own "legal frameworks" upon the Strait of Hormuz; from Washington, the President is briefed on plans for what his Pentagon calls strikes "short and powerful," that ancient euphemism by which generals have always softened their own consciences. Oil has risen to its highest price since 2022. American gasoline reaches four dollars and thirty cents at the pump, and one feels, behind those small green digits flickering at every roadside in Iowa and Ohio, the long shadow of a coming war that no one has yet had the courage to name.
I have lived this morning before. Not in this same Vienna, not under this same sky, but in the souls of men. I have watched, in the August of another year, the same absent expression descend upon faces in coffeehouses; I have heard the same impatient voices declare that this time, surely, the matter will be over by autumn. There is in human history a peculiar grammar by which the verb to negotiate always conjugates eventually into the verb to fire, and I confess that I tremble to read it written again, in a language I had hoped my children would not need.
In southern Lebanon, despite a ceasefire whose ink is not yet dry, nine more lives, two of them children, were extinguished in a single afternoon. In London, two Jewish men have been stabbed in the street; across Europe the synagogues are being watched again with a vigilance not seen for a generation, and the British government has raised her terror alert to a level not reached since 2022. I read these dispatches at my window in the Innere Stadt, and I think: how briefly the lessons of a continent endure. How briefly the careful ploughing of memory holds back the weeds.
There are, I notice, smaller items in today's paper, and these too belong to the same composition, for the world is not a sequence of separate stories but a single piece of music in which every voice answers every other.
In Naypyidaw, the generals have moved Aung San Suu Kyi from her prison cell into house arrest, as though the change of address were a concession. Five years they have held her: a Nobel laureate now reduced to the small theatre of one room. The world, having grown bored with her case, will receive this news as it receives so many, with a brief nod toward decency and an immediate return to its own preoccupations.
In Venice, the jury of the Biennale has resigned days before the opening of the exhibition. The reason given is the readmission of Russia, for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine. I find in this news a fineness of feeling that has become rare: that there are still, among the curators of paintings, men and women who hold that a frame is not merely a frame, and that what hangs upon a wall is also a confession of what one is willing to forget. We could use, I think, more such jurors and fewer such exhibitions.
In Brussels, the Prime Minister announces that Belgium will nationalise her nuclear power stations, in order, he says, "to depend less on others." Each capital is now learning, as if for the first time, the elementary lesson that no neighbour can be relied upon, no friendship is permanent, no tariff treaty older than the next election. Step by step, the great patient masonry of internationalism is being unbuilt, not by any single hand but by a thousand small ones, each justified, each prudent, each blameless.
In Brasília, the Congress has voted to reduce the prison sentence of the former president; a man convicted by the court is rescued by the legislature, which is to say that the law is now the prisoner of those it was meant to bind. And on every continent, the new report from the Reporters informs me, the freedom of the press has fallen to its lowest measured score in the history of the index. Lowest measured score. It is the kind of phrase one underlines absent-mindedly with a pencil, and then looks up at the window, and notices that the sun has somehow grown thinner.
I do not write these lines, my friends, in order to despair. Despair is a private virtue, almost a luxury, and our hour permits no luxuries. I write them rather to insist upon the small and unfashionable practice of attention. The men who built the catastrophes of my century did not do so because they were monsters; I lost too many friends to monsters to believe them so original. They did so because each, in turn, looked away. They looked away from the small cruelty next door, from the unnoticed law, from the ceasefire violated, from the journalist quietly disappeared in Kuwait, from the Palestinian boy of sixteen who loved football and was carried by his neighbours to a grave in Hebron, from the released prisoner whose own mother no longer recognised him at the gate. They looked away, and their looking away accumulated in the manner of snow on a roof, until suddenly the roof was no longer there.
It is two degrees in Vienna this morning. The sun is clear and yet somehow embarrassed, as though it had arrived at the wrong address. One must dress more warmly than the calendar advises. One must read more carefully than the morning permits. And one must remember, against the great soft pressure of the age to forget, that civilization is not a possession but a posture: a way of standing toward one's neighbour, however far away, and postures, unlike possessions, must be taken anew each day.
I shall now close the window and put on a second sweater. Even a feuilletonist is permitted his small defences against the cold.
