The morning comes to Salzburg the colour of pewter, eighteen degrees and partly clouded, the kind of mild and indecisive weather in which nothing seems quite settled. I have learned to distrust such mornings. It was on a day no more dramatic than this that I once watched a whole civilization, which had believed itself eternal, begin quietly to come apart, and the people in the cafés went on reading their newspapers as though the foundations beneath the marble tables were not already shifting.
Today the newspapers tell me that a peace has been made. The American president and the Iranian negotiator have signed a memorandum, electronically, across continents that never touched. It runs, by the vice-president's own admission, to a page and a half, and it is "very general." A page and a half. I have written letters to friends that were longer, and bore more conviction. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow throat of water through which the lifeblood of nations passes, is to be reopened in three days, without tolls, the blockade lifted, the vessels permitted again to go about the ancient business of carrying oil to people who have never seen the sea that bears it. The stock exchanges of New York rose at once, intoxicated, as though prosperity were a thing that could be restored by signature. And in Israel the men who fought the war declare the war unfinished, that their soldiers will remain in Lebanon, in Syria, in Gaza. So this is our peace: the dead are buried, the survivors return to precisely where they stood the morning before, and only the cemeteries are larger.
I knew such peaces in my youth. I knew the men who signed them, the elegant gentlemen who believed that an agreement of a page and a half could hold back the sea. They are always in earnest, these signatories, and they are always astonished afterward.
While in France the seven great nations sit down to dine and to discover, between courses, what is to be done with a world that no longer obeys them, the ordinary catastrophes continue, unfiled and unsummarized. In Kyiv the Russian missiles fell in the night and eleven people died, and an Orthodox cathedral that had stood at the monastery of the Caves for the better part of a thousand years was set ablaze. A bishop reported, with the particular grief of a man counting what is left, that many of the holy objects had been carried out of the fire. I think of those hands in the smoke, rescuing what cannot be replaced, and I understand them entirely. We are, all of us who have lived through the burning of libraries and the closing of borders, men and women carrying icons out of a fire we did not set and cannot extinguish.
It is a strange and bitter art, this saving of fragments. In Argentina a woman named Lidia Almeida, whom they called Taty, has died after fifty years of searching for a son who was taken from her and never returned. Fifty years. Every week she marched, with the other mothers, in a slow circle around a square, and the circle was itself a kind of cathedral, a thing built of nothing but refusal and memory. She did not find him. But she taught a whole nation that to forget is the second death, the one we inflict ourselves.
The young, mercifully, do not yet know all this. In the stadiums of America the World Cup has begun, and the joy of it reaches even here, absurd and necessary. Cape Verde, an archipelago of half a million souls who found one of their players on a website meant for clerks and accountants, has beaten Spain, and the people of those islands weep in the streets as though they had been handed the whole earth. The Iranian players take the field outside Los Angeles while their countrymen protest beyond the gates, and the old flag and the new anger stand a hundred metres apart, divided by a fence and by everything. I find I cannot scold this hunger for a game. In my own century, men sang in the trenches. The heart insists on its small festivals even as the house burns, and perhaps especially then.
Yet I confess a colder fear, one that has nothing to do with rope and water and the closing of straits. A report this morning declares that social media has become the leading source of news upon the earth, that the place where men now learn what their world is doing is the same place designed to flatter and enrage them. And Britain, sensing the danger, proposes to forbid it to all children under sixteen. I read this and I do not know whether to grieve or to applaud. We who loved books believed that knowledge would make men gentle. We were wrong, or rather we were naïve, which is the same thing in a man of fifty and unforgivable in a civilization. The instrument of enlightenment and the instrument of madness have always been the same instrument. It is only the hand that differs.
There died yesterday, in Germany, a pianist named Abdullah Ibrahim, ninety-one years old, who had made of South African sorrow some seventy records of unbearable tenderness. He died, the family said, peacefully, after a short illness. It is the only sentence in this morning's paper that I can read without flinching. To compose for eight decades, to turn the cruelty of one's country into something a stranger in Salzburg might hear and be made better by, and then to go gently, having said it all. That is a life. That is, very nearly, the only kind of victory our age permits.
The clouds have not lifted. The thermometer holds at eighteen, and the river goes on under the bridges as it did when I was young and certain. I have lived long enough to learn the one thing worth knowing, which is that the world does not end in a single thunderclap. It ends, and begins again, and ends, in mornings exactly like this one, mild and grey and full of signatures that will not hold. We carry the icons out of the fire. We march our slow circles around the square. We cheer the small islands when they win. It is not enough. It has never been enough. And still, God help us, it is all we have, and we do it, and the doing of it is the last and stubbornest proof that we were here.
