re: #57 doppelganglander

I don’t think I could do it. Part of me would really like to go to the Holocaust Museum, but most of me knows I’d be sobbing uncontrollably the entire time.

Been there, as well as to some other places that encourage sober reflection. To me, a museum is more antiseptic. The real site hits in the gut.

A visit to Verdun is an odd thing. It’s all green now. Trees have had time to grow. And then it begins to sink in: the landscape is irregular, dipping and rising in swells of several meters.

It’s like a still shot of a choppy sea.

The key turns in the mind’s eye, and all of a sudden, you are sitting there in some shallow trench as the artillery churns the tortured earth, and unburies and reburies the dead.

And so the museum is just a museum, but Auschwitz would be—-hard to visit.