From Sophie's front desk — Thursday, September 24
BBC News — read the full story
A construction crew in northern Sri Lanka found 572 skeletons arranged in earth, the country's largest mass grave, holding mostly the bodies of people killed across a twenty-six-year civil war that closed in 2009. The discovery has split families open again — those still searching for names among the bones, those demanding accountability for how the dead came to be buried without witness or record. Marcus Aurelius has the first word today, then Benjamin Franklin.
You have walked the Danube bank after the Quadi broke. You have seen the ditches where we threw the dead — Romans, Sarmatians, villagers caught between — three thousand in one season, and the earth did not care which standard they followed. The ground receives them all the same. Five hundred and seventy-two. A number the magistrates will record. A number the families will carry in the throat.
The war ended sixteen years past, they say. As if the signing of a treaty pulls the spear from the ribs. At Carnuntum we buried men years after the peace, because the ground kept giving them up. The plow turns a helmet. The flood exposes a wrist bone still bound. The dead do not observe the treaty.
The living want names. The living want the magistrate to say: this one was taken here, by these men, on this order. But the magistrate served the same power that gave the order. The inquiry will be handed to a clerk who served the same power. The report will use the word "regrettable." The families will be told to wait for justice that arrives only when the witnesses are dust. You will find, Marcus, that the grave does not close until the truth is spoken into it.
The question is not whether the dead can hear. The question is whether you have the stomach to speak when the cost is your own position.
Xucar]?" When Caesar said that he remembered it, he continued, "Do you remember that when, during the excessive heat, you wished to rest under a tree which afforded very little shade, as the ground in which that solitary tree grew was rough and rocky, one of your comrades spread …
modesty? Which of all those, either becomes good or fair, because commended; or dispraised suffers any damage? Doth the emerald become worse in itself, or more vile if it be not commended? Doth gold, or ivory, or purple? Is there anything that doth though never so common, as a kn…
48. Constantly consider how many physicians are dead and gone, who frequently knitted their brows over their patients; how many astrologers, who foretold the deaths of others with great ostentation of their art; how many philosophers, who wrote endlessly on death and immortality;…
can human life appear a great matter?' 'Impossible,' says the other. 'Can then such a one count death a thing of dread?' 'No, indeed.'" 36. It is a saying of Antisthenes, that it is the part of a king to do good and reap reproach. 37. It is a shameful thing that the countenance s…
all agreed. As when our neighbor’s boy has broken a cup, or the like, we are ready at once to say, “These are casualties that will happen”; be assured, then, that when your own cup is likewise broken, you ought to be affected just as when another’s cup was broken. Now apply this …
Marcus, you stood on the Danube bank and watched the earth swallow three thousand without asking their names. The news from Ceylon brings five hundred seventy-two up from the clay, and already the living have arranged them into evidence — families wanting closure, officials wanting reports, the world wanting a number it can cite. I remember the composing stick in my brother James's Boston shop: each letter a separate slug of lead, indifferent to the sentence it would serve. The dead are no different.
In '55 I rode the post-road past Fort Duquesne where Braddock's men had fallen two summers prior. Their bones still whitened in the ditches, uncounted, unclaimed, because no parliament needed their tally and no gazette could reach the frontier in less than six weeks by packet and ferry and coach. The Sri Lankan dead are exhumed within days; Braddock's waited for wolves. Opposite treatments.
Same indifference. The earth did not care then. It does not care now. The difference is only which living find the bodies useful.
A grave is not a ledger. It balances nothing.
Franklin, like other members of the Royal Society, sometimes served as a means of communication whereby nonmembers with news of curious phenomena or interesting discoveries might hope to have their reports transmitted to the Society to be read and printed. In this instance John W…
the English own they lost 400 killed, with 10 Officers; the Number of Wounded not mentioned. Genl. Lee is said to be taken Prisoner by the Enemy; but that News, tho’ possibly true, comes so indirectly as to leave still some room to doubt. The Troops at New York were very sickly. …
of All-saints in Northampton, an account has been kept for many years of the ages at which all die; and, I find, that of 1377, who died there in 13 years, 59 have lived to be 80, or a 23d part. According to Mr. Kersseboom’s Table of Observations, published at the end of Abraham D…
The earliest fully authenticated discovery of fossil vertebrates by a white man in what is now the United States was made in 1739 by Charles Le Moyne, Baron de Longueuil, near the Ohio River at a point an unknown distance above the falls that mark the site of the present Louisvil…
greater, as it appears to be by these accounts (in some even as thirty to one) surely parents will no longer refuse to accept and thankfully use a discovery God in his mercy has been pleased to bless mankind with; whereby some check may now be put to the ravages that cruel diseas…
BBC News carried the piece. A mass grave of 572 in northern Sri Lanka — most likely victims of a civil war that ended seventeen years ago — reignites the question of whether a society can absorb that scale of loss without naming and accounting for it. That's the brief.