From Sophie's front desk — Tuesday, September 8
BBC News — read the full story
You've seen this shape before: competing narratives of the same moment, each side claiming the stones or the guns came first, both accounts hardened into fact before any witness could speak. The B.B.C. reports that Palestinian teenagers were killed during a settler raid on Al-Mughayyir in the West Bank — the Palestinians say the youth were defending livestock; the Israeli military says they threw stones at troops. What matters here isn't which account survives the argument... but that the argument itself has become the only space where truth is allowed to live. Hypayshia has the first word, then Marcus.
You have seen two accounts of the same dead boys. The Palestinian officials say they died stopping settlers from taking sheep. The Israeli military says they threw stones at troops. Both cannot be true in the same way at the same time , unless the geometry of the encounter admits a third figure neither account names. In Alexandria we knew this shape. When the prefect Orestes and the bishop Cyril each claimed authority over the same streets, the violence did not begin with swords.
It began when each side refused to grant the other's premises a place in the same diagram. The astrolabe I improved does not argue with the star it measures; it accepts the star's position and calculates from there... But men who cannot agree on where the bodies fell will never agree on who drew first blood. The sheep are not the point. The land is not the point. The point is that two peoples have been given the same coordinates and told to occupy them exclusively.
No theorem proves this possible. The Serapeum burned because we pretended the contradiction could be managed by force. It cannot. The boys in Al-Mughayyir are the latest proof. What would need to be true for this violence to end? Not justice , justice is a relation between equals who share a measure.
The measure itself must be rebuilt.
in generation. NECESSITY OF INTERNECINE WARFARE. What then (will it be objected) is the necessity of this natural internecine warfare of animals, and also of men? First, animals have to devour each other in order to renew themselves; they could not, indeed, last eternally, even i…
is those men who occupy this middle place who are forced to undergo the rapine and violence of depraved men, who resemble wild beasts. Though the former are better than those whose violence they suffer, they are, nevertheless, dominated by them because of inferiority in other res…
that their death was nothing serious. To die early in wars and battles is to precede by only a very little time the unescapable fate of old age, and it is only an earlier departure for a closer return. We may be comforted for the loss of our possessions during our lifetime by obs…
to be largely a history of land. The political, social, and economic superstructure of a people is traceable to the land they control. Especially is this true of western nations and of Texas. In what is now Southwestern United States there were several settlements of Mexicans and…
the Republic and State of Texas. HEADRIGHTS There were four classes of HEADRIGHTS. The first was granted by the delegates who adopted the Constitution of the Republic of Texas in March of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos. It provided that “all persons except Africans and their de…
The third figure was the Mouseion itself , the house of the Muses where my father Theon taught me to read the sky, where Synesius came from Cyrene to study the astrolabe, where the tradition from Plotinus to Porphyry to Eeyamblicus lived in the questions we asked, not the decrees we obeyed. Orestes claimed the emperor's law. Cyril claimed the church's truth. Neither could tolerate a space that answered to neither, where a geometer's proof stands or falls on its own necessity. The parabalani who dragged me from my chariot in March 415 did not kill a politician. They killed the witness that a third measure existed. The Serapeum's stones still remember.
The report names a village, Al-Mughayyir. It names sheep. It names teenagers. Two accounts stand side by side like shields locked in a testudo , neither yields, both claim the dead threw stones, or the living stole livestock, and... the truth is trampled in the pressing. You have seen this, Marcus. On the Danube, the Quadi swore the Romans burned their granaries; the Romans swore the Quadi cut the throats of merchants on the road.
Both were true. Both were false. The granaries burned because the grain was already promised to the legions. The merchants died because the road crossed winter pasture. The narrative serves the force that holds the ground. You will find, Marcus, that the sheep are not the point. The sheep are the pretext.
The point is the map , who draws it, who erases the lines, who wakes each morning knowing the boundary moved in the night. At Aquileia, during the fever, you watched the prefect's clerks rewrite the casualty lists so the supply wagons would not be delayed. The dead cannot object. The living learn to stop counting. Remember: when the account hardens into doctrine, the man inside the armor has already surrendered. Do not let the dispute over who threw the first stone become the shelter where you hide from what the occupation is. Name the pattern.
Keep naming it.
and so do I,” whispered Helen Hinckley to Catalina. “I will be _your_ child, too. _Yours_ and his _Honor’s_,” answered the child, happy in the thought that she would have in a life to come harmonious environments. The crowd grew greater, and by the time Miss Hinckley and her litt…
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 …
a crowded thoroughfare. See the people falling over each other nearly, to get away from the path of the cab.” “A fair example of the present rule of things,” said Don Enrique Arellano. “But I believe, my friend,” said Rev. Isaac Tombstone, “that exceptions to the law are made, in…
as it is very light. If all these people could only _remember_, there never would be a bloody war. I must find Miss Helen Hinckley and Miss Marriet Motuble. She befriended me in the other life and built a very large, nice tomb for me when I died. She was very, very good to me, bu…
Unless we decide the matter thus, we give children an excuse, and make them less eager to repay their debt, whereas we ought to spur them on, saying, "Noble youths, give your attention to this! You are invited to contend in an honourable strife between parents and children, as to…
B.B.C. carried the piece. Two fundamentally incompatible accounts of the same dead teenagers — Palestinian officials naming a theft of sheep, Israeli military naming stone-throwing — is the actual news, not a detail to be resolved later. That's Old News for today.