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Authors: Ariel Levy
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walked in front of her, hiding her, when we came through the front door after school.
We filled in class assignments with clues to our lives. A teacher told us to keep a journal, to log the songs that defined us. I recorded my favorite: âItâs Not a Fashion Statement, Itâs a Fucking Deathwish.â
You get what everyone else gets
, the singer growls,
you get a lifetime.
Standing at the mirror on autumn nights, the slippery skin of our arms touching, we could hear the rain. Elizabeth wore black feathered wings. She painted a slice across her throat. Outside our faces might smear, but we were not alone or lonely. We could almost feel our pulses slow slightly, our skin cool, our limbs stiffen. We were ready.
We left the house while Russell slept. Sara whimpered, then hushed at Elizabethâs arched eyebrow. Once outside, we walked. The rain fell on our bodies, chilling us through black sweatshirts with enormous hoods that hid our faces so well in class. In the morning when the darkness cleared and the sun shone in our eyes, we would wake with clean skin, ribs rising and falling, and we would remember these nights when we shivered together in the coming winter.
Elizabeth almost escaped. Under her window that looked over the mountain, with nothing and no one for hundreds of miles, she tried and she failed. While Russell slumped on the sofa in front of a cooking show, Elizabeth missed the radial artery. Kneeling on the floor, Seether playing quietly on the stereo, she looked out the window and she waited, but it never came. She lived, her life would go on; she would find the drugs so prevalent in small towns, she would drop out of school. I would get used to eating lunch by myself, in the dark hall by the band room where we once sat together, throwing a sticky eyeball at the wall and watching it roll to the floor.
I knew, to her, life seemed very long.
On winter nights, while Elizabethâs skin healed to pink shiny scars, I returned to my silent house, the lights already off and my father asleep. The counter was clustered with uneaten lasagna and unwatered lilies, a thousand condolences from neighbors who tried with a new desperation to talk to me in the car. They wondered at my charade, the romance of what had taken my mother away, painted over my lips, over my eyes. With makeup gone I was undeniably warm and living, and I shook with the realization that perhaps we were not as beautiful as we were permanent.
ISAIAH BERLIN
A Message to the Twenty-First Century
FROM
The New York Review of Books
Â
On November 25, 1994, Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following âshort credo,â as he called it in a letter to a friend, for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf. Twenty years later, on October 23, 2014
, The New York Review of Books
printed Berlinâs remarks for the first time. For more on Isaiah Berlin, please see the Contributorsâ Notes.
Â
âI T WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times.â With these words Dickens began his famous novel
A Tale of Two Cities.
But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for yearsâthese are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.
I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and
We filled in class assignments with clues to our lives. A teacher told us to keep a journal, to log the songs that defined us. I recorded my favorite: âItâs Not a Fashion Statement, Itâs a Fucking Deathwish.â
You get what everyone else gets
, the singer growls,
you get a lifetime.
Standing at the mirror on autumn nights, the slippery skin of our arms touching, we could hear the rain. Elizabeth wore black feathered wings. She painted a slice across her throat. Outside our faces might smear, but we were not alone or lonely. We could almost feel our pulses slow slightly, our skin cool, our limbs stiffen. We were ready.
We left the house while Russell slept. Sara whimpered, then hushed at Elizabethâs arched eyebrow. Once outside, we walked. The rain fell on our bodies, chilling us through black sweatshirts with enormous hoods that hid our faces so well in class. In the morning when the darkness cleared and the sun shone in our eyes, we would wake with clean skin, ribs rising and falling, and we would remember these nights when we shivered together in the coming winter.
Elizabeth almost escaped. Under her window that looked over the mountain, with nothing and no one for hundreds of miles, she tried and she failed. While Russell slumped on the sofa in front of a cooking show, Elizabeth missed the radial artery. Kneeling on the floor, Seether playing quietly on the stereo, she looked out the window and she waited, but it never came. She lived, her life would go on; she would find the drugs so prevalent in small towns, she would drop out of school. I would get used to eating lunch by myself, in the dark hall by the band room where we once sat together, throwing a sticky eyeball at the wall and watching it roll to the floor.
I knew, to her, life seemed very long.
On winter nights, while Elizabethâs skin healed to pink shiny scars, I returned to my silent house, the lights already off and my father asleep. The counter was clustered with uneaten lasagna and unwatered lilies, a thousand condolences from neighbors who tried with a new desperation to talk to me in the car. They wondered at my charade, the romance of what had taken my mother away, painted over my lips, over my eyes. With makeup gone I was undeniably warm and living, and I shook with the realization that perhaps we were not as beautiful as we were permanent.
ISAIAH BERLIN
A Message to the Twenty-First Century
FROM
The New York Review of Books
Â
On November 25, 1994, Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following âshort credo,â as he called it in a letter to a friend, for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf. Twenty years later, on October 23, 2014
, The New York Review of Books
printed Berlinâs remarks for the first time. For more on Isaiah Berlin, please see the Contributorsâ Notes.
Â
âI T WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times.â With these words Dickens began his famous novel
A Tale of Two Cities.
But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for yearsâthese are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.
I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and
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