i was reading the periodic table by primo levi recently. primo was a jewish italian chemist, and this book tells the story of his experiences during the second world war, living under fascism, and ultimately becoming part of the resistance and ending up in auschwitz.
we didn’t mind the british bombs, he said, they were allies against fascism. but while the italians believed that mussolini would fall, they thought that the germans and the japanese were invincible. and that the americans, too, would prove invincible. war would continue for twenty years perhaps more, bloody and interminable, remote stalemate, ‘back and forth on the steps to the ukraine… would never come to an end.’
and to some extent, this has indeed come to pass. not twenty or thirty years of war. eighty and counting.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 