And I too suffer...

"...but always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer..." Bertrand Russell in The Prologue to his autobiography.


I just finished Susan Sontag’s “Regarding The Pain of Others” and it was a such a strong reminder of all the reasons why I love reading and how a powerful compendium of words can ram home unpalatable truths. In this book, Sontag makes an unflinching study of the many images of human distress and dissects our thinking as we consider such images. In doing so, she not only spells out the tenuous limits of morality (during wartime, especially) but also marks the larger manipulation of memory that human society chooses to live with.

Some excerpts from the book:

"...and the pity and the disgust that pictures like Hick's inspire should not distract you from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown"

“When Woolf notes that one of the photographs she has been sent shows a corpse of a man or woman so mangled that it could as well be that of a dead pig, her point is that the scale of war's murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings”

“It is the same intelligence whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter, wrote Junger, that labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.”

“The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees; but surely the Taliban soldier begging for his life whose fate was pictured prominently in the NY Times also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers, some of whom may one day come across the three colour photographs of their husband, father, son, brother being slaughtered-if they have not already seen them.”

“Photographs that everyone recognizes, are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about or declares that it has chosen to think about...what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating; that this is important and this is the story about what happened with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”

“The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs… to remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.”

“Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”

“Whom do we wish to blame? More precisely, whom do we believe that we have the right to blame? The children of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were no less innocent than the young African American men (and women) who were butchered and hanged from trees in small-town America… A stepped-up recognition of the monstrousness of the slave system that once existed, unquestioned by most in the United States is a national project that many Euro-Americans feel some tug of obligation to join. This ongoing project is a great achievement, a benchmark of civic value. The acknowledgement of the American use of disproportionate firepower in war (in a violation of one of the cardinal principles of war) is very much not a national project… would be regarded-now more than ever-as a most unpatriotic endeavor.”

“We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”

The book is available at Amazon for $9.36. Capa's falling soldier picture from the BBC site here.