“There’s power in not having to care. As Inez Guzmán remarks, the film Oppenheimer can leave New Mexico just as its subject did: apparently without a second thought. But there’s also power—more ambivalent, yes, but also more lasting—that comes with needing to pick up the pieces.”
I never sleep well when I am home. This is usually due to physical—not mental—distress: in eighth grade I inherited a three-quarter sized bedframe from the eighteenth century, a Sharpless heirloom that my grandparents wanted to get rid of. Rare is the vendor in this century that sells a mattress fit to its arcane proportions, so my parents threw two futons on it and told me it was temporary.
“The truth is that in every annoying, badly done Facebook meme, there is a grain of truth hidden somewhere. Because even the hunter puts down the rifle when the rabbit is served to him on a silver platter by strangers he’s never going to see again.”
It was difficult to pay attention to anything but the mass of people that seemed to constantly surround me. Throughout the day, I found fears of terrorist attacks—or disbelief at how a terrorist attack had not yet occurred at the park—infiltrating my mind. I remember being packed into a bus on the way from our hotel to the park, standing with my pale tourist arms and legs rubbing against child limbs and moms’ Bermuda shorts, and thinking how perfect of a target we would be.
I had not heard of Sachsenhausen before my trip to Berlin. Located in Oranienburg, just outside the city, it was the first iteration of Nazi design—the early concentration camp was shaped as a triangle to enable the guards to have … Read More
Just as I started to really enjoy Princeton, I’m going away—for a long time. When I arrived in September, I was a freshman, but not particularly fresh. I’d returned from a gap year that had me doing almost nothing, and certainly nothing that benefited other people particularly (unless you count the two hundred forty Chinese children whom I taught English for a semester—for a decent amount of cash).
Not Tri- as in triangle or tricycle, but Tri- as in Tree. Tree as in that family tree project I made in the third grade, still a novice to glue that came in sticks instead of bottles. The tree whose oldest branches spread far back to Spain, and in some cases, to Italy or France. The tree from which later branches grew in Argentina, a place where many branches still remain. Until, this newest, fledgling branch ended up on new American soil, taking up roots as it keeps trying to grow.