| s-101
| What the literary imagination faces in these political times. |
| s-102
| One of the finest Israeli writers, A B Yehoshua, speaks about this in an excellent book of interviews, Unease in zion, edited by Ehud ben Ezer. |
| s-103
| 'It is true,' Yehoshua writes, 'that because our spiritual life today can not revolve around anything but these questions [ political questions ], when you engage in them without end you can not spare yourself, spiritually, for other things. |
| s-104
| Nor can you attain the true solitude that is a condition and prerequisite of creation, the source and its strength. |
| s-105
| Rather, you are continuously summoned to solidarity, summoned from within yourself rather than by any external compulsion, because you live from one newscast to the next, and it becomes a solidarity that is technical, automatic from the standpoint of its emotional reaction, because by now you are completely built to react that way and to live in tension. |
| s-106
| Your emotional reactions to any piece of news about an Israeli casualty, a plane shot down, are pre-determined. |
| s-107
| Hence the lack of solitude, the inability to be alone in the spiritual sense, and to arrive at a life of intellectual creativity.' |
| s-108
| During the Six Day War, Yehoshua says that he felt himself linked to a great event, that he was within a historic wave and at one with its flow. |
| s-109
| This was a pleasant and elevating feeling. |
| s-110
| But today, unable to see the end of war, he has lost the sensation of being borne upon any such wave. |
| s-111
| 'You do not achieve peace from history,' he says. |
| s-112
| The feeling of being swept along and of uncertainty as regards the future prevents you from seeing things in any perspective whatsoever. |
| s-113
| You live the moment, without any perspective, but you can not break free of the moment, forget the moment. |
| s-114
| You can not cut yourself off and not read newspapers or stop hearing the news over the radio for weeks on end, as you could six or seven years ago. ' |
| s-115
| It is slightly different with us. |
| s-116
| Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the UN, the financial collapse of New York. |
| s-117
| We can't avoid being politicized (to use a word as murky as the condition it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. |
| s-118
| Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. |
| s-119
| Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so huge and so terrible), can be screened out. |
| s-120
| The study of literature is itself heavily 'politicized.' |
| s-121
| There is a clever, persistent young woman who writes to me often from Italy, who insists upon giving the most ordinary occurrences in my novels a political interpretation. |
| s-122
| A cafeteria lunch in New York actually refers to a meeting in Canada between Churchill and Roosevelt, and a tussle with a drunk in the hallway of a rooming house corresponds to D-Day. |