Pain and poetry

A story as old as The Fall

Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions Some are living in holes; Yet there is no place for us, my dear yet there is no place for us. Went to a committee; they offered me a chair; asked me politely to return next year; But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today? . . .

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors: Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

— W. H. Auden, March 1939

NOW IT’S back to Aleppo in Syria, home of the fabled Aleppo Codex, an early form of the Torah scroll that disappeared— or was destroyed in pogroms— aeons ago. This time Aleppo is back in the news. It can’t seem to stay out, and the news tends to vary between bad and just plain hell- onearth gosh- awful. That’s the Middle East, as they say. (“Tens of thousands of Syrians fled Aleppo for the Turkish border Thursday, trying to escape a regime offensive backed by Russian airstrikes . . .” — Page 1, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5.)

Meanwhile, in proper and peaceful London, diplomats with well- trimmed fingernails and custom- made suits courtesy of their tailors on Savile Road gathered at polished conference tables in air- conditioned offices to tut- tut. And to pledge billions to the international bureaucracies told to take care of the refugees at great expense— anything but actually accept them.

“After almost five years of fighting,” announced the always surprised and equally tendentious American secretary of state, The Hon. John Kerry, “it’s pretty incredible that we have come to London in 2016 [ and] the situation on the ground is actually worse.” As they used to say about another American secretary of state, The Hon. Warren Christopher, none of this would be happening if Warren Christopher were still alive. But none of it is hard to believe for those of us who have seen this sad show again and again and understand that it is part of the human condition. Call it the evil impulse, which is what talmudic scholars named it long ago.

“The situation in Syria is as close to hell as we are likely to find on this earth . . .” added the secretary- general of the United Nations, another useless official. If so, it is a hell repeated again and again as the United Nations follows the old League of Nations into wellearned oblivion.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,

A thousand windows and a thousand doors:

Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.