Diary Entry

They will meet in Washington, in a room far from the soil over which they fight. Representatives, they are called. I have always wondered what that word means. A man represents others. But if those others did not ask him to go, if they have no way to tell him to return, in what sense does he represent them? He represents an idea of them, which is a different thing entirely.

They will discuss ending a war. This is sensible. Yet I find myself fixed on a prior question: how did the war begin? Not the first shot, but the first consent. A government declares a war. A thousand - a hundred thousand - young men take up arms and go to die or to kill. They are told it is for their country. But the country is them. It is their own lives they are spending. Would you give a stranger your house key, your savings, your child? You would not. Yet they give him their life, which is all of these things. And they call this duty. I do not understand the transaction.

The prospects are said to be slim. Of course they are. When two men are hired to pull on opposite ends of a rope, they will pull until their hands bleed. They have been hired to pull. To stop pulling would be to admit the rope itself is a fiction, that they could simply drop it and walk away. The mediators in Washington will not suggest dropping the rope. They will suggest a new knot, a different tension. The pullers will be praised for their strength.

The truly difficult talks will never be held. They would not be between Lebanon and Israel, but between each soldier and his own habit. Why are you here? Who told you to come? Do you see the man across from you? He asks himself the same questions. You have both accepted a story that requires your mutual destruction. The story is older than you, so you think it is true. But a story is only true for as long as someone believes it.

I look at this and feel not anger, but a quiet bewilderment. They will sit at a table to negotiate the terms of a chain, when the key has been in their own pocket all along.