Time is out of joint

-Kaushik Sunder Rajan

A fragment about mourning: for those we love most, and for those whose names we cannot know.

When my father died, a close friend of mine was in Palestine, attending to the dying during the 2014 bombing of Gaza. She told me how poignant it was to hear of someone’s deeply individual grief while burying bodies whose names she could not know. My friend went to al Aqsa mosque to pray for my father, in the midst of her own more anonymous grief.

What kind of an ethics and politics can knit such intimacy and distance together?