“All of these considerations confront us with the very central question of borders. Not only between one country and another, or between one continent and another, but above all the borders within ourselves. Between ourselves as egoistic individuals and ourselves as members of a community in which we depend on one another…”

( I completed the picture, “Seated Woman with Cat”, and wrote the descriptive narrative almost a year before stumbling across this passage but it very well captures the sentiment of the picture)

“Why should someone who’s doing just fine want to know what’s happening in the blind spot of his conciousness?”

”Last fall, when I visited Princeton for a reading, I met a professor who proudly mentioned that she had urged one of Angela Merkel's advisors to accept Syrian refugees. But her advice was not that Germany should accept the refugees instead of rejecting them; rather, it was that if Germany had to accept refugees at all, then at least it should accept Syrian refugees instead of others who were less well educated and sophisticated. And they had to act fast before other countries beat them to the punch. She told Merkel's advisor that Syrians were elite as far as refugees were concerned; they'd be the easiest to integrate and the quickest to pay back into the system. That way Germany wouldn't have to accept those poor suckers, you know, the ones from the "shit-holes"-*”

* Mali, Niger, Haiti and other “shit-holes”, as a senior American statesman referred to them a few years ago.

Exerpts, Jenny Erpenbeck, 2018 Puterbaugh Keynote