Europe Has the Shape of My Brain

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• The important thing was to get away from what was emblematic of Europe at the time: the dull, mechanistic, and conformist rationality of its ruling classes.

• knew that the Nazi creed would lead “logically” to the Holocaust and that the Soviet version of “social harmony” would provide the foundation for the East European terro

• coldly scientific crimes would soon become accepted practice under the cover of “social engineering” and in the name of “advancing human wellbeing,” crimes that entailed experimenting with the real, living bodies of individuals as well as with huge, terrorized groups of people

• yet to overcome the consequences.

• Still, I doubt that this would truly be enough to return our right to celebrate our belonging to Europe.

• Today, discriminating in this way would signify a barbaric mindset.

• Many of the strands in the rope binding us to our Judaeo-Hellenic traditions can be followed into other realms, some close by and others very distant

• In our minds, Europe is a complex mental image made up from interrelated concepts, as well as a contra

• dictory mass of sentiments, in which self-love mingles with self-hatred

• There are many Europes, no less than a confederation of multidimensional Europes distributed over time and space. To which one of these should I claim allegiance? Which of them do I detest? Some are as real as a handful of soil sprouting blades of grass, while others are virtual, ghostlike manifestations still haunting our imagination

• I feel more connected to the Europe of today than to any other of its past manifestations, but in the greater scheme of things the present-day place has no greater degree of concrete reality than do any of the previous versions.

• here-and-now has guided my progress through both my conscious existence and dreaming, and must be my dominant reality.

• Even now, Europe is not united and this will not change in the foreseeable future, not even when all the nation-states in the would-be “East” have become officially integrated into that equally fantastic notion of the “West.”

• In no way am I an eastern European writer. As far as I’m concerned, the tripartite Europe is unreal.

• no geopolitical justification, nor a cultural one, and that includes religion as well.

• l that there is indeed, almost tautologically, an element of a shared European spirit in all literature of true cultural value, wherever it has been created and however extensively it has been influenced by that locality.