WEBVTT

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Tall Windows.

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All day you didn't cry or cry
out and you felt like sleeping.

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The desire to sleep was
light bulbs dimming when

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a powerful appliance kicks off.

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You recognized that.

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As in school, it
was explained to you

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that pus was a brave army
of white corpuscles hurling

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themselves at the virulent
invader and dying.

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Riding through the
Netherlands on a train,

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you notice that even
the junk was neatly

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stacked in the junkyards.

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There were magpies in the
fields beside the watery canals,

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neat little houses,
tall windows.

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In Leiden, on the street
outside the university,

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the house where Descartes lived
was mirrored in the canal.

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There was a pair
of swans in a sense

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that without haste or anxiety,
all the people on the street

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were going to arrive at their
appointments punctually.

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Swans and mirrors and Descartes.

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It was easy to see how this
European tranquility might

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produce a poet like Mallarmé,
a middle class art-like

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symbolism.

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And you did not despise
the collective orderliness,

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the way the clerks
in the stores were

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careful to put bills
in the cash register

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with the Queen's
face facing upward.

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In the house next to the
house where Descartes lived,

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a Jewish professor died in 1937.

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His wife was a Dutch woman of
strict Calvinist principles

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and she was left with two sons.

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In 1939, when the Nazis
came, she went to court

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and perjured herself
by testifying

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that her children were conceived
during an illicit affair

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with a Gentile.

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And when she developed
tuberculosis in 1943,

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she traded passports
with a Jewish friend

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since she was
going to die anyway

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and took her place on
the train to the camps.

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Her sons kissed her goodbye
on the platform, eyes open.

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What kept you awake
was the feeling

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that everything in the
world has its own size.

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That if you could find its
size among the swellings

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and diminishings, it
would be calm and shy.

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[APPLAUSE]

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