flâneur

Attachment is suffering, attachment is love

bessstillman.substack.com · 4,153 words · saved by 1 readers

My grandfather used to tell a story about the death of his brother, Noah, a few days before the liberation of Auschwitz: “Noah had typhus,” my grandfather would say. “He was like a skeleton. We were both like skeletons. He died in my arms. Three days later, the Americans came, and one handed me a whole chocolate bar as he walked past. My brother never got to taste chocolate again.” As far as I can tell, my grandfather, Daniel, never let go of his brother long enough to really wrap his arms around anyone else. Daniel’s been dead for a decade now, so I can’t ask him, but he told other stories that made it obvious that the wholesale destruction of his old life at the hands of the Nazis meant he never fully engaged with the objectively bountiful life he built in America afterwards. He may have survived, but he never thrived. Daniel’s story reminds me of a documentary I just watched called The Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling (minus the Nazis): The film begins with old home movies, painting a

My grandfather used to tell a story about the death of his brother, Noah, a few days before the liberation of Auschwitz: “Noah had typhus,” my grandfather would say. “He was like a skeleton. We were both like skeletons. He died in my arms. Three days later, the Americans came, and one handed me a whole chocolate bar as he walked past. My brother never got to taste chocolate again.” As far as I can tell, my grandfather, Daniel, never let go of his brother long enough to really wrap his arms around anyone else. Daniel’s been dead for a decade now, so I can’t ask him, but he told other stories…

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