August 19, 2014 edition
The sun can be bright, but distant and indifferent to human suffering. Les Misrables, which was first published on April 1, 1862, wanted to be closer to the earth, and sensitive to French weeping. As its famous phrase says: "Those who do not weep, do not see."
Victor Hugo wanted our eyes to be moist and for them to see, sensitively, around them. In general he succeeded in this, at least for his readers of two hundred years ago. There is a story that the publishing in Brussels of the first edition of his novel was delayed because the printers sobbed so much when reading the manuscript.
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
August 12, 2014 edition
That brutal, hopeless and never-ending history probably started in a small Palestinian town 15 kilometers southeast of Tel Aviv. Arabs call it al-Ludd (). The Jews now call it by its Biblical name Lod. It used to be known as Lydda.
Before the turmoil of World War II, Arabs lived side by side there with the Jews who had started arriving in 1913. On the slopes, a Jewish immigrant established an olive-oil soap factory; another founded an orphanage for forced exiles from Eastern Europe.
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August 5, 2014 edition
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.I am large. I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
Tens of thousands of people gathered one unexpected afternoon: layer upon layer of enthusiasm, pile upon pile of hope, and anxiety, line upon line of faces that were not just watching with fixed and passive gaze.
Walt Whitman
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January 1, 1970 edition
You do not take sides. You do not want your view obstructed by barricades. You want to show that behind every barricade, whether it be that group over there or this one here, perches the dirty and repugnant. There are schemes and tools of destruction at the ready. You want to stress that your role ('I am an intellectual', you say) is to oppose this. You want to underline clear thinking, unbiased standards of good, and listening to one's conscience.
That is why you do not want to take sides,
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January 1, 1970 edition
One hundred years ago, a nineteen year old man fired his semi-automatic pistol at a husband and wife on a street corner in Sarajevo.
Franz Ferdinand, the ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who was visiting his subjugated city, was killed along with his wife Sophie. The murderer was Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Serbian nationalist movement that wanted to expel imperial rule from its territory.
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July 15, 2014 edition
We are probably going to live as a society exhausted by lies. This year, 2014, is the year of the most brutal elections-brutal in the form of words-in the history of Indonesia since 1945. In this bitter process, we are almost constantly bombarded with 'facts' uttered only to be turned around, rebuttals made with no intention of finding out what is true, and, slowly but surely, the spread of mutual distrust-even hatred. And with this: the loss of serious conversation.
Serious conversation contains the desire to listen to each other, without necessarily having to agree. Serious conversation does not mean humorless conversation: no, humor can be important. In serious conversation it is assumed that words have power in sound and sense, in thinking and feeling-power that is sometimes called 'meaning' or 'maksud'. In Indonesian, the word maksud can mean both 'meaning' and 'intention'. But when lies are uttered constantly, then 'meaning' is carried off-and sometimes drowned-in the flow of jostling sounds that grammar calls (to use Hamlet's expression of irritation) 'words, words, words'
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January 1, 1970 edition