Before I get started please note Playing with Fire will be published in January 2027. There are artists of note to read about. The garden wanes but oh so beautifully. Now onward.

PARIS IS BURNING. Something is happening. That much is clear. It’s happening near and far. An unsettling. The uncertainty pulls me off balance both mentally and even physically. Finding it hard to focus. Looking back at 17 October in Paris, the “manifestations” as they say in French, were peaceful almost mellow. Protests are announced. Metro and traffic disruptions publicized so those going about their business are not inconvenienced. Or at least they’ve been informed. This time the march became a mob. Or a mob arrived afterwards. The word is derived from the latin phrase mobile vulgus, “the movable or fickle common people.”

Schadenfreude. Another interesting definition. The satisfaction of learning about the pain of others. Do we take a morbid pleasure in others’ problems because we would rather not look at our own? I’m currently reading Julia Boyd’s fascinating (and cautionary tale) Travellers in the Third Reich. Ms. Boyd’s research gives us reflections from tourists both casual and political and their reactions to massive social realignment in the 1930’s.

Hatred against an “other” when normalized grows like a cancer and become like mobs who are emboldened by broken windows and no civil code. Does any of this sound familiar? When Thomas Wolfe was leaving Berlin after the Olympics, a Jewish companion in his train compartment was stopped, beaten, and carried away. Their eyes met as the train pulled away from the station. Haunted, Wolfe wrote I Have Something to Tell You which was published in The New Republic in 1937. His books were subsequently banned in Germany.

Are these incidents connected? How can we learn from them? Am I doing enough to prevent hatred and injustice?