downthefallfullpassagain

He gets waved through customs, steps into his country, sees the haze. Yellow sun and jaundiced sky. It could be interpreted again as an angelic gold. His small stream of social media sirens goes straight to seeing the smoke as sign and signal. Apocalypse mixed with the warm hues of a blade runner sky. He drives two hours home. The next morning he sends a picture to friends back at university. You can see the smoke from Canada (that's how everyone was calling it, just "from Canada") and it's kinda beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful. They respond, oh God... Hannah Arendt's past and future – two titans locked in collision at the present – are the two vectors of his reaction; he is caught between imagining what preceded the smoke and what comes after. Terror is a foolish spark. Beauty is held in action, if you and your country are not burned by the match or the aftermath. A few weeks before his flight, he had heard of the floods in the south of his adopted country. ...