essay: #011 A MEMO

Memo To: Jonathan Safran Foer.

Subject: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

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Jonathan.

Your words made me cry.
Last night.
Dammit.
You made me think again.
Feel.
Grieve.
For a world
So at odds with itself.

Thought of human casualties.
Endless walls of posters.
Of strangers missing.
And missed.
Epitaphs lining the Tube.
Where suicide bombers surf.
On misguided ideals.
And one-way ticket to martyrdom.

Fuck.
The crux.
It's a War of Idealism.
Fought with words.
With rhetoric.
With bombs.
With human kamikaze.

From Ground Zero.
To Bali.
Madrid.
Kings Cross.
To the many, many.
More to come.

See.
Suddenly
It hit me.
When you wrote.
The following words.
You were speaking for
ALL of humanity.
When you said:

"In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go into the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened - like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack - an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir."
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

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