For Dore Ashton

Many of us must have experienced a sensation of relief while celebrating the advent of the new millennium. The relief consisted first in having survived, and then in saying adieu to a century that more than any other in the long history of mankind had been marked by evil. As if torn from a corpse, the ligatures of that evil - binding total war to totalitarianism; the totalitarian destruction of entire peoples to the invention of nuclear weapons; and the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a post-totalitarian world to the unprecedented capacity of mankind to annihilate itself - revealed the identifying scars of the century that had come to its calendric end. But New Year and even millennial celebrations tend to be followed by sober, frequently painful awakenings. Has our “morning after” found us in a new world? Has the mere passage of time from the twentieth to the twenty-first century healed the wounds of the former and enabled us to be reconciled to the latter? If we heed the Russian poet Akhmatova, who was not thinking of the calendar when she spoke of “the real twentieth century,” are we not forced to ask ourselves: What, if anything, has ended? Hannah Arendt might counsel us to ask a somewhat different question: What, if anything, has begun?