CYNTHIA OZICK
47
to do. Then consider the bystanders not as a group, not as a stereotype,
but one by one. If the bystander is the ordinary human article, as we
have agreed, what can there be to puzzle us? This one, let us say, is a
good and zealous hater (no one can deny that hating belongs to the
ordinary human article), encouraged by epaulets, posters, flashy rhetoric,
and pervasive demagoguery. And this one is an envious malcontent,
lustful for a change of leadership. And this one is a simple patriot. And
this one, unemployed, is a dupe of the speechmakers. Such portraits, both
credible and problematical, are common enough. But let us concede that
most of the bystanders were quiet citizens who wanted nothing more
than to get on with their private lives: a portrait entirely palatable to
you and me. The ordinary human article seeks nothing more complex
than the comforts of indifference to public clamor of any kind.
Indifference is a way of sheltering oneself from evil; who would interpret
such unaggressive sheltering as a contribution to evil? The ordinary
human article hardly looks to get mixed up in active and wholesale
butchery of populations; what rational person would want to accuse the
bystander - who has done no more than avert her eyes - of a hardness–
of-heart in any way approaching that of the criminals? That would be a
serious lie - a distortion both of fact and of psychological understanding.
Yet it is the nature of indifference itself that bewilders. How is it that
indifference, which on its own does no apparent or immediate positive
harm, ends by washing itself in the very horrors it means to have nothing
to do with? Hoping to confer no hurt, indifference finally grows lethal;
why is that? Can it be that indifference, ostensibly passive, harbors an un–
suspected robustness? The act of turning toward - while carrying a club
- is an act of brutality; but the act of turning away, however empty–
handed and harmlessly, remains nevertheless an
acl.
The whole truth may
be that the idea of human passivity is nothing but the illusion of wistful
mortals; and that waking into the exigencies of our own time -
whichever way we turn, toward or away - implies action. To be born is
to be compelled to act.
One of the most curious (and mephitic) powers of indifference is its
retroactive capacity: it is possible to be indifferent
IIII/IC
pro
II/I/f.
I am
thinking of a few sentences I happened to be shown the other day: they
were from the pen of a celebrated author who was commenting on a
piece of so-called "Holocaust writing." "These old events," she com–
plained, "can rake you over only so much, and then you long for a bit
of satire on it all. Like so many others of my generation" - she was a
young adult during the forties - "who had nothing to do with any of
it, I've swallowed all the guilt I can bear, and if I'm going to be lashed,
I intend to save my skin for more recent troubles in the world."
Never mind the odd protestation of innocence where nothing has
