Approaching the six month mark dedans l'abyme.
This isn't just a question of contextualizing the encounter in a useful way. After so many years in this place, and having seen it from so many angles, I can see the ways that people are conditioned to react, the manner of having life that is suggested to them, and I can see that this way of living is completely transparent to the folks doing bad things.
Further, I think it's an uncontroversial position to say that the people who are doing bad things are the ones in the positions of power in this city. Effectiveness is prized, and the most effective ways of being effective have increasingly little to do with right and wrong. Note the way that language has changed in the time of this city's ascendancy -- what does "impactful" mean, anyway? And, in a phenomenological context, what is it to be "immersive"? When language stretches, a condition underneath is attempting to find a marker to hold its place at the table.
Six months -- and the adversities have been biblical, or, for a fresher frame of reference, on the level of the gulags. But I have at least mostly survived it, and I still have a clear eye on the world.
Of course, this is because mentally, I am living as if in another place. This morning, reading Henry James in Dorcol or Studentski, or reading the Kantians in the shadow of the Hungarian Church in Cluj, or the Greek Gospels in the old (now Lutheran) church in Sibiu. I live not where I love, as the song has it. Largely because, if I were to fit my notions of having life to the place I'm actually in, I would lose even what I have.
Next year in a holy land.