Born at the Right Time
There's a good story in the New Yorker this week about the death of poet Federico Garcia Lorca during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. The writer sets out with volunteers who are locating and exhuming some of the mass graves of the 30,000 victims never found. A volunteer with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory is asked why he devotes so much time to the cause. His answer has been playing through my head this weekend:

It's a bit difficult to explain. My ideas are exactly the same, I think, as those of most of the people buried here, and I always thought that if I had the ill fortune of having been born then, I would have ended up buried in a ditch.

- posted by Amy @ 12/22/2003 09:09:00 AM