29
" It was kind of like that, recovering the memory of what my father had done. The knowledge was always there, I carried it in my body, but I didn’t know what I knew, although I knew I knew something and that I dreaded knowing it fully, dreaded it as if only coming into the knowledge, into the memory, would make the event that I was repressing real. And I think Sima was the first person to intuit the contours of this unknown knowledge that I carried; she helped me see that what was missing had a shape, was a piece of the puzzle of my personality, and she made the edges visible—how what I wouldn’t let myself know jutted out into other domains of my experience. And once its edges came into view, I could—in fact I could not not—confront the knowledge I’d both always and never had. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School
30
" that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; they don’t even have a father—President Carter!—to kill or a father to tell them to kill the Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven to mass surrender without anything to surrender to; they don’t even believe in money or in science, or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they are overfed; in a word, they are starving. These kids, Klaus said, just need a good whipping and some physical labor; these kids, Klaus also said, are undergoing a profound archaic regression. "
― Ben Lerner , The Topeka School