Commonplace Book

'What I want to explain, if I can, is that these people's basic ideas of the universe have been shattered. And, when an idea is broken, that's much worse for the people concerned than death or pain. You see, she believed in justice; it was an apparently practical ideal. It was the thing she and her husband had been working for since they were young - the basis of their marriage, and of their bringing children into the world. They had been good people. And now this had happened. It had happened to her husband who was a good man - that was what she couldn't understand. She stood there by her kitchen stove - and it didn't look as if she had much to cook on it. And she was going to be turned out of her house, and she had no money, and she could do nothing. Nothing at all. She had to stand there with her neck bowed. I don't think I've ever understood about oppression before. I've written about it, and imagined it, but here it was [...] And, for thousands and thousands of years, men and women have had to stand under the whip, not even answering back. And they've really been people, not a kind of animal, not something different, or romantic or picturesque. It's all real. The damned thing's been going on all this time. And now I've seen it, and I will not accept it in my world.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)