torthúil reads

Progress so far. Yeah it’s a tough book. But there’s so much I want to highlight and think about in every chapter. The Bluecaps. In this chapter we meet the interrogators.  Solzhenitsyn begins by saying that despite spending hours with the interrogators, he remembers little about them personally: much less than about his cell mates, for example. “There is one thing, however, which remains with us all as an accurate, generalized recollection: foul rot—a space totally infected with putrefaction.  And even when decades later, we are long last fits of anger or outrage, in our own quieted hearts we retain this firm impression of low, malicious, impious, and possibly muddled people.” (144) “Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views—and they are not. Their branch of service does not require them to think logically: and they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering—