Guest, Host, Ghost - A Dinner Party in Kyiv -- Timothy Snyder

[erronis]

https://snyder.substack.com/p/guest-host-ghost

An extremely powerful piece by Timothy Snyder. Just excerpting the beginning - please read the original.

It had rained. As the September day evened into night the surface of the cobblestones glistened with the remnant sunlight. I had been working in hotel rooms and bomb shelters and was glad for the downhill walk, but glad also that it was short: curfew brings a second nightfall, manmade by the proximate authorities who want to keep you alive, and by the distant ones who want you dead.

I rang the bell at the unmarked door, and creaking floorboards invited me into a home. My hostess's work is to explain war, and I had met her once before; and I have seen her since that evening, on an island in the Baltic Sea. There she was wearing a necklace with hammerlets of Thor, as people did in eastern Europe a thousand years ago: "it makes me feel stronger."

Ours is not a hospitality culture, and I feel awkwardly in debt to friends who have made me feel at home in other countries, who exemplify internalized generosity regardless of the external situation. During this war, when Ukrainian friends have come to visit, they invariably bring a gift for my children: something they took trouble with, carried with them on the long overnight train ride to Poland (no flights in Ukraine, remember), and then on whatever other journeys brought them into my house.

. . .

[Wild blueberry]

1. Absolutely superb

Very moving.
Will donate again to United24.
Thank you.