Anyone who has seriously attempted it knows the impossibility of representing past events authentically, as they were lived and felt by the people involved. …. People then just didn’t think the way we do.

… as in 1901, when Strindberg wrote “The Dreamplay,” it seems as though There Is No Alternative (“TINA” – see Daniel Singer’s 1999 book on this tyrannical goddess). Of course, there is an alternative, there always is. Let us pray, to whatever gods we find within ourselves, that it is not the kind of alternative Europe created for itself in 1914. (2000.12.04)