Simone Weil 28

The temporal was only a bridge. Radhika asks what apostrophe means and I say “O bridge!”: that doesn't refer to hours the governor closed a bridge out of spite. Power is a means, yes, but it's also mean--the way lack of commitment masks itself as indecision. She fears the cruelty of breaking a non-commitment, asks the newspaper ethicist what she needs to say. A world-renowned ethics professor sexually harasses his foreign students. The question we pose is so obvious we hardly need ask it. She wonders what is more cruel, the saying or the not-saying. If the bridge had an end, we could never get off it, gulls arcing beneath us, as we worried over concrete spalling, angled for repairs. The man whose shrill shirt balloons never lands, hangs in the air between roadway and the river. We have stopped him cold with a single syllable, calling into being what never ceases to die.