spolia

through the silent path

*
Hundreds of stories, and all of them end with a little incident, a little simple thing that stays in your mind.
"I remember the eyes of people going to work in the morning," a man says. "There was a quality of tiredness in those eyes I haven't forgotten. It was beyond a tiredness you can imagine - a desperate kind of weariness that never expected to be rested. The eyes of the people seemed to be deep, deep in their heads, and their voices seemed to come from a long distance. And I remember during a raid seeing a blind man standing on the curb, tapping with his stick and waiting for someone to take him across through the traffic. There wasn't any traffic, and the air was full of fire, but he stood there and tapped until someone came along and took him to a shelter".
In all of the little stories it is the ordinary, the common-place thing or incident against the background of the bombing that leaves the indelible picture.
[...]
The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.

John Steinbeck, 'Once there was a war', 1959