You can’t look the nightmare dead-on, he says, it won’t do what you think it does. The overwhelming scale of the destruction will freeze you in your panic, and you won’t even see what you need to see. Looking at catastrophe backward, in a mirror and at a remove—Weiss implies that this way of seeing can help us learn both to take sides in the fight and also to understand what to do next, whenever and if ever we might find ourselves facing this scale of horrors again. We don’t need to tell you that these questions are, fuck’s sake, not hypothetical or abstract for any of us. {read}