Greg Grandin on 'Gabriel García Márquez—a Rebel Against Form, an Artist Against the Forces of Oblivion', The Nation, April 2014:
"...Life and history are lineal, García Márquez seemed to want to say, but memory, which makes us human, is reiterative. Or, as he wrote at the beginning of his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, published in English in 2003, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers in order to recount it"..."
"Ernst Janning is guilty. But Ernst Janning is not the only one guilty. The men who gave him the power to do what he did, they are also guilty. The men who looked away while he did it, they are also guilty. The men who said, 'It is not my concern,' they are also guilty."
( "Judgment at Nuremberg", 1961)
Richard Stoneman writes in his wonderful 'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks':
"... It may be possible to add to the list of trees observed by the Greeks the two that occur in the Latin Letter of Alexander to Aristotle about India. After his conquest of India,
Some of the wise men of the kingdom came to Alexander and said, ‘Your majesty, we have something to show you which deserves your special attention. We will take you to the trees that speak with a human voice’. So they brought Alexander to a place where there was a sanctuary of the Sun and the Moon. There was a guardpost here, and two trees closely resembling cypresses. Around these stood trees that resembled what in Egypt is called the myrrh-nut [this is the myrobalan tree, or amala, ambla, amlaki in Hindi], and their fruits were also similar. The two trees in the middle of the garden spoke, the one with a man’s voice, the other with a woman’s. The name of the male one was Sun, and of the female one Moon, or in their own language, Moutheamatous....
...Of the many sacred trees in India, two stand out for importance, the pipal and the neem. The pipal is perhaps the holiest tree in India, further sanctified by its association with the Buddha, who achieved enlightenment sitting under one at Bodhgaya, known as the bodhi tree. It is regarded as a masculine tree. The neem is widely regarded as a beneficent and friendly tree, and is usually thought of as a feminine. Many trees in fact have a feminine aspect, being the home of a yakṣī or (feminine) tree spirit. (Yakṣas, masculine, are equally common.)
Haberman reports a conversation with two Hindu workers who were in charge of sweeping the temple at Bodhgaya:
For us there are two sacred trees. One is a god [devata]; the other is a goddess [devi]. The first is the pipal; the second is the neem. The pipal is Vasudeva; the neem tree is Shervahani.
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A pipal and a neem tree entwined (‘married’), near the Rock inscription of Aśoka at East of Kailash, Delhi
Sometimes the trees even intertwine, or are said to be ‘married’, and in the eleventh-century Persian poem Shahnameh the trees visited by Alexander are said to twine together into a single tree, one trunk being male and the other female.
…The Alexander Romance makes explicit not only that the trees are male and female but that they are trees of the Sun and Moon respectively. The pipal is sometimes said to be ‘the abode of the Sun on earth’ and is associated with the sacred fire: in kindling the sacrificial fire ‘the friction drill was made from pipal wood and was considered male, whereas the friction pan was made from sami wood and considered female’. The pipal tree is also often said to be the home of the god Shani, son of the Sun and brother of Death, though sometimes he only takes up his abode there on Saturdays, as otherwise the tree is Vasudev’s....
