Triumph Over Tragedy Quotes

Fabulous. If you possess it, you don’t need to ask what it is. When you attempt to delineate it, you move away from it. Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular oppressed subculture’s most distinctive, invigorating features. What are the salient features of fabulousness? Irony. Tragic History. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The fabulous is not delineated by age or beauty. It is raw materials reworked into illusion. To be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, and physical insufficiencies. The fabulous is the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, the dislike, the other.

Some stories won't have a happy ending, but there's always hope that the next one will. Hope is everything. Even when there's nothing else. Especially when there's nothing else.

The great triumph (or horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the day finding creative ways to deny our mortality, no matter how powerful, loved, or special we may feel, we know we are ultimately doomed to death and decay. This is a mental burden shared by precious few other species on Earth.

Even the broken will fight

Do it double, because some can't do it at all.

Hope is made of air, and wishes. An empty box wrapped in shiny paper.

According to how gifted we are, we are all given a large or small key to this treasury of wonders. I have been blessed with a small key to the world of the young. It's a place where good and evil are clearly stamped. It's a place where the better part of human nature triumphs over tragedies, and where innocence rides high. It is a great pleasure to write there, because the young have what the rest of us only envy, and that is a belief in goodness and perpetual hope.

A dream conceived from the inside-out eventually becomes reality. But a dream desired from the outside-in is subject to spoil and tragedy.

Where we encounter the "naïve" in art, we should recognize the highest effect of Apollinian culture--which always must first overthrow an empire of Titans and slay monsters, and which must have triumphed over an abysmal and terrifying view of the world and the keenest susceptibility to suffering through recourse to the most forceful and pleasurable illusions.

In foreign policy, a modest acceptance of fate will often lead to discipline rather than indifference. The realization that we cannot always have our way is the basis of a mature outlook that rests on an ancient sensibility, for tragedy is not the triumph of evil over good so much as triumph of one good over another that causes suffering. Awareness of that fact leads to a sturdy morality grounded in fear as well as in hope. The moral benefits of fear bring us to two English philosophers who, like Machiavelli, have for centuries disturbed people of goodwill: Hobbes and Malthus.

My Keeper took everything from me: my home, my family, my voice. He made me powerless. But I'm home now. It may be split in two, but I have it back. My family may be broken, but I have it back. I have my voice back. I am not powerless anymore.

when the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

People reject the cross because it contradicts historical values and expectations—just as Peter challenged Jesus for saying, “The Son of Man must suffer”: “Far be it from You; this shall not happen to You.” But Jesus rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31, 33). “In the course of a few moments,” Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation. Suffering and death were not supposed to happen to the Messiah. He was expected to triumph over evil and not be defeated by it. How could God’s revelation be found connected with the “the worst of deaths,” the “vilest death,” “a criminal’s death on the tree of shame”?[15] Like the lynching tree in America, the cross in the time of Jesus was the most “barbaric form of execution of the utmost cruelty,” the absolute opposite of human value systems. It turned reason upside down. In his sermon-lecture “The Transvaluation of Values” in Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr turns to Paul to express what it meant to see the world from a transcendent, divine point of view.

But that’s what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it’s because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper’s half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.

We can all endure disaster and tragedy and triumph over them—if we have to. We may not think we can, but we have surprisingly strong inner resources that will see us through if we will only make use of them. We are stronger than we think.

If there is one thing I can say without a doubt, it is that tragedy can make great music. Every single song I have ever written has been born of tragedy and heartache, and being able to make something beautiful out of pain is powerful. When you open your mouth to sing, you are triumphing over pain through music - the music itself can help you conquer your sadness.

Miss Selina, you have over the past minutes—as in the past months, and indeed, in all the years of your association with him—demonstrated an understanding of Master Bruce, his aspirations, his desires and his demons, that would be the envy of his closest colleagues, who believe they know him better than anybody. It is quite impossible to credit your fear that you ‘will not be good at this,’ for there is clearly no one in his life better suited to comfort him in tragedy, rejoice with him in triumph, and keep him from being alone in the days and nights in between. If he should ‘give up hope,’ I have no doubt you would manage the situation with the same sublime felinity you have used to such advantage in the past. Now drink your tea, young woman, and the next time you enjoy, or even sniff, this particular brew, I dare say you will understand how it helps.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both to resign ourselves to the outward rules of Fate and to recognise that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain; from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word 'responsibility'. And when Morgan suggested he was using the word almost in a religious sense Oppenheimer agreed it was a 'secular devise for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word 'ethical' here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now I don't know how to describe my life without using some word like responsibility to characterize it. A word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I'm not talking about knowledge but about being limited by what you can do. There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself but increased knowledge, increased wealth... leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable. After this soliloquy Morgan wrote "Oppenheimer turned his palms up, the long slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion 'You and I' he said 'Neither of us is rich but as far as responsibility goes both of us are in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.' This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica... that indifference to the sufferings one causes is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty. Far from being indifferent, Robert was acutely aware of the suffering he had caused others in his life and yet he would not allow himself to succumb to guilt. He would accept responsibility. He had never tried to deny his responsibility but since the security hearing he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the cruelty of indifference. and in that sense, Robby had been right- they achieved their goal, they killed him.

Each time he read the tribute, Travis was filled anew with wonder at Einstein's existence. What fantasy of children was more common than that their dogs were fully as perceptive and wise and clever as any adult? What gift from God would more delight a young mind than to have the family dog prove able to communicate on a human level and to share triumphs and tragedies with full understanding of their meaning and importance? What miracle could bring more joy, more respect for the mysteries of nature, more sheer exuberance over the unanticipated wonders of life? Somehow, in the very idea of a dog's personality and human intelligence combined in a single creature, one had a hope of a species at once as gifted as humankind but more noble and worthy . And what fantasy of adults was more common than that, one day, another intelligent species would be found to share the vast, cold universe and, by sharing it, would at last provide some relief from our race's unspeakable loneliness and sense of quiet desperation?

Spellbinders are characterized by pathological egotism. Such a person is forced by some internal causes to make an early choice between two possibilities: the first is forcing other people to think and experience things in a manner similar to his own; the second is a feeling of being lonely and different, a pathological misfit in social life. Sometimes the choice is either snake-charming or suicide. Triumphant repression of selfcritical or unpleasant concepts from the field of consciousness gradually gives rise to the phenomena of conversive thinking (twisted thinking), or paralogistics (twisted logic), paramoralisms (twisted morality), and the use of reversion blockades (Big Lies). They stream so profusely from the mind and mouth of the spellbinder that they flood the average person’s mind. Everything becomes subordinated to the spellbinder’s over-compensatory conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology emerges from this conviction, true in part, whose value is supposedly superior. However, if we analyze the exact functions of such an ideology in the spellbinder’s personality, we perceive that it is nothing other than a means of self-charming, useful for repressing those tormenting selfcritical associations into the subconscious. The ideology’s instrumental role in influencing other people also serves the spellbinder’s needs. The spellbinder believes that he will always find converts to his ideology, and most often, they are right. However, they feel shock (or even paramoral indignation) when it turns out that their influence extends to only a limited minority, while most people’s attitude to their activities remains critical, pained and disturbed. The spellbinder is thus confronted with a choice: either withdraw back into his void or strengthen his position by improving the ef ectiveness of his activities. The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who has succumbed to his influence and incorporated the experiential method he imposes. He showers such people with attention and property, if possible. Critics are met with “moral” outrage. It can even be proclaimed that the compliant minority is in fact the moral majority, since it professes the best ideology and honors a leader whose qualities are above average. Such activity is always necessarily characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically. However, spellbinders nurture great optimism and harbor visions of future triumphs similar to those they enjoyed over their own crippled souls. It is also possible for optimism to be a pathological symptom. In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively upon common sense and social order; such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers sometimes manifesting pathological traits, spellbinders’ activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy. Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally join together in a ponerogenic union. On the other hand, people who have maintained their healthy critical faculties intact, based upon their own common sense and moral criteria, attempt to counteract the spellbinders’ activities and their results. In the resulting polarization of social attitudes, each side justifies itself by means of moral categories. That is why such commonsense resistance is always accompanied by some feeling of helplessness and deficiency of criteria.

After we finished the interview Paul thanked me for my time and told me he thought I was great on the radio. He suggested I think about it as a career. I thanked him and said I’d consider it. But really all I was thinking about was Jamie. As soon as I got in my car I looked on my phone and saw I had a Facebook friend request from her. I felt schoolgirl giddy. I accepted the request and immediately called my Army buddy Max. Max is one of the guys who came with me on that first Tough Mudder. We are really close friends, and he’s someone I’ve always confided in. Just a few weeks before I had called and told him, “You know what? I’m done with women for the time being, but the next time I talk to a girl, I’m shooting out of my league.” So now I called Max and said, “I’ve met a girl way out of my league and I’m gonna take a shot.” I wasn’t good at asking women out and felt really nervous. I told Max she had sent me a friend request and he urged me to send her a private message on Facebook. I typed out a pretty long message and hit SEND. Then I finally put the keys in the ignition and left the radio station parking lot. Every red light I hit, I checked my phone to see if she had responded. She hadn’t. Why wasn’t she responding? Finally, I pulled over and looked again. The message hadn’t gone through! I panicked and called Max back. “What am I gonna do? What if I send another one and the first one is just floating through the Internet and it eventually goes through? Do I send another one? Do I make it sound exactly the same? I’m gonna look like a crazy person! What do I do? I don’t know what to do!” Max calmed me down again and I rewrote my original message. This time she responded. “Jamie, it was great meeting you and Paul today. Sorry you got stuck with a used bracelet. If I run into you again I will hook you up with a new one. You’ll just have to give that one back. They aren’t free. LOL. Take care.” She responded: “Ha ha. Actually, Noah Galloway, I got the one I wanted ;). Great to meet you, too. Love your story. Tragedy to triumph. I can’t imagine the number of people you inspire every day. Hope to run into you sooner rather than later.

Only 768 people—passengers and crew—had survived; four of those died of their injuries in the next months. Some 1,198 had perished, including 128 Americans. Over 800 of Lusitania’s victims were never recovered.(

could join his siblings in helping their mother. After a brief-but-publicized legal struggle, the children reached an agreement with Joan: Two financial professionals would watch over her estimated $9.5 million in assets while a guardian would monitor her and guide her medical decisions. The agreement stipulated that if Joan abused alcohol or endangered herself again, more control would be shifted away from her. Any rift caused by the legal proceedings had been long repaired by 2009, when Ted Kennedy died of brain cancer in the Hyannis Port home his family had owned since the 1920s. His new wife, Vicki, was by his side, as were his children. Joan quietly attended his funeral, her presence evoking a quarter-century of his life—both the highs of the long-lost Camelot days and the lows of two assassinations, a near-fatal plane crash, a son’s battle with cancer, and a political life nearly derailed. In 2011, her daughter, Kara, died suddenly of a heart

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable . . . you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that you have left is a compromise.

A part war drama, part coming-of-age story, part spiritual pilgrimage, Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is the story of a young woman who experienced more hardships before graduating high school than most people do in a lifetime. Yet her heartaches are only half the story; the other half is a story of resilience, of leaving her lifelong home in Germany to find a new home, a new life, and a new love in America. Mildred Schindler Janzen has given us a time capsule of World War II and the years following it, filled with pristinely preserved memories of a bygone era. Ken Gire New York Times bestselling author of All the Gallant Men The memoir of Mildred Schindler Janzen will inform and inspire all who read it. This is a work that pays tribute to the power and resiliency of the human spirit to endure, survive, and overcome in pursuit of the freedom and liberty that all too many take for granted. Kirk Ford, Jr., Professor Emeritus, History Mississippi College Author of OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943-1945 A compelling first-person account of life in Germany during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. A well written, true story of a young woman overcoming the odds and rising above the tragedies of loss of family and friends during a savage and brutal war, culminating in her triumph in life through sheer determination and will. A life lesson for us all. Col. Frank Janotta (Retired), Mississippi Army National Guard Mildred Schindler Janzen’s touching memoir is a testimony to God’s power to deliver us from the worst evil that men can devise. The vivid details of Janzen’s amazing life have been lovingly mined and beautifully wrought by Sherye Green into a tender story of love, gratitude, and immeasurable hope. Janzen’s rich, post-war life in Kansas serves as a powerful reminder of the great promise of America. Troy Matthew Carnes, Author of Rasputin’s Legacy and Dudgeons and Daggers World War II was horrific, and we must never forget. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a must-read that sheds light on the pain the Nazis and then the Russians inflicted on the German Jews and the German people. Mildred Schindler Janzen’s story, of how she and her mother and brother survived the war and of the special document that allowed Mildred to come to America, is compelling. Mildred’s faith sustained her during the war's horrors and being away from her family, as her faith still sustains her today. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a book worth buying for your library, so we never forget. Cynthia Akagi, Ph.D. Northcentral University I wish all in the world could read Mildred’s story about this loving steel magnolia of a woman who survived life under Hitler’s reign. Mildred never gave up, but with each suffering, grew stronger in God’s strength and eternal hope. Beautifully written, this life story will captivate, encourage, and empower its readers to stretch themselves in life, in love, and with God, regardless of their circumstances. I will certainly recommend this book. Renae Brame, Author of Daily Devotions with Our Beloved, God’s Peaceful Waters Flow, and Snow and the Eternal Hope How utterly inspiring to read the life story of a woman whose every season reflects God’s safe protection and unfailing love. When young Mildred Schindler escaped Nazi Germany, only to have her father taken by Russians and her mother and brother hidden behind Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain, she courageously found a new life in America. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is her personal witness to God’s guidance and provision at every step of that perilous journey. How refreshing to view a full life from beginning to remarkable end – always validating that nothing is impossible with God. Read this book and you will discover the author’s secret to life: “My story is a declaration that choosing joy and thankfulness over bitterness and anger, even amid difficult circumsta

It is a hard thing to ask me to throw over a constitutional King acting on the true advice of his Ministers, apart from British pressure, in order to install a dictator who may very likely become the champion of the extreme Left.

It would be an ill day for all the world and for the pair of them if they did not go on working together and marching together and sailing together and flying together, whenever something has to be done for the sake of freedom and fair play all over the world. That is the great hope of the future.

Queer contagion, including the anxiety triggered by gender nonnormativity, found its viral materiality in the early 1980s. The diagnosis of gay cancer, or GRID (gay-related immune disorder), the original name for AIDS, was a vengeful nomenclature for the perversion of existing in a world held together, at least in part, by trans/queer undoing. Found by chance, queers began showing symptoms of unexplainable illnesses such as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). Unresponsive to the most aggressive treatments, otherwise healthy, often well-resourced and white, young men were deteriorating and dying with genocidal speed. Without remedy, normative culture celebrated its triumph in knowing the tragic ends they always imagined queers would meet. This, while the deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women (queer or otherwise) were unthought beyond the communities directly around them. These women, along with many others, were stripped of any claim to tragedy under the conditions of trans/misogyny. Among the architects of this silence was then-President Ronald Reagan, who infamously refused to mention HIV/AIDS in public until 1986. By then, at least 16,000 had died in the U.S. alone. Collective fantasies of mass disappearance through the pulsing death of trans/queer people, Haitians, and drug users - the wish fulfillment of a nightmare world concertized the rhetoric that had always been spoken from the lips of power. The true terror of this response to HIV/AIDS was not only its methodological denial but its joyful humor. In Scott Calonico's experimental short film, "When AIDS Was Funny", a voice-over of Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes is accompanied by iconic still images of people close to death in hospital beds. LESTER KINSOLVING: "Over a third of them have died. It's known as a 'gay plague.' [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this." LARRY SPEAKES: "I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry!" [Press pool laughter.] LARRY SPEAKES: "Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "No, I don't.

By this thesis, in short, the coming of St. Francis was like the birth of a child in a dark house, lifting its doom; a child that grows up unconscious of the tragedy and triumphs over it by his innocence.

She looked up to the sun. Ninety-three million miles away, it took just over eight minutes for its rays to reach the eyes. It was like seeing the past.

I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence.

In the story of Wagner and Wagnerism, we see both the highest and the lowest impulses of humanity entangled. It is the triumph of art over reality and the triumph of reality over art; it is a tragedy of flaws set so deep that after two centuries they still infuriate us as if the man were in the room. To blame Wagner for the horrors committed in his wake is an inadequate response to historical complexity: it lets the rest of civilization off the hook. At the same time, to exonerate him is to ignore his insidious ramifications. It is no longer possible to idealize Wagner: the ugliness of his racism means that posterity's picture of him will always be cracked down the middle. In the end, the lack of a tidy moral resolution should make us more honest about the role that art plays in the world. In Wagner's vicinity, the fantasy of artistic autonomy falls to pieces and the cult of genius comes undone. Amid the wreckage, the artist is liberated from the mystification of "great art”. He becomes something more unstable, fragile, and mutable. Incomplete in himself, he requires the most active and critical kind of listening. So it goes with all art that endures: it is never a matter of beauty proving eternal. When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also. In the distance we may catch glimpses of some higher realm, some glimmering temple, some ecstasy of knowledge and compassion. But it is only a shadow on the wall, an echo from the pit. The vision fades, the curtain falls, and we shuffle back in silence to the world as it is.

THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures.

These mountains have their stories. Nearly all of them deal with the relationship between man, his relationship to the earth, and his cohabitation with others. Millions of years ago, when our mountains were under the ocean, the world looked very different. Over time, countless species died, depositing their bones on the ocean floor. Eons of time lapsed, and those calcium remnants had transmogrified into our now famous marble deposits.

The enormous sense of the potentiality for success and failure, and the prospect of triumphs and tragedies, hoover over collegiate students jubilant and anguish filled, animated actuality.

Humanity has determined it is supreme in the kingdom of animals, yet [the] beasts live a less tragic existence...and many of their tragedies are a consequence of so-called human brilliance.

Eisenhower’s tragedy was that he permitted himself to be pushed into what turned out to be a trap. He had succumbed to General George C. Marshall’s suggestion that he take over the ground command in Europe and involve himself in the tactical conduct of the war, for which he was not actually suited. He took upon himself this enormous operational responsibility in addition to his strategic job, which alone was beginning to overtax his resources. Consequently, both strategy and tactics suffered, leading inevitably to a drifting beyond the Seine and eventually to the prolongation of the conflict.

Alexa's face whitens. The coil of hair loosens itself from her finger. "You did it for me. You never fought back. Because you thought you were keeping me safe." I pull up my gaze to meet hers. "Yeah." "I--" It's a strangled, high-pitched sound, laced with shock and grief. Then she bites her lips shut. Her chin trembles, just once, before she turns away.

My sister has never not told me something before. We used to share every secret, every thought. While I was in the attic, it felt like we were forever far away. Now I'm with her again. We're so close that we're touching, but there's still a distance between us.

The only thing that gave me comfort in the attic was thinking about my family. Now I'm home, but it's not the home I imagined. Not the family I imagined. I'd convinced myself that they'd continued on with their happy, carefree lives without me, that they were doing it double, because I couldn't do it at all. I was wrong.

Each second of my four years, two months, and seven days in the attic dragged on forever, and nothing ever changed. But outside the attic, everything changed, and so violently fast. Destruction and devastation for all of us, whether we were in the attic or out.

I say to my sister, "I thought you were doing the things in our Dream Book. I was sure of it." "Why would I do that stuff without you?" "Because you could." "Well, you were wrong.

Something contracts in my chest. The air shifts, grows heavy and dense as mud. Alexa twists her hair around her finger and whispers, "Didn't you even try to escape, Charlotte?

Hope is made of air, and wishes. An empty box wrapped in shiny paper. And now Dad wants me to be the ambassador of hope for his foundation. How can I be the ambassador of hope, when hope doesn't change anything? When unrealized hopes only bring pain and despair?

Dad thinks I'm ready to fly around the country as the Ambassador of Hope, but Mom thinks I'm a frail little bird with broken wings.

My friend Bailey is looking at me with tears in her eyes and a smile of pure joy. She sees me, the real me, not the broken little bird that my mother sees, or the Ambassador of Hope that my father sees, or the girl who was stupid enough to walk off with a stranger and ruin everyone's lives that my sister sees. Bailey sees me as I want to be: a normal, non-newsworthy, non-broken, non-victimized sixteen-year-old girl.

So many cameras are on me. This press conference is going to be on every news channel and posted on the internet. Thousands, maybe millions of people will see me. And they will all be thinking: Victim. Victim. Victim.

My father is using me as a message of hope. My sister is using me as a message of fear. I don't want to be used by anybody.

My Keeper's house. Right there. Brown shingles, dark red shutters, yellow-and-black police tape wrapped around the massive tree trunks. The attic window looks out over the yard and the world narrows until that attic window is the only thing I can see.

What we call Western civilization is to be found primarily and essentially in the confluence of the autonomous rationalism of classical philosophy and the faith of biblical religion. As Leo Strauss has said, the vitality—and the glory—of Western civilization is to be found above all in the "mutual influence" of these two irrefutable, irreducible principles of human life. The dynamic of Western civilization is the dynamic of their interaction. The triumph of Western civilization is to be found in the evidence, supplied by both philosophy and revelation, that the human soul, no less by the questions it asks than by the answers it believes it has discovered, participates in a reality that transcends all time and change. The tragedy of Western civilization has been the unfettered attempt, by political means, to vindicate claims whose very nature excludes the possibility that they can be vindicated by political means. To attempt to overcome the skepticism that is the ground of philosophy is like trying to jump over one's own shadow. To attempt to remove the necessity of the free and unconstrained faith that is the ground of the Bible and of biblical religion is like denying the existence of the shadow by jumping only in the dark—or with one's eyes shut!

What is it about us that we take such inspiration from the lives of those who triumph over tragedy? Is it as simple as that we love a story with a happy ending, or does it go deeper than that? Could it be because we never really know if, within ourselves, we have the strength to bear such tragedy and survive such intense grief? Or is it that we too actually do know pain—and along with more than a few tears—we know from experience, that after the pain, there does again come a time for joy, because we have our own story. And could it be that for everything we’ve been through, that no one really knows us—especially, if we keep it all a secret.

For a realistic assessment, one had to turn to those who remained inside Germany. They painted a very different, much grimmer picture. One of the most sensitive and valuable witnesses was the journalist Sebastian Haffner, who stayed in Germany until 1938. Though no one expected it when Hitler became chancellor, Haffner notes, his policies were remarkably successful at first. Within three years, Germany went from deep economic depression to full employment. Hitler also rearmed the nation, making it once again the dominant military power on the continent. And then there were the foreign policy triumphs: the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the incorporation of Austria, the acquisition of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Looking back in April 1939, Hitler could say, “I overcame chaos in Germany, restored order, enormously raised production in all fields of our national economy. . . . I have led millions of deeply unhappy Germans, who had been snatched away from us, back into the Fatherland; I have restored the thousand-year-old historical unity of German living space.” To which a despondent Haffner could only reply: “Damn it, it was all true, or nearly all.” Former opponents, Communists and Social Democrats among them, were won over by Hitler’s undeniable accomplishments. Haffner estimates that at his height, Hitler had the support of 90 percent of the German people, and that a majority of those who had voted against him in 1933 were now Nazi Party members or at least party sympathizers. This, Haffner says, was “perhaps his greatest achievement of all.” What’s more, such wide popularity made it difficult for critics to find fault, even when they weren’t being hounded by the Gestapo to conform. “I don’t like that business with the Jews either,” Haffner would hear from acquaintances, “but look at all the things the man has achieved!” What could one say? Haffner himself was immune to Hitler’s appeal in part because he had many Jewish friends and a Jewish girlfriend. But articulating a response was not easy because rejecting Hitler for his faults seemed to require rejecting his achievements as well, and few wanted to go back to the frustrating political paralysis of Weimar. Opponents of the Nazis who had the inner strength to resist the inevitable self-doubt that had to creep in when everyone around them was applauding Hitler for his all-too-obvious achievements found themselves increasingly living in a world of intellectual isolation and muted skepticism. According to Haffner, “What passive resistance there was to the wave of Hitlerism in Germany was mainly caused by his anti-Semitism,” but how many wanted to stand up and be labeled defenders of the Jews?