The Italian poet Franco Fortini had described “the difficulty of writing in an age when the poet is trapped between epitaphs and manifestos.” There is also the difficulty of writing from amidst the rubble of words. In a fine piece published on Open Democracy, John Berger reports from Palestine. He quotes the poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Ours is a country of words. Talk. Talk. Let me rest my road against a stone.” I like Berger’s kind of travel writing, attentive to people and broken histories, attentive also to one’s own inevitable flaws and the flaws of others, finding in the rubble around him what in a remarkable phrase he calls “undefeated despair.”