The Stories of How We Begin to Remember

These are some of the things that I underlined while reading Eichmann in Jerusalem . The first is from the introduction, written by Amos Elon, and all the rest are quotes from Arendt herself. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste to the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil. A show trial needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defined outline of what was done and how it was done. In the center of a trial can only be the one who did —  in this respect, he is like the hero in the play — and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has...

A few weeks ago my mom called me and asked what I was up to. “At Starbucks reading,” I told her. “Oh,” she said. “What are you reading? Is it for pleasure?” “Yeah, for pleasure,” I said. “ Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” You’re probably thinking what my mom was thinking: “We need to have a talk about what it means to read for pleasure.” This past semester at UGA I was in a political theory class. We studied all the usual suspects — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Marx, and Mill. Our professor told us that if we had had more time, Hannah Arendt would’ve been on the syllabus as well (and, in general, regretted his decision to only include men on the syllabus). We did have an opportunity to attend a screening of and Q&A about the film Hannah Arendt for extra credit. I went not knowing much about Arendt; but who doesn’t love extra credit, especially when all you have to do is show up and watch a movie? In addition to being a his...