Coffee Break
Member
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2022
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Korean
- Home Country
- South Korea
- Current Location
- South Korea
I read this expression, "occupying as it does the contradiction between", but am finding it difficult to understand it. Could you please let me know what it means? Here is the excerpt:
But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.
- Katie Kitamura, Intimacies, Chapter 7
This is a novel published in 2021 in the United States of America. The protagonist is an interpreter working at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Now she is thinking about the unspeakable crimes she learned while working at the Court, and marvels at how the institution dealing with these unspeakable crimes sits in the broad daylight in a normal city.
In this part, I find it difficult to parse this phrase.
Is it that "this word occupies the contradiction", like this world exists inside the contradiction...?
Even more confusing to me is how "as it does" is inserted there.![Dizzy face :dizzy_face: 😵](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png)
But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.
- Katie Kitamura, Intimacies, Chapter 7
This is a novel published in 2021 in the United States of America. The protagonist is an interpreter working at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Now she is thinking about the unspeakable crimes she learned while working at the Court, and marvels at how the institution dealing with these unspeakable crimes sits in the broad daylight in a normal city.
In this part, I find it difficult to parse this phrase.
Is it that "this word occupies the contradiction", like this world exists inside the contradiction...?
Even more confusing to me is how "as it does" is inserted there.
![Dizzy face :dizzy_face: 😵](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png)