The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, November 4, 2025

Diary: One of those memories of my early childhood, magical but for the occasional interruptions of Jesuits’ violence on my body and war’s violence on my country, is of Beirut under curfew. Couvre-feux, as we’d say and hear it said in French, especially by friends or neighbors who just loved to say the word, the way neighbors or lesser beings in Palm Coast love to say “deploy” or “boots on the ground”–to feel that thrill of consequence roll off their tongue as if they were reptiles gauging their tactical surroundings with theirs. They like to dress up their everyday in verbal camouflage and pretend for a second that their W Section is Parris Island. To my young ears couvre-feux sounded awesome and frightening, but also seductive. Its English equivalent loses the lugubriousness of the French, which literally translated is cover-fire, but more accurately understood as fire-suppressing, which makes more sense: there were firefights, there were bombings, then came the couvre-feux, which is why I always find it hilarious when local police in the United States use the word after hurricanes or to keep teens from being teens, as if the situations could ever be comparable. Anyway: I did not really understand the word back then. I thought it had something to do with fires. But I could look out the window of our fourth-floor apartment–palatial apartment, that was: seven bedrooms in the old Ottoman style (CNN ran a picture of my apartment building in a 2017 story), with a fabulous view over Damascus Road, St. Paul’s very own, and in the distance, the mountains–and see a city empty but for the rumble of army trucks. That was in 1973, when there was a Lebanese Army, when, after the Palestine Liberation Organization’s well-deserved Black September in Jordan (it had tried to take over that country, King Hussein massacred half of it and threw out the other half) the PLO got unruly in Lebanon and the Lebanese government whipped its ass for the last time, before the 1975 break-out of the 15-year civil war. During those days of war in 1973 we could see the Lebanese air force’s two or three ancient Hawker Hunters drop their bombs and rise high over the horizon in the distance to the east (they were bombing Palestinian camps). My brother and I loved watching army trucks pass by, sometimes with a few armored vehicles, going to or back from the front. We had soldiers stationed at the intersection below the apartment building, and I remember the building’s un-Malamud-like tenants taking turns to bring them coffee and pastries as we huddled at times in the first-floor apartment of the neighbors, when it was too dangerous to stay on our fourth floor. In that war, our apartment building was unscathed. In the next, I would be asleep in a back bedroom on the fourth floor when rockets struck on the third floor. What I remember most of those curfews was the city’s silence. The weigh of that silence: unearthly, unlike anything I had ever not heard before. The absence of those sounds Beirut always made was frightening. I would re-discover that urban silence–the silence of an immense metropolis suddenly all hushed–in New York City snowstorms, when the contrast between normalcy and whiteness would be the same as that between Beirut’s horn symphonies and deadness but for the echoing dirty jokes of soldiers in the street, which I did not understand (my Arabic was piss poor). Silence was scarier than gunfire. When guns fired and bombs dropped, you knew what was happening. You could hear them, you could tell yourself: not hitting us. But in the silence, the eeriness is the enemy. It never lets up. You never know what’s next. You fear that world-ending blast, like the one that threw us off our couches and shattered all the glass panes facing Damascus Road that night at the beginning of the war as we were getting ready to watch the last episode of The Odyssey on TV (the Dino de Laurentiis production). Someone had set off a bunch of dynamite sticks in the median on the street below. There was a curfew then, too. So curfew to me meant dread. It meant imminence. Imminence of what? The imminence was the dread. I’m recalling this story because today, a day before this latest or miserable elections, this is how the silence of my P Section feels like despite the familiar hum of I-95 in the background. It isn’t the usual silence of late-summer-early-fall heaviness, or the usual silence of suburban torpor. It is the silence of curfew., of imminence. And to be clear about the reference above to the violence of Jesuits on my body: that violence was generally directed at my ears, as I very much hope no other orifice was violated, though I cannot be any less sure than Voltaire, who once told Alexander Pope, or so Pope related: “when I was a child these damned Jesuits sodomized me to such a point that I’ll never get over it.” I hope we don’t wake up tomorrow or the day after feeling the same way, though my hope by now is all pro forma. We are past the imminence already. Sodom is here. 

—P.T.

 

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But not only did I have no experience of independent civilian life, having gone straight from school into the Army: I was still mentally and nervously organized for War. Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed. When strong enough to climb the hill behind Harlech and revisit my favourite country, I could not help seeing it as a prospective battlefield. I would find myself working out tactical problems, planning how best to hold the Upper Artro valley against an attack from the sea, or where to place a Lewis gun if I were trying to rush Dolwreiddiog Farm from the brow of the hill, and what would be the best cover for my rifle-grenade section. I still had the Army habit of commandeering anything of uncertain ownership that I found lying about; also a difficulty in telling the truth—it was always easier for me now, when charged with any fault, to lie my way out in Army style. I applied the technique of taking over billets or trenches to a review of my present situation. Food, water supply, possible dangers, communication, sanitation, protection against the weather, fuel and light—I ticked off each item as satisfactory.

–From Robert Graves’s Goodbye To All That (1929).
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