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# Have We Learned Anything from the Past Century?
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/dov-talpaz-have-we-learned-anything-from-the-past-century/
- Published: 2018-04-07T14:00:24.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:10:35.000Z
- Description: “If we were to lose the ruins we would be left with nothing.”
- Author: Dov Talpaz
- Tags: Art, Drawing, Weekend, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-18 14:37 (2018)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2018/04/dov-talpaz-he-will-be-the-city-pen-on-paper-6x9-inches-2018.jpg)

Dov Talpaz, “One Will Carry the City” (2018), pen on paper, 5.5 x 8 inches

The world is failing the Syrians. Helping them is not a question of political or military strategy, but of humanity. If we have learned anything from the past century, that should be more then enough of a reason.

*From* “Report from a Besieged City” *by Zbigniew Herbert (Warsaw, 1982):*

> we were left with the place an attachment to the place  
> still we keep ruins of temples phantoms of gardens of houses  
> if we were to lose the ruins we would be left with nothing  
>  
> \[…\]  
>  
> we look at the face of hunger the face of fire the face of death  
> and the worst of them all—the face of treason  
>  
> and only our dreams have not been humiliated

*(translated by Czeslaw Milosz; source:* The New York Review of Books*, August 18, 1983)*