The woman who in the village of Byshiv, Ukraine, retrieves the books from the municipal library destroyed by the bombs, puts me in difficulty. It is the photograph that I do not expect, the one that in the sequence that repeats the horror and makes it – terrible to say – monotonous, is a different note. Pending. It is so improper, so strange, so moving that bending over superfluous and abandoned paper objects – against that backdrop of rubble. But she, however, bends down, and studies, and collects. I don’t know if libraries are really granaries, as a great writer said, against a possible winter of the spirit, because the winter of the spirit fears nothing and is hindered by nothing. And yet we are baffled by this movement of delicacy, or simply of attention, with which a woman, in the worst of climates, in the most ungrateful circumstance, rescues something that is not herself or another human being. Overinterpreting, one can think that it is, in spite of everything, just an act of trust in the human. But it is more simply a habit that is perpetuated, a small passion that resists – even in the fined world. Indeed, perhaps it is even a way of resisting – emotionally, intellectually. It is a way of hoping.