Timothy Snyder’s liberty bell
“At every meal that we eat together, freedom is invited to sit down. The chair remains vacant, but the place is set,” wrote the French poet and Resistance fighter René Char. Char hadn’t wanted to publish his work during the war. It was a time to stay low. But he had carried on writing throughout, pressed up tight against terror and death. As the Fourth Republic took shape, he wanted to put his experiences on the record and so published Hypnos, from which this aphorism is taken, in 1946.
