Syria : Roads to Freedom

The view from inside the Syrian crackdown.
by Wendell Steavenson 
August 29, 2011 

I arrived in Damascus on a Friday at the end of July, a few days before the start of Ramadan, and five months into a grimly repetitive series of protests and crackdowns in towns and cities across Syria. When I checked into my hotel, I discovered that I was the only guest. I also found that I could not connect to the Internet. “Friday, Saturday—Internet very bad,” the desk manager explained. I learned later that the government steps up its restriction of Internet service on the Islamic weekend, because that is when most of the protests occur.

I walked through the Old City—the Christian quarter and the Shia quarter, the Sufi mosques and the souks of Sunni merchants, the labyrinthine passages and hidden courtyards. It was quiet without the usual throng of browsing tourists. In cafés, I was often the only customer. The Old City is, in some ways, a microcosm of modern Syria, a secular state that comprises an array of ethnic and religious groups. At the heart of the Old City is the magnificent Umayyad Mosque, a part of which was built originally as a Byzantine church. Sunni worshippers mingle with Shia pilgrims visiting the shrine of the martyr Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, and with Christians visiting the tomb of John the Baptist. 

Syria came under the secular, socialist rule of the Baath Party in 1963. For the past four decades, it has been controlled by the Assad family—first by Hafez al-Assad, who took power in a coup, and, since his death, in 2000, by his son, the current President, Bashar al-Assad. The Assads belong to one of Syria’s most distinctive minority groups, the Alawites, who are followers of a secretive dissident offshoot of Shiism, and historically come from villages in the country’s mountainous west. The Assad regime has kept minorities it favors protected within a majority Sunni population by maintaining a rigidly authoritarian state. Syrians are mindful of sectarian strife in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq—more than a million Iraqi refugees have taken shelter in Syria since 2003—and, for many of them, lack of freedom has been offset by the consolations of stability and security, in a region without much of either. 

In a café a couple of days after I arrived, I saw an old friend, Karim, a prominent civil-rights activist. (I have changed his name.) He came in from the street and said, “I think I was followed.” Then he slumped into a sofa, pressing his fists against his forehead. He held them there for more than a minute without speaking. He had a few more gray hairs than when I had last seen him.

“Do you want to get some lunch?” I asked.

“I have not eaten,” he said, “but I am not hungry.”

For years, Karim has been trying to carve out a space for activism in whatever way he can. I first met him a few years ago, the day after he had been detained by the regime’s security services and interrogated for five hours. He spoke so quietly that I could barely hear him; the puckish smile I later came to know flashed only once toward the end of our meeting. Ever since I’ve known him, he has been under an intermittent travel ban, like nearly all Syrian activists.

We went to a restaurant nearby and ordered soup. It was the day before Ramadan, and there was news that tanks had begun an assault on the city of Hama, which has a history of opposition to the regime. The city had seen violence earlier in the summer, but, after scores of people attending a Friday protest were killed, the security forces had been pulled out. During the following weeks, a million people filled the streets, declaring Hama liberated. The American and French ambassadors visited, and reported that the crowds were a model of peaceful protest. The new crackdown clearly marked a serious escalation by the authorities. Everyone invoked the notorious Hama massacre of 1982, when Hafez al-Assad ordered the suppression of a Muslim Brotherhood uprising; tens of thousands of people were killed, and entire neighborhoods razed. Karim told me that there had been plans to convene a conference of activists from all over Syria the following week. Now it seemed almost impossible. 

When Bashar came to power, eleven years ago, many Syrians hoped that he would usher in a period of reform. He was an accidental leader, having become his father’s heir only after the death of his elder brother, in a car crash. Bashar trained as an ophthalmologist, and spent two years studying in London, where he met his wife, Asma al-Akhras, a British-born woman from a Syrian family. Initially, Bashar hinted at a program of gradual reform, and a so-called Damascus Spring flourished briefly in the salons and living rooms of activists. But a series of high-profile arrests soon snuffed out the movement.

By early this year, when the regimes fell in Tunis and Cairo, a decade of promises to Syrians had come to nothing. In March, a group of teen-agers in the southern city of Deraa were arrested and tortured for producing anti-regime graffiti. Large protests followed. The regime cut off electricity and water and sent in tanks and rooftop snipers. When people in other cities took to the streets in support of the protests, Bashar tried again to present himself as a reformer. He addressed a number of old grievances: he repealed an emergency law, in place since 1962; some Kurds, denied citizenship for decades, were given Syrian national identity cards; a ban forbidding teachers to wear the niqab, a full face covering, was lifted.

In late June, intellectuals and activists had managed to organize a conference in Damascus, hoping to provide a road map for transition. The regime countered with its own Consultation Conference, and later announced that a new law, allowing independent political parties, would be enacted within months. At the same time, it rejected the activists’ demand that security operations against protesters be stopped. State television continued to insist that the protesters were armed gangs, and protests continued to be met with violence. The tally of civilian dead, according to human-rights groups, reached two thousand, and many thousands more were arrested; the Syrian government, meanwhile, says that several hundred military and security personnel have been killed. 

Karim described an impasse. He did not think that protesters would be able to defeat the regime’s security services in a direct confrontation. But the regime was trapped, too. It could not really enact reform, because any crack in the system would bring down the whole edifice. 

“Today, we are stuck in the neck of the bottle,” Karim said. “There’s so much violence, and less and less hope that things can calm down and lead to a peaceful situation.”

In central Damascus, all seemed calm. The traffic flowed and jammed as usual; markets were open; stalls on street corners were selling Ramadan treats—fruit juice and crisp deep-fried pancakes drizzled with grape syrup to break the fast. But in the surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs protesters gathered near mosques after the evening prayers: in conversations in cafés, I heard reports of two killed in Maidan, of five arrested in a café in Jaramana, of checkpoints on the roads around Douma. 

Meanwhile, the Syrian economy was in serious trouble. Roadblocks across the country were impeding commerce. International sanctions had increased since the start of the year, and businessmen complained that they could no longer transfer money in and out of the country or change Syrian pounds into hard currency inside Syria. My hotel told me that I would have to pay in cash, because it could no longer process credit-card payments. In the upscale clothing stores near where Karim and I had had lunch, every window carried a sign advertising half-price sales. 

People avoided Internet cafés, because, I was warned, owners could monitor your activities and read your passwords. Friends described a netherworld of proxies, firewalls, pseudonyms, and multiple e-mail addresses. Skype was safe, but often seemed blocked; Facebook risky and only intermittently accessible. I never managed to connect to Twitter, and people recommended Tor anti-surveillance software and Gmail chat. But a reporter who had been operating in hiding told me that the authorities couldn’t shut down every avenue: “It’s been five months now, and we’re still able to work and get things out.”

In a café, I met two Kurdish students who had been helping to organize protests in Damascus since the beginning. (For their safety, I have changed their names.) Mohammed, a philosophy student, was kind and friendly, but I noticed that as he spoke he wrestled his knuckles together and twisted a piece of foil from a cigarette packet into a tighter and tighter cone. His friend Khalid, who studies literature, told me that he was particularly interested in the moral issues he encountered in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” He also liked Coldplay, and found wisdom in the band’s lyrics. He quoted a line: “Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean I’m lost.” As part of the regime’s recent concessions to Kurds, he had obtained Syrian citizenship. He grinned and showed me his new I.D. card with mock pride. But, he said, “what’s the point of having nationality if tomorrow I can be killed, because I still don’t have any freedom?”

Mohammed and Khalid explained that protests usually occur around mosques because that is the only place where people can gather. (League soccer matches, for example, have been “indefinitely postponed.”) They lamented that Damascus is a city of many squares and roundabouts, with no central square, like Tahrir, in Cairo. Protesters use coded text messages to call people together: “Are you having a party today? Are you guys getting together tonight?” They described the tacit support of onlookers and residents who were too fearful to join in themselves, and Mohammed said, “Most of the demonstrations, there are not more than twenty-five or thirty at the beginning, and then more people come and share with us.”

Khalid looked at Mohammed and laughed. “Many times, Mohammed starts it by himself!” He mimed uneasy crowd members looking at each other, fearful of chanting. “He shouts ‘Hurriya! Hurriya!—Freedom! Freedom!’ and it begins.” Mohammed smiled modestly, as if to say that someone has to do it.

One evening at dusk, as I took a taxi back to my hotel, the streets were deserted. Everyone had gone home for iftar, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast of Ramadan. As I drove through Marjeh Square, with its grand French-colonial façades and large central fountain, I noticed ten or twelve men, wearing tracksuits, T-shirts, and sneakers, loitering around a van. One had a Kalashnikov slung across his back. In a grassy area near the fountain, some venders sat cross-legged, their wares spread on blankets. Protesters told me that these venders had only recently begun appearing and were in fact security thugs, poised to break up any crowd that might form. On another corner of the square, I saw a single soldier in an olive-green uniform dangling a rifle by its trigger guard.

Once I knew what to look for, I realized that almost every square in Damascus was occupied in this manner. I drove around one afternoon with a Christian woman, an activist wearing a bracelet that read, “Proud to Be Syrian.” She pointed out the place where she had tried to go to the funeral of a martyr and had been stopped at a security checkpoint. “And over there is the detention center where they held a friend of mine,” she said, indicating a nondescript cul-de-sac off a tree-lined street. “It’s underground.” We circled Abbaseen Stadium, on the edge of a square where protesters have frequently tried to gather. She lives near the stadium and told me that security thugs often mustered there. The day before, she said, the stadium had been so full of thugs “you couldn’t see the grass.” I peered through the entrances and saw clothes hanging on railings, as if people were camping inside. Three Army trucks were parked outside. Knots of skinny toughs in undershirts stood around. One stood on top of the stadium watching the traffic go by, idly knocking a concrete wall with a long stick.

A few Damascenes still manage to protest in areas that they think may be less secured. The demonstrations are so fleeting that they are nicknamed “flying protests.” Activists have tried to confound the authorities by singing the national anthem or throwing roses into the fountain in Marjeh Square. They have tied messages of defiance to balloons, and tucked them inside packages of dates given out at mosques, and taped them to Ping-Pong balls thrown into the street from high buildings. In one ingenious scheme, they wrote “freedom” on banknotes, but then banks refused to take notes with any markings on them. One day during my visit, dozens of people simply wore white and walked around a block in an upscale neighborhood. Several were arrested.

There are more than a dozen branches of the Syrian security services, and no one really knows who’s in charge. I met a tremulous young man—I’ll call him Wael—who was detained at a protest in Damascus in March by Air Force Security, which has a particularly harsh reputation. He was kept blindfolded, with his head bent between his knees. His interrogators wanted the names of his friends involved in the current protests. When he stonewalled, with a recitation of innocuous facts, they took him into a basement room and stripped him naked. “I was thinking of my father at that time and how I was supposed to be strong and to make him proud of me and to not scream,” Wael told me. His father was a Communist and had been imprisoned in the nineteen-sixties. When Wael continued to stonewall, his interrogators stretched him out on a metal table with his hands cuffed behind his back, so that they were squashed painfully under his weight. They told him to keep his legs elevated. It was impossible to hold them up for more than ten minutes or so, and when he lowered them they administered electric shocks to his feet. “I tried to imagine that their faces were sad when they were doing this,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine any human would do this to another.” At the same time, he said, he bore them no grudge: they were simple men and only following orders.

“I think I passed out for one or two days at some point,” he went on. “I dreamed crazy things. I dreamed the regime had fallen—that the President had come to the prison and tried to sort things out, and I tripped him up as he passed in the corridor.” Wael was held for six days in the corridor of an Air Force Security interrogation center and another six days in solitary confinement. Then he was transferred to a cell, five metres square, which held seven other prisoners. “This was the most pleasant time,” he said, as he recalled the solace of human contact. “It was a tiny place, and we slept like sardines.”

Eventually, he was released. The security officer who drove him home was friendly, and said, “Sorry if we were bad to you.”

“I told him to drop me two hundred metres from my house,” Wael told me. “I didn’t want them to see where I lived. Of course, this was stupid, because they already know. Maybe I just wanted to compose myself before I saw my mother.” He added, “Worrying about her was my biggest pain, my biggest fear, when I was in prison, until I learned not to think about her.”

Day by day, the news from Hama became more dreadful, and the mood in Damascus grew increasingly oppressive. I was introduced to a man who had escaped from Hama, a few days after the crackdown began, by driving through a checkpoint that was briefly unguarded. During our talk, he tried to smile politely, but he was clearly still very shaken. I offered him a glass of water, but he said that he was fasting.

Many of Hama’s old people, women, and children had already been sent away to villages nearby, he said. The day before Ramadan, he was awakened between four and five in the morning by the noise of tanks. The Army had surrounded the city and was starting to occupy police stations and squares. From his apartment he could see the tanks attacking his neighborhood. “They tried to get in several times, but the people prevented them.”

“How?” I asked

“They had gas cannisters,” he explained, the kind used for cooking stoves. The protesters rolled them over oil-soaked roads so that they landed under the tanks, and then lit the oil on the ground, like a fuse, to make the cannisters explode like bombs. They also threw Molotov cocktails and burned barricades. The Army, he said with pride, had to retreat three or four times in the first two days. 

Throughout our conversation, the man seemed to be quietly stunned. Twice, I put my hand on his arm and told him that he could stop if he wanted. He shook his head. Two of his friends had been killed; his parents were still in the city. Cell-phone networks had been turned off for days, and only a very few reports were getting out, thanks to a handful of activists with satellite phones. 

He watched events unfold from his window, unable to go onto his balcony because of snipers. During a lull in the shooting, he went to a neighborhood known as the Old Aleppo Road, where he saw barricades made of uprooted bus-stop signs, lampposts, burned cars, and even fire trucks and a huge excavator. He said that one legacy of the 1982 massacre was that not many people in Hama owned guns. A few people had pistols or guns for hunting, but, in the absence of serious munitions, he said, “they have taken the example from Misrata against Qaddafi, when they were not heavily armed. They created a shield of neighborhoods.” He explained that the poorer neighborhoods were the most activist and also the hardest for tanks to penetrate, because of the narrow lanes. “The Army is still not in these neighborhoods,” he told me with satisfaction, but a few days later state television showed video footage of empty, ruined streets, suggesting that the city had finally been subjugated.

Late one evening, I went with a friend to see a well-known artist named Youssef Abdelke. We met him in his studio, and he ushered us into a tranquil, whitewashed courtyard paved with geometric tiles. He keeps pigeons, and they flapped and cooed, and little bells on their feet rang as they walked. There was an orange tree in one corner of the courtyard and a bowl of apricots on a table. On another table was a new work, a grotesque plaster bust of Bashar with a sharp curved nose and small, recessed eyes, cartoonishly close together and daubed with ochre. In the studio, Abdelke showed me another recent work—a large charcoal drawing of a man lying straight and stiff on the ground with his eyes open and a bullet hole in his forehead leaking blood. He said that this was a tribute to the martyrs of Deraa.

Abdelke’s prominence made him less afraid than most people I talked to. He said that I could quote him openly and describe his art work. He is a veteran of the opposition to Bashar’s father, and was arrested as a member of a left-wing opposition party in the nineteen-eighties. He subsequently spent twenty-four years in exile in Paris, after the Syrian government refused to renew his passport, and returned to live in Damascus only in 2008.

He had been at a protest in the neighborhood of Maidan earlier in the day.

“How did you get in?” my friend asked. The roads around the Hassan Mosque, where most of the Maidan protests have taken place, are often blocked. 

“A friend told me about a back alleyway,” he said, and explained that the protests have recently moved to an adjacent area of mazelike lanes. He had gone there with a female friend, and he recounted an afternoon of confrontation and tear gas amid a crowd of about two thousand protesters. He said, “She kept saying on the way, ‘I am afraid, I am afraid.’ Then when she got there she became like a tiger!’ ” The protesters split into groups and were able to march along the lanes protesting for a full half hour—“It was almost a dream come true!”

Abdelke also discussed the particular nature of Damascus within the political landscape of the country. A significant number of the city’s residents were still effectively pro-regime—“either because they have their benefit from it or because they are afraid.” He said, “For forty years, the regime has manipulated this concept of fear in the minorities. Its main proposition is based on: ‘It’s either us or chaos. If we go down, there will be extremists. Islamists will come, and there will be massacres of minorities.’ ”

I met several Syrians like those he described—people who deplored the violence of the regime but still hoped that, given more time, Bashar could institute meaningful reform. Some were from Syria’s minority groups and were worried about the examples of sectarian violence in Lebanon and Iraq; others, having benefitted from a spate of economic growth in recent years and conscious of Syria’s history of stability, worried about the uncertain political melee that has followed the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. 

A Sunni I talked to who works in the medical industry pointed out that, when he first started working in a state hospital, in the nineteen-eighties, his salary was fifty dollars a month. Recent economic liberalization enabled him to make a few thousand a month now in the private sector. “These kinds of opportunities were not present in Syria ten years ago,” he said. He thought Bashar was “trying to change, but he deserves a little time.” The opposition, he felt, was not strategic or organized. “I do not see the future from the protesters’ side,” he said. “They haven’t made any plan. Why not give the government some time to make a better decision? Why rush?” 

In the Christian quarter of the Old City, shopkeepers displayed posters of Bashar in two favorite guises: the military strongman in combat fatigues, and the relaxed father, playing with his children and smiling at his wife. A Catholic priest told me that most of his congregation was pro-regime, which he attributed to the regime’s effectiveness in “trying to manipulate us as a minority.” The Christian activist who drove me around the city told me that opinion in her family was divided and fluctuating. “My parents change their minds every day,” she said. “They are really afraid of the Muslims. Yesterday, my mother said to me, ‘What if you have to cover yourself?’ I told her, ‘If I have to wear the hijab to get rid of this regime, I will!’ ”

The Alawites, who are perceived to have benefitted most from the Assad regime, and who make up much of the security services, feel that they have the most to fear. I talked to one young Alawite protester who described a recent visit to her family in Tartus, a port city on the edge of the mountainous Alawite region. She had always believed that her family was open to other sects, and she was shocked by their behavior. They told her, “If you leave the pen, you should be killed.” Her brother threw a glass at her, which shattered and cut her feet. She knew that he was among those who went out on Fridays and beat people gathering at mosques.

“I tried to talk to him in a logical way,” she recalled. “But he had no answers and became angrier and angrier with me. I started to tell him that the protests were about reform, that it was people who were asking for their rights—the families of those hurt and killed asking for their justice. I said, ‘How can you live in a country where you cannot express yourself?’ He replied, ‘I am ready to live humiliated so long as the President and the government are from my sect.’ ” She said that he believed that the protests were orchestrated by the Sunni majority and that, if the regime fell, all the Alawites would be killed.

Youssef Abdelke’s long experience of the regime gave him some perspective on such fears. He pointed out that Sunnis ruled Syria from 1946, when the country became independent, until the Baath Party coup, in 1963. During that time, he said, “there were no massacres or extremism or injustices against the rights of minorities.” He was hopeful that the ideal of democratic freedom could make common cause among different sects and religions. He had gone to Hama during the huge demonstrations earlier in the summer, and he mentioned, as an example, an Alawite he had seen addressing a predominantly Sunni crowd. The man had been warmly applauded.

In Abdelke’s quiet courtyard, my friend’s cell phone trilled. She read a message from the state news agency announcing that terrorists had committed atrocities in Deir ez-Zour, a restive city in the east, and that images were going to be broadcast shortly. She looked up.

“They are going to invade Deir ez-Zour tomorrow,” she said. “That’s what they did in Hama. They showed footage of people supposedly being shot by terrorist groups, and then they went in.” She was right. Tanks rolled into Deir ez-Zour the next day. 

Everyone I talked to agreed that the Syrian security forces could not be defeated, but violent repression clearly had not deterred the protesters. I asked various people: What is the regime thinking? Several tried, flailing a little, to explain the current predicament by first defining the regime.

Louay Hussein, a prominent writer and activist, told me, “For the last eleven years, we have had this question: Who is ruling the country, and how are they ruling it?” During the eighties, Hussein was imprisoned for seven years, and he is one of the signatories of the Damascus Declaration of 2005, in which two hundred and seventy-four people from various religious and political backgrounds called on the regime to begin a period of peaceful, gradual reform. Like Abdelke, he waved away my concerns about using his name. He had been arrested in his home in the first days of protests, and the authorities knew very well who he was and what he thought of them. 

“Whenever someone asks me, ‘What do you think the regime is thinking?,’ I say, ‘They don’t think,’ ” he said. “They don’t have a mind. They do something and then, depending on the result, they decide whether to continue or to withdraw. They are reacting, they don’t have a strategy.” 

Western diplomats told me something similar. They had heard that reformist figures in the regime were no longer even getting in to see the President; but nobody in Syria seemed to have any solid idea who was in control. “We can’t really talk about a government,” one diplomat said bluntly. “There is no Syrian government. There is a loose confederation of mini-kingdoms.” Furthermore, power is still overwhelmingly in the hands of one family. Bashar’s brother Maher is the head of the Army’s élite Republican Guard; his cousin Rami Makhlouf owns the largest mobile-phone network and myriad other businesses, which reach into almost every sector of the economy. “They think they will own Syria forever,” one activist said of the Assads, “and whatever they grant the people of Syria comes as a gift from the Assad family.” I asked three Western diplomats, separately, whether the best analogy might be the Sopranos sitting around their dining-room table. Each of them replied, “Exactly!”

Louay Hussein told me, “Of course, all Syrians are afraid, because they don’t have answers—they are afraid of the unknown. We don’t know what the regime will do or if it will fall or when it will be over. All Syrians, including the protesters, are afraid of tomorrow.” Some of the people I talked to who had been arrested or beaten were now afraid to protest. Others remained defiant. I talked to a doctor and a nurse belonging to an underground network of medical professionals who treat injured protesters unable to risk going to hospitals. The nurse told me about a twenty-one-year-old with two bullets in his shoulder whom she had tended to a few weeks before. “Luckily, his lung was not punctured,” she said. In the surrounding streets, she could hear security forces going from house to house looking for people. She and a doctor had removed the two bullets from the man before they realized that he also had a bullet in his leg from a month earlier. As the nurse bandaged his shoulder, the protester asked, “Can I go next Friday? Can I still protest?”

Many Syrians who had been wavering were dismayed at the regime’s brutal strategies. Adonis, the country’s most famous poet and an Alawite, who had previously been conciliatory toward the regime, urged Bashar to step down. One lunchtime, I drank whiskey with an acquaintance who had hoped that Bashar would be given the opportunity to reform. Now he saw friends on Facebook shifting their positions. “The ones in the middle who were supporting Bashar but not the regime, and asking for security to pull out, are now completely against him,” he said. “I did not expect they would shift their opinions like this. Alawites, Christians, Sunnis—all of them.” It was announced that the Defense Minister had been replaced. No one had any idea what fractures in the regime this change signified. “We are waiting,” Louay Hussein told me. “Everything is in the regime’s hands now.”

International pressure has continued to escalate. First Qatar, then Italy, then Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain recalled their ambassadors. Talks at the U.N. Security Council failed to produce a resolution about the regime’s atrocities, owing to objections from the Russians and the Chinese, and the council offered instead only a weak statement of condemnation. Turkey, which previously enjoyed a close relationship with the Assad regime, has become increasingly critical of its actions against the population. The Turkish Foreign Minister went to Damascus in what was seen as a final warning to try and persuade Bashar to halt the violence. Finally, last week, President Obama announced categorically, “The time has come for President Assad to step aside,” and the leaders of Britain, Germany, and France issued a joint statement along the same lines. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for countries to stop buying Syrian oil and gas, a move that could put serious pressure on the regime’s finances. 

Syrian activists took heart in the increasing clamor of both Arab and Western condemnation, but also worried about the possibility of direct foreign intervention. The day before Obama made his statement, Bashar told the U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, that the military and police operations had come to an end. Nobody believed him, and activists reported that protesters were still being shot in demonstrations across the country. Whether all the diplomacy will have any effect on a regime that is already isolated and clearly determined to stamp out dissent remains to be seen.

As I prepared to leave Syria, London erupted in riots, and Syrian state TV, eager to show that other countries had problems, gleefully carried footage of burning buildings and gangs of looters. Activist friends of mine laughed at the irony of the British government suddenly considering measures that were all too familiar to them, such as using rubber bullets and shutting down social networks.

I met Karim again for lunch, and we discussed the mental corrosion that everyone was feeling—the inability to concentrate, to remember the past, or to think about the future. Louay Hussein had told me that he thought only of the day-to-day: “So they did not arrest me yesterday—it doesn’t mean they won’t arrest me today.” Karim leaned across the table so that he would be out of earshot of the other diners. He said that he was more afraid than he had ever been. But he’d also had a new realization.

“It’s amazing, freedom,” he said. “It’s like a different kind of awareness. When you start seeing it in people’s hearts, it looks like the new grass of spring, the very tips of the new spring grass—so fresh and tender and intimate and sad.”

“Why is it sad?” I asked.

He looked down. “Because it experienced so much death before it could start to grow.” 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_steavenson?currentPage=all