An Unkillable Streak of the Utopian

Sophie Lewis considers Keiran Goddard’s “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.”

By Sophie LewisJune 9, 2025

• Fiction

“WE ALL WATCHED that tower block on the news,” says one of the characters in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, a 2024 novel by Keiran Goddard that the BBC is currently adapting into a movie. For that moment in June 2017, captured sharply at the end of the novel’s first act, it felt like every working-class person in Britain was watching—“people like us,” as Goddard’s character Rian puts it, “burning to death in their sleep or throwing babies out of windows hoping something would break the fall.” My household had watched too, on a phone in our own death trap of a flat in Manchester. It was simultaneously unbearable and consciousness-raising. As Rian continues: “How could you see that and still pretend that anyone gave a fuck about us?”

Rian, of course, means Grenfell Tower, the council estate—chronically underserved and racialized as a so-called “sink estate” in gentrified West London—that erupted in flames that eluded firefighters for two days. The issue was the flammability of the cladding, recently installed for cosmetic reasons around the exterior of the building—which had, previously, been considered an eyesore by wealthier locals.

“[Y]es it made the tower look pretty,” spat Ben Okri in his poem for the 72 casualties, published by the Financial Times a week after the fire. Like others, Okri was decrying the failure to fire-test the cladding on a high-rise (residents recall that it “went up like a matchstick”), as well as the dearth of sprinklers, fire escapes, and functioning alarms throughout the 24 stories of council-owned dwellings. At Grenfell, violent prettiness had merged seamlessly with a more incremental, infrastructural type of killing conducted firmly out of sight: what the theorist Rob Nixon—in his landmark 2011 book on the “environmentalism of the poor”—calls “slow violence.” While the report summarizing an official six-year inquiry found “no evidence” that “racial or social prejudice” played any part in the fire—finding only dishonesty, incompetence, and corruption—veritable mountains of scholarship have exposed the role of, to quote prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” (That poor whites also lived in Grenfell didn’t stop its overall nonwhiteness from functioning within London’s socioeconomic calculus as a mark of disposability.)

A great deal of destruction is concealed via the prevailing definition of violence as visible, personal, or spectacular. Goddard’s writing excels at laying bare this temporal, spatial, and epistemic mendacity, along with the requirement that those brutalized behave like “respectable” victims. His first novel, Hourglass (2022), attended closely to the invisibility of structural violence. Hourglass is not, ostensibly, about society-wide events (it is the story of the beginning, middle, and, above all, end of a love affair, told from the shattered lover’s perspective); however, by showing class to be a constant presence in the relationship, Goddard applies pressure to the assumption that there is nothing scalable or structural about a breakup. He is curious about the abject, riotous, sometimes ignoble ways that abstract domination makes people act, at the scale both of the ultrapersonal and of mass politics. From self-inflicted toenail loss and alcohol-fueled psychoses to swallowed hairballs and delusions of being God, Goddard’s earlier chronicle of becoming human is full of the insanity that derives from the fact that “almost everything is class-coded.” At one point, the nameless narrator shows a “kid” a photo of “the last time a guillotine was used in France”—which is to say, “a picture of somebody without their head”—only to get banned from the local swimming pool.

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Even after I moved to the United States in that summer of 2017, I continued to notice that, with respect to Grenfell, the politics of progressive mourning diverged sharply around questions of innocence (notwithstanding the widespread academic agreement that slow violence and “social murder” had transpired). Some of us were pointing to the victims’ prior class consciousness—the continuity and nonexceptionality of their rage—while others sentimentally emphasized their supposed helplessness. Our side undertook a radical push to consequentialize the crimes of the ruling class, an attempt to emphasize that those responsible for the tragedy have names and addresses, as the old activist line goes. Instantly, there was a reassertion of the law that dictates whose transgressions are prosecutable: a man who lived next door to the tower, Omega Mwaikambo, was jailed for insensitively taking and uploading photos, in his rage at his neighbors’ treatment, after one of their corpses had been dumped outside his door.

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is set in an Irish community on the Birmingham council estate of Shard End. Like Hourglass, Goddard’s latest novel teems with noninnocence and Lebenslust. Here, however, the author turns away from the form of the romantic dyad in order to grapple with the transindividuality of friendship: the ways that collective life itself gives the lie to the whole concept of “the individual.” Still, the prose poetry is largely the same, with its precise rhythms, bird images, esoteric Catholicism, and plentiful jokes. It is, furthermore, easy to hear a call-and-response, via small details, between the two books—especially on the subjects of alienated labor, poshness, and food. In the earlier novel, for instance, mangoes are an enduring object of hatred because the narrator had a traumatizing childhood job selling that particular fruit for six pounds a box. In the later book, an artichoke is hated at first as something “only rich idiots eat,” until it is explained, by Rian’s friend Shiv (as in Siobhan), that artichokes are “plants with flesh,” “flowers with claws”—which is to say: creatures that taste good, and fight back.

I See Buildings follows Rian and his four childhood best friends Oli, Patrick, Conor, and Shiv, proletarians who think often about tearing buildings down, blowing them up, or pulling them off the horizon “like a leech and let[ting] the blood run.” Actually, Rian is an ex-proletarian, because he played online poker and then the stock market, and got lucky—very, very lucky. Even so, his mind remains, for the most part, joined with the hive. There’s a reciprocity, a logical vengefulness, to the Shard End crew’s shared psychic grammar of world-destruction, because vanishing acts have constantly been visited on their neighborhood from above. Per Conor: “We used to all go and watch the demolitions when we were kids; they were the most exciting things we’d ever seen, it felt like watching a magic trick on a massive scale.”

The novel consists entirely of interior monologues. Yet, though it alternates between the five friends’ perspectives, it never varies its diction, a stylistic choice that underlines the sense that these aren’t fully separable entities. Never talking to each other in explicit, real-time dialogue but rather reflecting on shared events and conversations singularly like facets of a prism, their internal voices narrate the drama that arises from their overlapping entanglements on and around a high-rise residential construction site—a project that Conor is managing, Oli is laboring on and carrying bricks for, and Rian’s accidental wealth is financing. “[T]he government won’t build […] either we do it ourselves or it just doesn’t get done”—that’s the sticky reality. It’s our very own freedom-craving gang who is starting to make a new neo-Grenfellesque edifice, presumably only a few years after the tragedy (we’re never told the exact date). These are flats that will, Conor assumes, “go to shit within a decade, cheap materials, unsafe and untested, filling the sky for a while and then taking their turn to crumble.” So, what the fuck are they doing?

“The drawing has taken a wrong turn,” Rian muses, staring at the worksite at its halfway point, imagining it as an Etch A Sketch. “[L]et’s rub it out and start again.” It almost feels too on the nose that the landscape Goddard’s novel dreams of rendering more livable is called, in real life (as the author’s acknowledgments make clear), “Shard End,” like the fractured glass at a bus stop—or, for that matter, the gorgeous bottom of a kaleidoscope.

Meditating on images of shards, I suddenly recalled how, in Hourglass, the “you” whom Goddard is addressing throughout (a person I thought of as “The Beloved”) imparted a trick that suddenly made the awkward bodily self-consciousness of being on a dance floor much less uncomfortable for the narrator: just imagine, she said, that you are in the middle of a revolutionary insurgency, “spinning about and throwing bricks at buildings”! Riffing on Emma Goldman, the narrator subsequently makes a quip about not wanting a revolution that doesn’t have dancing in it—dancing “that is disguised as throwing bricks but is actually just dancing.” (The technique evidently had its benefits since, the narrator explains, “I still think about broken glass whenever I dance.”) This same imagined connection between shards and the fall of capitalism hints at something world-historical—something more than leisure—latently at stake during the scenes in I See Buildings that feature Rian, Patrick, Shiv, Conor, and Oli out dancing together.

Generally, the friends’ lives afford depressingly few opportunities for rehearsing insurrection. Patrick works himself thin. Oli rarely leaves his sofa, escaping the council estate via a method different from Rian’s exit to London—namely, heroin, which is one way to exert some measure of control over “how fast the time goes, how fast the hours are swallowed up.” Conor, for his part, batters his girlfriend Sophie; later on, he decides to try to break the generational cycle whereby fungible bodies are “swap[ped] in when the older ones are used up” by seeking recourse in suicide. Shiv fails dismally to support Sophie, never (despite an intimate understanding of the situation) offering to help her escape Conor’s abuse, imagining somehow that the ethical thing to do is “pretend everything is O.K.” and attempt to prevent the dissolution of the couple-form for the sake of Sophie and Conor’s newborn baby, Sean.

To be sure, there is little in this web of everyday communal life that can be plausibly teased and extrapolated as transformational, as principled resistance. When Shiv wonders if she “could have done more” in relation to Conor and Sophie—if she “should have spoken up earlier”—the answer is, frankly, yes. Patrick calls Shiv “a realist, willing to play in the mud and rot of life, to accept that things aren’t always perfect and to forgive and muddle through”; he even counterposes this ethos self-deprecatingly to his own “insulated and superior” leftist politics (“my ideals, my theory”).

Whatever is true of Patrick’s putative unrealism, though, muddling through—for the most part, together—is evidently a key reason why this hell-world, with its Grenfells and its genocides, persists. During countless nights of drinking, and especially at Conor’s funeral, the friends strive to carry “the whole mess of a person, all the broken bits of them, even the bits that cut your hands, the bits you’d rather throw away.” Goddard shows us this for what it unquestionably is: a vital commitment to nondisposability. At the same time, he seems to insist on there being a line beyond which “forgiving” the bits of people that draw blood isn’t really love at all but is, in fact, cowardice. It is because all the “bits” of Conor were tolerated—not carried bravely enough, one might say—that Sophie drops through the web. She survived, but did not attend the funeral. The group’s collective betrayal of this woman, who flees Shard End with her baby, is one shameful and unassimilable cost incurred by the friends’ failure to act (and, in all likelihood, is not the only one).

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Love is all too often the reason we give when we don’t act to stop bad things, big or small. Nonetheless, as we know, the global precariat sometimes does take the risk of combating violence, slow or fast, through the counterviolences of disruption and discord without knowing what is on the other side. In every radical tradition I know of, this, too, is theorized as love. While love often gets us into the shit and keeps us there, it’s also what gets us out. Here, no question, is some cause for hope.

I take the persistence of collective love in the face of slow violence to be central to Nixon’s analysis: that capital’s success in quieting or annihilating people cannot ever be assumed in advance. Often, we do allow our own annihilation and even normalize or assist it in its progress, recruiting or sacrificing other victims to boot. Whether we are actively fighting back or not, it should go without saying, people who are, in Nixon’s words, “remaindered” by this world—those on whom “neoliberalism’s inequities bear down most heavily”—“remain animate and often resistant in unexpected ways” despite their “aggregated dehumanization.” In one of his memorial poem’s fatalistic flourishes, Okri suggests that the mass-murder event known as Grenfell was completed at a prior date: “They did not die when they died,” he wrote; “their deaths happened long / Before.” Did they really happen long before, though? It seems to me that Goddard has no truck with such fatalism, even as he traces the violence of class from its point of eruption back through miles of rhizomatic, intergenerational time. Indeed, as Nixon observes, it is often from such violence that grassroots movements and the poor “have drawn nourishment.”

The novel’s social analysis isn’t applied from on high by Goddard; it comes from inside the minds of his characters. The theoretical lens, to be sure, tends to come specifically from one of them: Patrick, the one member of the friend group who went to university. When poor people “curse the future” (as Shiv puts it), and rich people hoard it, “Patrick would say they were reproducing their class composition or something.” Rian similarly grumbles that Patrick is always spouting “boring shit” about “the climate crisis or the trade deficit or how technically there is no such thing as a natural disaster.” Were the man only 10 years younger, higher education might have served as the vector for his propulsion into the middle class and desertion of his kin. But British academia has lately been creating millions of “graduates without a future”; as The Guardian reports, a university degree “is no longer a guaranteed ticket to social mobility and a better life” (if it ever was).

Instead, Patrick works where he was born, in the gig economy, as a courier for a food-delivery app. Every day, he breaks his body on an algorithm-governed bicycle for pennies, while Rian, stupidly, sends him expensive gifts from all over the world: whiskey, aftershave, and shoes Patrick can’t wear without looking ridiculous on the estate. Patrick’s greatest joys come not from these ill-chosen gifts but from his togetherness with Shiv and their two little girls, Molly and Freya—a togetherness that readily includes Rian, whenever Rian isn’t staying away from Shard End out of shame. “Money doesn’t buy you happiness,” Rian has discovered. “But,” he goes on, in one of the book’s many Hourglass-esque nods to the ubiquity of class codes, “it does buy you pretty much unlimited access to ice”—i.e., to the means of regulating temperature on a burning planet. “I fucking love ice,” Rian repeats whenever he is drunk, like a sweaty, chremamorphized version of fossil capital itself. “Get rich, eat ice,” he tells himself. “I honestly think ice might be my favourite food.” You can almost sense the glacial inflection starting—slowly, yet no less violently—to stain his syllables.

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I See Buildings is at its most lacerating when detailing the collapse of Rian’s doomed relationship with a wealthy Londoner named Emma, and when parsing the pain of Rian and Patrick’s newly class-divided friendship as it slowly fractures (there is an excruciating night, for instance, when Shard End comes to London to meet Emma, and Emma acts “as though she had been invaded somehow. As if they were interlopers crossing the border and bringing dirt and disease with them”). Yet it also details the possibilities of such a relationship, albeit even more slowly, as it resurrects around their love of the same woman: Shiv.

Rian slept with Shiv once, long ago. Now, Patrick is the one who lives with her, along with Molly and Freya. Patrick’s income supports them all, since the equation that would satisfactorily balance any of Shiv’s potential earnings against the cost of childcare doesn’t realistically exist. It is hard for the idea not to strike, reading about Molly and Freya’s adoration of Rian, that Rian’s presence (and, frankly, money) could change much in this household for the better—if only his assistance could somehow be cut loose from the patriarchal sexual contract according to which any failure to single-handedly “provide” would signify a deep humiliation for Patrick. Goddard inserts just the faintest whisper, here, of a conceivable nonmonogamous or three-way parenting option (Patrick’s sexual values are explicitly nonpossessive). Forming a household based not on the lie of the “individual” whose sexuality and labor can be exclusively owned, but instead on free bonds of affinity, hovers as a possibility limned, in a sense, by its very absence. Something comparable occurs in Hourglass, at the end of a rebound relationship briefly recounted—“I don’t mind,” the narrator says, “that she has slept with someone else because that doesn’t really matter. But she insists that it matters and then insists on leaving.” If love, as he suggested shortly before this, essentially amounts to “wanting someone to have the biggest, most free life,” must there inevitably be “a silent parenthesis attached that says something like … but only if it includes me”? Or is there another way?

Patrick used to be “on fire with the world” (“Surely we all knew the world was shit and that it was only us who could change it?”). Nowadays, exhaustion has dimmed his flame: almost anything would be better than endlessly pedaling through Birmingham in that uniform, ferrying “a cheap, greasy burger that has basically fallen apart by the time I hand it over to the grateful, tired-looking bastard who ordered it.” One man, not so grateful, spits at him from a balcony. Many people, averting their gaze, don’t tip him at all, even when it is raining. “Be your own boss, they say,” scoffs Patrick’s internal monologue. “I mean, come on, fucking hell.” A gigging rider obviously isn’t his own boss in any meaningful sense, but—twist!—nor does he have “a boss to get angry at.” There’s no villainous face to punch, only the ineluctable, voluntarily chosen capitalist violence of “the green dot on the map,” the app, the timer in the corner of his phone. Caught in this vise, Patrick starts to hate the food itself. He even hallucinates that it is disciplining him: “I’m a horse and the box of chicken nuggets in my bag is my master. A master who might reach over and whip me, just for a bit of fun, just to break up his day.”

While playing charmingly with Marx’s famously gruesome ideas about the animation and liveliness of the commodity, Goddard doesn’t divulge strategies for overthrowing the gig economy—or, for that matter, real estate, as if these could be isolated from other circuits of accumulation. After all, as he has stated elsewhere, it is “both impossible and pointless to try to disentangle our relationship to work from our wider existence as social, erotic and political subjects. For better or worse,” he continues, “it is hard to illuminate the true texture of a life without also accounting for the type of work we do, and under what conditions of duress of freedom we undertake it.” His fictional voice in Hourglass goes even harder on this point: “[A]ll wage labour is coercive. […] In my view even the people who are lucky enough to choose the particular way in which they are coerced by work are still being coerced.”

One truth too many leftists struggle to appreciate is that our “work society” brutalizes the waged and the unwaged alike—both Patrick and Shiv, both “dependents” and providers, both the contractor and the disability or unemployment claimant. In that sense, Goddard’s care vis-à-vis the labors of life-making in each of his novels (and everything that coerces and steals them) reads as especially heartening. In Hourglass, our lovelorn narrator stumbles his way toward a kind of anti-work, empathetic understanding of his often hospitalized, sometimes brutal, always conspiracist mom’s loneliness. “It took me twenty years to realise,” he relates, that she had only taken a bite out of his birthday burger from McDonald’s—“the best thing [he] had ever tasted”—because “she was hungry too.” Another time, while eating a bacon sandwich cut into quarters, he says, “I had saved the biggest quarter, the quarter that seemed like it had the most bacon on it, until last. But just before I ate it, my mom reached over my shoulder, grabbed it off the plate and shoved it in her mouth.” She did this, allegedly, to impart a lesson about consuming the best things first, since otherwise, “some cunt like me will come and take them.” In this way, behind the scenes of Goddard’s tale of love’s loss, we are constantly unspooling the legacy of another woman’s poverty. (In I See Buildings, the hierarchical inversion that would invite resentment toward “actual oranges” because of their valuation above “the orange foods”—e.g., freezer potato waffles, baked beans—unspools via the image of the artichoke, which Shiv gets tattooed on her flesh.)

Mom is eventually buried in the ground, “presumably forever”—but only presumably. One day, she may yet be avenged. After all, as Hourglass’s narrator reminds himself, “revolutions often involve people destroying public clocks. Silence all of the bells until all of the bells ring for us, that sort of thing.” God may be a “tardy prick” in the Goddardian universe, but nobody dies before they are dead. Even when it comes to certified, mournable deaths—Mom, Conor, the 72 individuals lost at Grenfell—nothing is ever settled in these books. They vibrate with a desire akin to the yearning felt by Walter Benjamin’s angel of history—“to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.”

In I See Buildings, it is the sky itself that the angel will implicitly piece back together, by extracting the shoddily built, unsafe high-rises currently fracturing it. Meanwhile, in good dialectical fashion, it is the slow growth—not the precipitous fall—of a building that the action orbits. The novel’s opening sentence, “And then none of it happened,” nominally refers to the wild, free, “bigger, bolder” lives that the five Shard Enders “were sure [they] would have” when they were teenagers, and then don’t go on—as the book details in innumerable, vivid ways—to live. But one can equally read those words as a retroactive prayer-cum-premonition on an even bigger scale. To begin with the claim that nothing presently transpiring is what was originally desired is a provocative way of calling every pragmatic accommodation to the capital relation into question. It confronts us with the limits of the all-too-relatable, yet quite agency-abdicating, explanation for all disappointments: “Life happens.” Life certainly can happen, Goddard implies, but only tends to do so when we make it.

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I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning makes clear that there is, as the slogan goes, no justice, just us. Goddard’s poetics incites an appetite for nondisposable world-building even as it casts a spell subliminally upon the reader, making us think about the things we’d magically “disappear” from history if we could. A fascinating dialectic emerges here, between carrying the “whole mess of a person” and dreaming of total rupture; between muddling through forgivingly and appreciating that everything—even our loved ones’ messy identities—will have to change beyond recognition with the death of capitalism. A counterreality is conjured wherein no brutal wasting of people’s lifetimes was ever committed, and predatory real estate doesn’t “clutter up the sky” with unsafe and unaffordable “shitholes.” This same polyvalent wish, I think, is embedded in the title, a phrase describing a memory as well as a fantasy about death-trap architecture vanishing off the face of the earth in a flash. There is an is, and a was, here, as well as an ought to be, or shall be. The prophecy is not just the nonrecurrence of infernos made from profit-maximizing combustible cladding but also the idea that one day they will have unhappened—been redeemed—when revolution rings out for the living and the dead.

If enough redemptive stuff happens, then none of the bad stuff will have happened. This prophetic mood, linked to the future perfect tense, enables Goddard (as he puts it in an interview) to maintain a “meaningful relationship with the possible.” It’s a hyperstitional orientation that purposefully messes with the boundary between autofiction and speculative futurism. Put differently, there’s an unkillable streak of the utopian in Goddard—which is why, I’d claim, we ultimately find Rian coming home to Shard End for good, and even possibly intending to help raise Molly and Freya while applying Patrick’s Marxist ideas to the future of the construction project. It’s utopianism not as the rubbing out of an Etch A Sketch drawing gone wrong but as an open-ended commitment to chiseling into the screen on top of it. When Rian asks Patrick if he has “ideas” for the flats, he responds at “a hundred miles an hour about co-ops and residents’ associations, community rates not market rates, and all the rest of it.” Oli, too, reaffirms this vision of housing justice in the novel’s final pages: “Patrick will end up doing something good with the houses. He’s got ideas for them and I know Rian will listen when it comes down to it.” Might property developers sometimes listen to the anti-capitalist poor, provided they grew up poor themselves and are your childhood friend? Could those kinds of projects be real?

Perhaps. There used to be a library on the five friends’ council estate, but—as Patrick recalls—it closed at some point back when they were kids, only to be replaced by a “book van” that, in turn, some older kids set on fire. These streets were Goddard’s own childhood stomping grounds in real life—the same ones where director Clio Barnard and screenwriter Enda Walsh filmed their adaptation of I See Buildings this spring. But whereas Rian comes back to the West Midlands ward to create construction jobs for his friends, Goddard apparently came back in a quite different way: to support the local library. Out of the ashes of a possibly only fictional “book van” rises a real “micro-residency”; in 2024, the novelist tweeted from the train up from London about one of the visits he was making to the Shard End library to support various ongoing campaigns in Birmingham: a library he described as “kicking back against the vile class warfare being enacted via mass library closures.” Covering the protest initiative (known as “Brum Library Zine”), a local indie newspaper quoted the homegrown literary celebrity as saying that a better world is “both possible and necessary. And in my brighter moments I also think it is inevitable.”

Inevitability itself is, paradoxically, a choice. Goddard’s “relationship with the possible” is guided by the Zapatista theorization of time as expressed in Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano’s 2017 speech “Timepieces, the Apocalypse, and the Hour of the Small” (from which, notably, the epigraph for Hourglass is taken). “We Zapatistas are more like an hourglass” than a watch, proposed Galeano; “the struggle is something that requires you to pay attention to the whole and to the parts, and to be ready because that last grain of sand isn’t the last, but rather the first, and that the hourglass must be turned over because it contains not today, but yesterday, and yes, you’re right, tomorrow too.”

As I write this, the UK government has announced that the blackened, burnt-out husk of the condemned Grenfell tower—which has remained standing for eight years like a sooty cenotaph—will be demolished, a decision some survivor-advocacy groups reject since no prosecutions of those responsible have yet been carried out. Whatever happens, though, the fire “changed everything” for some survivors. One former resident who goes by the mononym “Ish” says that it awakened in him a“fight “against global enemies and structures.” “We talk politics now,” says Ish, “and how we can take power.” It seems possible that the towering tomb imprinted itself on his mind as a giant hourglass—its sand falling sometimes slowly, sometimes fast—waiting to be turned on its head.

“Every emancipatory struggle,” Goddard’s Hourglass contends, “has been in some very real sense a struggle over who gets to lay claim to the ownership of time.” Last year, the Palestinian writer Adam HajYahia illuminated the stakes of this thesis when he theorized the demolition of the Zionist “time-regime” from below, and conjured the destiny of the colonized and the dispossessed with the phrase “we will live in a time that is ours.” By speaking out in no uncertain terms against the accelerated US-Israeli genocide in Palestine over the past 600 days, and the Nakba in general, Goddard himself (unlike far too many in literary and other communities) has refused to collude in the dispossession of Palestinians from the hour of history, the expropriation of their key to a self-determined present—which is to say, the ongoing 77-year-long murder of their cosmos.

Note that the Palestinian horizon called return “is the redemption of the past in the present and the future, not its abandonment, forgetting, or re-insertion,” as HajYahia specifies. “It is the opening to the future as endless uncaptured time.” Chewing on these words—on Goddard novel’s and the futures his characters did or did not go on to have, at least within the book—while browsing the reparative justice blog The Grenfell Enquirer, I spotted a comment from a community organizer. It signed off with a quote from a best-selling book (one you’ve definitely heard of) about a certain Palestinian political prisoner: “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Not in any putative next life, mind you, but in ours.