NICE: BEFORE AND AFTER

"Je me souviens."  ["I remember.]

Eugène-Étienne Taché

Here at the Global Business Dialogue we tend to stick to our knitting - the long scarf of trade and investment issues - and we rarely take note of the tragedies (or the triumphs) of the wider world.  That is not because we haven't noticed or don't care.  It is just that we have another job, and later today we shall return to those more routine tasks with another TTALK Quote on Brexit.  First, however, there needs to be a pause, an acknowledgement that something terrible has happened.  And some reflection.

This start of a BBC report on yesterday's events is a summary in a sentence:



Scores more were injured, many critically, and, according to the same BBC report, the children's hospital in Nice, Fondation Lenval, treated some 50 children and adolescents injured in the attack.

But what of the rest of us?  What should we feel?  What should we do?  Obviously, that depends upon our individual personalities and responsibilities.  There is the patching up of the injured, the cleaning up of the carnage, the mourning of the dead, the comforting of those who loved them, and - as this was not simply a tragedy but an attack - the fighting back.  There is also reflection, and for us, that is where the quotes come in. 



Voltaire's poem on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 comes to mind, with its lines,



And its implicit question, who can justify such carnage?



There is Ecclesiastes:

 

One wants those times to be discreet, but they are all jumbled up.



A Winton Churchill lament of 1915 makes the point.  To his friend, Violet Asquith, the Prime Minister's daughter, he confessed:



Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty then, and he thought he was on the eve of a major victory at the Dardanelles.  That's another story, but the guilty irony of recognizing one's own enjoyment of life while others suffer is simply part of the human condition, and Churchill put his finger on it.



Lastly, there is today's featured quote.  You probably recognize it.  It's the motto of Quebec:

(In English, "I remember.)    Eugène-Étienne Taché was, among other things, the architect of the Provincial Parliament Building in Quebec, and in 1883 he had those three words carved in the stone below the province's coat of arms, which he also designed.  He didn't explain the motto.  He just put it there. But it comes back at times like these.  Whatever else we can do, we can remember.  We are each of us part of a continuum. Remembrance is a duty.

Je Me Souviens takes is a link to the Wikipedia article on Quebec's motto.



Attack in Nice takes you to the BBC article quoted in the Context Section above.



Poem on the Lisbon Disaster is a Wikipedia article on this famous Voltaire poem.



Churchill and Violet Asquith.  We are not sure of the best source for the remark by Churchill to Violet Asquith. We found it in David Fromkin's book on the Middle East "A Peace to End All Peace," (page 135) and the link is to the Amazon.com page for that book.