It's so jarring to go from Baghdad to Cambridge, to go from a place where people are fighting and striving and dying to a place where the biggest concern is what kind of cheese to put in your sandwich.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the stark differences between war-torn regions and peaceful environments.
Dexter Filkins contrasts the harsh realities of life in Baghdad, where survival is a challenge and people face violence daily, with the trivial concerns of everyday life in Cambridge, epitomized by an inconsequential choice like selecting cheese for a sandwich. This juxtaposition emphasizes the vast disparities in human experiences and the way perspective shifts depend on one's environment and circumstances.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on the impact of war on societies.
Any American who has spent time in Iraq or Afghanistan will tell you: the closer you get, the less certain you are of anything. If you are in Iraq, if you are in Afghanistan, everything is ambiguous. Everything is murky and gray and uncertain and possibly lethal.
For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.
Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments.
It was like a church in there as only the truly lost sit in bars on Tuesday mornings at 8:00 a.m.
Leisure consists in all those virtuous activities by which a man grows morally, intellectually, and spiritually. It is that which makes a life worth living.
It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.
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