“Dwell on the past, and you’ll lose an eye. Forget the past, and you’ll lose both eyes.” — Old Russian saying quoted by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn in the preface to The Gulag Archipelago.
By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: “No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.”
But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”
