All of the essays will continue to be available for viewing. However subjective our interpretations may be, they are never without consequence for the opinions and arguments, the lives and times of those amongst whom we live. An interpretive community can only gather to talk or listen, when its members are assured of their right to narrate, to stand by their understanding and act on their judgments. Such a right might inhabit an artist's hesitant brush stroke, be glimpsed in a gesture that fixes a dance movement or become visible in a camera angle that stops your heart. Suddenly, in painting, dance or cinema you renew your very senses of personhood and perspective, and in that process, you understand something profound about yourself, about your historical moment, about what gives value to a life lived in a particular town, at a particular time, in particular social and political conditions.
Narrative is a sign of civic life.
When you fail to protect the right to narrate you are in danger of filling the silence with sirens, megaphones, hectoring voices carried by loudspeakers from podiums of great height over people who shrink into indistinguishable masses. However sincere our spirit of reconstruction and reparation, however earnest our instinct for truth and reconciliation, the spectres of these events haunt our lives like voids to which we can never, retrospectively, endow the right to narrate. But it is nonetheless a magnificent obsession. It has infused our century with a spirit of freedom and equality embodied in civil rights, women's rights, the needs of and obligations toward AIDS communities, the freedom of cultural and artistic expression, the care of the environment and much else. The world is both our earthly inheritance and a cultural and ethical horizon.