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Launches in Ukraine - Senses of a word and of a struggle :: Timothy Snyder
https://snyder.substack.com/p/launches-in-ukraineTimothy Snyder on the ground in Ukraine and his up-coming book "On Freedom" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744574/on-freedom-by-timothy-snyder/)
Words make their way through the world with us, changing their senses as we change our lives. Think for example of the word “launch.”
Today and in days to come I will “launch” my book On Freedom, in the sense of the word all of my publishing friends like to use. They want to book to “launch,” to soar, to do well. In this spirit I talked to Tom Sutcliffe of the BBC in London this morning, and I am hoping to speak to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tonight. And no doubt throughout this long day, which begins in Europe and ends in the United States, I will say “launch” several times myself.
I am returning from Ukraine. My first true conversation about On Freedom this month was a week ago in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border and to the front. The Literary Museum there had invited me for a presentation at an underground site. It was a lovely place, with a bar that made me the coffee that I needed after a long trip, and a crowd of people invited to talk about freedom (we could not announce the event for safety reasons, which I regret). In a sense, this Kharkiv discussion was the real launch of the book.
We were underground, though, because of another kind of launch, the unmetaphorical kind, not the literary launch but the literal launch — of Russian missiles.
The Russians seemed close to taking Kharkiv at the beginning of the war. There was intense combat in Saltivka, a district of the city home to about 600,000 people. Major buildings in the city center of Kharkiv are still in ruins. The Ukrainians held the Russians back, but Russia itself remains close. A missile fired from Russia can reach Kharkiv before people have a chance to get underground. That, in Kharkiv, is what a “launch” too often means.
The difference in the sense of a word can help us to catch the difference in reality. In Kharkiv, the drones and the bombs and the missiles are a normal part of the day. People want to talk about books, they want to go to restaurants and movies, they want to live their lives, and they do, despite it all.
Today and in days to come I will “launch” my book On Freedom, in the sense of the word all of my publishing friends like to use. They want to book to “launch,” to soar, to do well. In this spirit I talked to Tom Sutcliffe of the BBC in London this morning, and I am hoping to speak to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tonight. And no doubt throughout this long day, which begins in Europe and ends in the United States, I will say “launch” several times myself.
I am returning from Ukraine. My first true conversation about On Freedom this month was a week ago in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border and to the front. The Literary Museum there had invited me for a presentation at an underground site. It was a lovely place, with a bar that made me the coffee that I needed after a long trip, and a crowd of people invited to talk about freedom (we could not announce the event for safety reasons, which I regret). In a sense, this Kharkiv discussion was the real launch of the book.
We were underground, though, because of another kind of launch, the unmetaphorical kind, not the literary launch but the literal launch — of Russian missiles.
The Russians seemed close to taking Kharkiv at the beginning of the war. There was intense combat in Saltivka, a district of the city home to about 600,000 people. Major buildings in the city center of Kharkiv are still in ruins. The Ukrainians held the Russians back, but Russia itself remains close. A missile fired from Russia can reach Kharkiv before people have a chance to get underground. That, in Kharkiv, is what a “launch” too often means.
The difference in the sense of a word can help us to catch the difference in reality. In Kharkiv, the drones and the bombs and the missiles are a normal part of the day. People want to talk about books, they want to go to restaurants and movies, they want to live their lives, and they do, despite it all.