“An animal swallows its food,” Brillat-Savarin wrote. “A man eats it. But only a man of intelligence knows how to dine.”

The tale of Cain and Abel is obviously one of acceptance and rejection. It captures the uneasy balance between ritual and violence.

Socrates’ final words in Crito carry the weight of both an ending and a promise.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote that “hell is the province of those who are not allowed to finish what they have started.”

Is the merciless, unrepentant, genocidal history of Venezuela (since its very colonial inception) just another historical instantiation of the unforgivable?