Yesterday afternoon, as I was getting ready to wrap up at my office, I heard a shriek. Someone said, “There’s been a mass shooting, in Paris.”

I put my head back down and kept working. I think a lot of us did. On the other side of the ocean, for something that had already happened, there wasn’t anything we could do, right that moment. We continued. Not as if nothing had happened, but because that is the requirement of life, continuing.

Reading the news this morning, I feel horror and resignation that this is going to part of my life time, standing against intolerance and the seeing the world fight over it’s future narrative. I want to write some sort of response, to talk about how reading novels promoted my own tolerance of difference or express about the fact that the IS is NOT necessarily the true representative of the Islamic religion, as I have met it among my friends, students and classmates. That’s all true.

For now, though, I will take a moment of silence, in respect for those for whom this is not academic, but horribly real. It hardly seems sufficient.