Note (v.)

There is simply no allegorical, edifying or fully-formed way to show completely senseless acts of violence. The narrative always skids right up to the point where the young man, who was so much like other young men, begins assembling a small armory. After the jump, a story that had been told in the fraudulent math that tries to balance a recognizable, human childhood with an incomprehensible, inhuman act, switches over to the fractured language of the newscast: helicopter images, computer re-enactments, grainy home videos, 911 calls, yearbook photos, the shots of children who could be our children crying in small huddles outside the crime scene. After two years of reading, watching and listening to pretty much everything about Cho Seung-Hui, I realized, with a thin flare of defeat, that the distance between us could never be measured, at least not in any instructive way.

— Violence and Making Sense | The Awl