The very last essay she wrote was titled "Home to Roost," a reference to Malcolm X's speech after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in which he said that all the chickens were coming home to roost and American imperialism was now reaping what it had sown. In her essay, an elaboration of a lecture she gave on the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution, Arendt warned of the disintegration of democratic power, which could produce a historic break comparable to the one that had ushered in the destruction of the European polity by totalitarianism:
"We may very well stand at one of those destructive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past."
Translation: The "Oddly Circuitous Path," in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer
"We may very well stand at one of those destructive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past."
Translation: The "Oddly Circuitous Path," in Unlearning with Hannah Arendt by Marie Luise Knott, translated by David Dollenmayer
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