Nearly Incomprehensible

Paterniti, in a project for Ira Glass, in the NYT Mag (thanks, Dan Stockman):

If you'd been born to farmer parents in Battambang province, in the country of Cambodia, and been given the name Vann Nath (pronounced van NAT), you would have spent four years as a young man in a pagoda, carefully etching calligraphy on a palm leaf, and through that task, learned the Buddhist concepts that were meant to guide your life: a belief in nonviolence, truth-telling and mindfulness. After leaving the monkhood and taking up work as a commercial painter, you would have found yourself as a young husband and father, on the precipice of that April day in 1975 when the Lon Nol regime fell to the jungle forces…