Chance meetings.
There is a certain book that seems almost sacred to me. I am very attached to this book, so attached that when I moved and realized one day that I didn't know where it was, I felt panicked. This is a book that, every time I open it, I seem to be reading it for the first time, and yet, conversing with an old friend. This book is called Gates of the Forest, by Elie Wiesel. He writes of the numinous and the ineffable, the vile and the unmentionable, and he writes so evocatively, with such emotion, that I marvel some days that single person could survive the genesis and the birth of such a work.
Today I opened it to page 87, and re-read the words which I had underlined on that page:
"Affirm thereby the solidarity of destinies bound together for and against man. Every death leaves a scar, and every time a child laughs it starts healing...The rhythm of their march toward death...Marching a few steps together and then our paths draw apart, and only mud and dust are left. What, then, is man? hope turned to dust...What is man? Dust turned to hope."
There is something about this book, despite the ache of disillusionment, of demoralization and despair...there is something about it that sings of hope, compassion, and love of man--even man at his worst: perpetuating genocide.
"A chance meeting can change the whole world, and bring all things into question. Nothing exists purely on its own; past and future can be conceived only as a function of the present, a present which constantly expands and exceeds itself."
A chance meeting with this book, plucked from the shelves of a college bookstore when my quest for a book for a history of science course brought me into contact with the hebrew studies section, has changed my life. And it continues to do so, unfolding into my future as surely as all the baggage of the past. I carry this piece forward with reverence and profound appreciation for the suffering that transformed the boy Elie into the man who writes so eloquently of the cycle of hope and pain that mankind perpetuates daily.
Today I opened it to page 87, and re-read the words which I had underlined on that page:
"Affirm thereby the solidarity of destinies bound together for and against man. Every death leaves a scar, and every time a child laughs it starts healing...The rhythm of their march toward death...Marching a few steps together and then our paths draw apart, and only mud and dust are left. What, then, is man? hope turned to dust...What is man? Dust turned to hope."
There is something about this book, despite the ache of disillusionment, of demoralization and despair...there is something about it that sings of hope, compassion, and love of man--even man at his worst: perpetuating genocide.
"A chance meeting can change the whole world, and bring all things into question. Nothing exists purely on its own; past and future can be conceived only as a function of the present, a present which constantly expands and exceeds itself."
A chance meeting with this book, plucked from the shelves of a college bookstore when my quest for a book for a history of science course brought me into contact with the hebrew studies section, has changed my life. And it continues to do so, unfolding into my future as surely as all the baggage of the past. I carry this piece forward with reverence and profound appreciation for the suffering that transformed the boy Elie into the man who writes so eloquently of the cycle of hope and pain that mankind perpetuates daily.
posted by KR | 9/27/2004 10:50:00 PM
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