Pondering strength: the lungs and the legs to kick out into deep water, swimming back and forth across the bay. What it would take to remain calm in the face of a shark sighting might require more strength than I could muster – then again, maybe not. I often marvel at the reserves of strength humans harbor.
The strength of survival: how people make it through this life in the face of considerable adversity. After voluntarily reading Hersey’s The Wall as a teenager and recoiling in horror at the extermination of Jews in Poland during Hitler’s reign of terror, I swore I couldn’t broach that topic again. And yet it’s like a wagon I’m riding in, perpetually circling, trying to form a defensive barrier while wondering if what’s in the middle is worth protecting. I can’t shut my eyes to what’s true – never could.
And so I find myself in a thrift store, grabbing Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, putting it in my basket. It is only later I delve into this memoir of the author’s beloved aunt and uncle – he, an east Indian dentist who lost his arm in WWII, she an Israelite who escaped before Berlin was systematically purged of its Jewish occupants, sweeping her mother, sister, and countless dear ones into horrific oblivion.The book starts out benignly enough, as do most of our lives – family, friends, parties, schooling – shaping us, all innocent and free, onto paths unknown even to the wisest among us. We live, laugh, love and sometimes despair over trivialities. We are children, after all, until life turns on a dime and we transition into adulthood. How this should be versus the reality of how it goes down for many of us determines our character. And what we can share, if we survive, are our stories. For better or for worse, experiences unfold, peeling back the protective skin, revealing the core of the collective. It is you. It is me. It is us: the human race.
How do we live with the knowledge of our very worst tendencies? To deny history dooms us to repeat it. Platitudes we do well to remember, and yet …
begins the day. Thoroughly unfathomable, until, bit by bit, it opens before me …
