Nine Pages

I have always wanted to read Night by Elie Wiesel. When a friend finally lent me a copy, however, I discovered I was not brave enough to do so yet. I have had three attempts to read it, but I only got as far as the ninth page, this last time. Reading those first nine pages was unlike any reading experience I have had. I knew this because the whole time that I read it, the hairs on my face, my arms and those at the back of my neck kept standing, and this has never happened too early in anything that I have read, nor for that long. I had always dubbed that sensation "The Longinus Effect", credits to Longinus, a literary scholar/critic who theorized about an aesthetic criterion--a feeling that you get when you read and you know that whatever you are reading is good because you had been "touched by the sublime".

As I said, the Effect came too soon and persisted for too long that it felt oddly misplaced, as if it broke some universal law on writing that postpones the best until the end or the damning until later. Night is a slim volume of the biographical account of a Holocaust survivor, written in such potent prose. It is a record of the worst that human beings could be, and I worry that when I read it, I might see things I cannot un-see.

I’ve seen such things in Schindler’s List and in Life is Beautiful. I have read it in Alice Walker, in Toni Morrison, in Alan Paton, in Edilberto Tiempo, in Joseph Conrad, in Anna Akhmatova, and I remember the things that that seeing had caused me: grief then questions. Questions, then an inconsolable sense of abandonment. That and then a struggle for redemption.

I never got past those nine pages. Not yet. I had to put the book down, eventually. It was too powerful, and I am terrified of its power. I still look forward to reading it, one day, when I am wiser, when I have found answers to those questions. One day, when I am no longer afraid of the consequences of seeing.

As for now, Night will stay on my bedside table, closed. Silent. And benign.