The Consequence of Memory

I pulled an all-nighter for Elie Wiesel’s Night.

I have always thought that there are books that change us, and there are books that are able to reveal who we are. Night was both, and I had been fearful of it.

Two years ago, I attempted to read it, and I put it down nine pages later, terrified of what it could break in me. Last night, I picked it up again, and I was right to not underestimate its power.

 It was as harrowing as I expected it to be.

Night is not for the struggling faithful or for the non-believer. One should approach the book with care, because he emerges from it a changed person. Only the self-assured pseudo-religious would emerge from it unscathed, because they will have dismissed it as an example of condemnable writing.

Night is a slim volume of the firsthand account of a Holocaust survivor, written in very potent prose. It is a record of the worst that human beings could be, and I feared that when I read it, I might see things I cannot un-see.

Yet, I emerged from Night without having been as provoked as I had expected to be. I did not get out of it angry, or confused, or accusing. If anything, I accepted that I was not asking the wrong questions. I do not know how this was possible. Perhaps because I had grown up, had grown wiser in the span of time that I waited, and the part of my soul that was vulnerable, in all its fragility, had created for itself a semblance of defense.

Or perhaps because I had lost what I had been struggling to protect in me, two years back, when I decided I couldn’t get past the book's first nine pages. I had lost this part of my soul in the two years that I waited, and because it is no longer there, there is nothing to protect nor to destroy.

Had I insisted on reading it then, I would have fallen into a pit from which there is no saving. Like Night's Eliezar, I would have found it futile to guard my faith when all there was to see were abandonment and disillusionment. Like him, I, too, would have found it easy to condemn and impossible to forgive. My fear had been my very salvation. Because I waited, I am saved.

Elie (for I shall call him that) ended his memoir in three pages. The conclusion of an unspeakable journey, in three pages.

It was an epilogue devoid of drama, devoid of questions or answers. It did not glorify the redemption that came in the end.

If anything, the conclusion was written only like it was a duty he owed to the story he told—like it was the consequence of living, the consequence of memory.

In the Tiger's Eyes

I remember how the eponymous lad in Life of Pi wailed inconsolably when he was finally found along the Mexican shore by people—members of his own species, he said—after a long ordeal and a struggle to survive with a Bengal tiger, which like him, had survived a shipwreck. He was wailing, much to the confusion of the people who were saving him, because his heart broke when the tiger left him--so unceremoniously.

This tiger, for whom he has learned to feel responsible and by whom he felt valued and needed, jumped out of the boat, all thin and famished, and walked on towards the forest without looking back. It just walked, literally, out of his life. So unceremoniously.

Time and time again, we are Pi, calling out and wailing for the tiger that left so unceremoniously, it broke our heart. I’ve been realizing how it is truly a miracle to find people who value us, when, as it happens sometimes, a moment so clear comes when we realize our insignificance in certain relationships we value. The moment would be so clear that the epiphany would almost seem like a betrayal. How could we have been missing it until now? How could we not have seen how little we mattered?

Pi’s father is right: we see in the tiger’s eyes only our own emotions reflected back to us.

But those emotions were ours. And despite them inadvertently hurting us in the end, looking straight on couldn't be a mistake.

So, we allow ourselves to be saved by the epiphany, we grieve for the tiger who left so unceremoniously and perhaps, when we are healed, we will try again.