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.