Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Hello readers, long time no write.  I've been reading books by Primo Levi - I read The Periodic Table last week, and am currently reading Survival in Auschwitz.  Next I will read The Drowned and The Saved, and then The Double Bond, an acclaimed biography of Levi by Carole Angier, just out in paperback. I was reluctant to approach these books, although my reading of W.G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction (about Germany's response, social and literary, to the WWII Allied bombing campaigns) had primed me for them, in a sense.  One approaches "writing of the disaster" (to mis-appropriate a phrase by Blanchot) carefully, for it can easily descend into a pornography of violence, damage, and harm.  I don't want to do damage to myself, or to some sort of collective memory of this horrible thing, by engaging in that sort of reading.  I don't want that in my life, but I wanted to know.  I felt a profound need to know.  In the interim, I happened to read Elizabeth Costello, by J.M.Coetzee.  This is a strange, troubling and subtle book (I liked it a lot).  One section of this book concerns his eponymous protagonist's reaction to a book detailing the final moments of Hitler's would-be assassins, as they are taunted, degraded, and ultimately hanged by the SS.  He uses this as a springboard, of sorts, into a rumination regarding which details of human history should or should not be recorded or remembered.  Well, I read this and felt ready for Primo Levi. Primo Levi was a good man, and a great writer and artist.  Is there any higher praise?  His books are deeply and rigorously moral, kind, beautiful.  And this, despite my best, most honest preparations, is not what I expected.  I fail as a human being, over and over and over again, as I turn the pages of these books.  I expected (wanted?) filth and anger and pain.  I saw this tendency within in myself, I girded myself against it, and nevertheless I failed to meet him with the proper moral and intellectual rigor - for we do, after all, take an encounter with the writer as we read their work, do we not?  What other reason could there be to sit down with these strange objects?  This has not been easy or pleasant, but I am humbled and grateful.  I am even given to hope - cautiously, tentatively - that I am slightly better, stronger even.  Such things do happen. 4:38:46 PM