Writing in the Dark by David Grossman Read Free Book Online

and to those around us, we will be
forced to admit that, essentially, we are always preparing ourselves for the next disaster. In this perpetual state of preparation, we unconsciously reduce within ourselves, one by one, our human elements and qualities, so that when they are taken from us, or debased by the situation or by the enemy, we will suffer less. Because if my gut feeling, and yours, is right, if it is true that in this terrible situation “he who feels more, suffers more,” then this aphorism is gradually translated in our minds into “he who feels, suffers.” We are so afraid of death that we condense the range of our emotional, psychic vitality.
    In a disaster zone, of course, or in a prolonged war, the tendency of the hawkish sides is to minimize and deny the human aspect of the enemy, to flatten it into a stereotype or a collection of prejudices. Because only then can one truly fight to the death for decades, eventually hoping for the enemy’s disappearance or death, believing that he is less human than us, or completely nonhuman.
    And please, do not tell me that life here is more or less normal or tolerable, that we have grown accustomed to the periodic, cyclical wars, and that we have learned to make the best of our existence in this cruel region. One cannot truly adapt to such warped conditions without paying a high price, the highest price of all—the price of living itself, the price of sensitivity, of humanity, of curiosity, and of liberty of thought. The fear of and aversion to facing others fully and soberly: not only the enemy, but any others .
    After spending a century in all-out war and becoming
accustomed to seeing anyone who threatens us as an enemy to the death, and having the concept of “enemy” ingrained in us so deeply, almost from birth, and living in an environment in which the concept is so highly available, because of the hostility and the constant acts of violence—after all this, eventually our compasses and healthy instincts go awry, and then, in almost any situation of conflict and disagreement, even one’s brother looks like the enemy. It is enough for his opinions and habits to be different from our own, for his desires to be distinct from our own, for his interpretation of a situation to be different from ours, for our brother to become, in our minds, in our fears, an enemy.
    When I say this, I fear that after decades of spending most of our energies, our thoughts and attention and inventiveness, our blood and our life and our financial means, on protecting our external borders, fortifying and safeguarding them more and more—after all this, we may be very close to becoming like a suit of armor that no longer contains a knight, no longer contains a human . Moreover, I often think that even if this longed-for peace reaches our region tomorrow, in some sense it will already be too late. Because the qualities and the viewpoints and the behaviors that the violence has formulated in us, Israelis and Palestinians, will continue to work their ways on us for many more years. They will not be quick to disintegrate in our bloodstream, both private and national, and they will keep on poisoning our souls, sabotaging the possibility of maintaining a stable
peace. Time after time, they will sweep us away and cause us to replay all the same old ills, which will, in turn, create more and more waves of violence.
     
     
    Let us return to literature for one more moment.
    The purpose of literature is the complete opposite of what I have described thus far: in literary writing, we do everything we can to redeem each character in our story from alienation and impersonality, from the grip of stereotypes and prejudices. When we write a story, we struggle—for years, sometimes—to comprehend all the facets of one human character: its internal contradictions, its motives and inhibitions, the boiling magma I talked of earlier.
    There is something tender, almost maternal, in the way a writer