It is said that the real tragedy is not when one man has the courage to be truly evil, but when millions lack the courage to be good. We all deal with tragedy in ways that make sense to us. Anger and a bitter disappointment at what man is capable of doing to man is always at the forefront. But we fail even as we profess to be better representatives of humanity. We fail when we allow tragedies to define us as a mob of angry and bitterly disappointed people. We fail when our own disenchantment reduces that tragedy to just oil that keeps the anger burning and the hatred spreading. Out of tragedy then should rise a better version of us. Out of tragedy there should be an even fiercer raging of hope. Out of tragedy should rise a world those lost to us would have welcomed and rejoiced in.
Though no large feat is accomplished overnight. Not the burning fire of hope, and not the road to redemption for humanity either. We must heal first as individuals, find reasons that give us hope for the world and hope for humanity. These reasons do not come to us as a barrage of epiphanies either. We must search for them, laboriously, one by one. This week, I do my very small part by giving you books penned by those who seemed to understand the world much more than we perhaps ever will, to look for reasons. Or maybe just one reason left behind in words: One by one.
“The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah quite simply captures the strength of France and its people in the face of war. When war of any magnitude rolls around, it touches upon every soul in some way. The roles of people and how war would come to affect them was set in stone during the time of World War II; men would fight for their lives in battle, and women would be left behind, striving everyday to keep together the remnants of their life and humanity. Hannah spins the tale of those women left behind: the ones with every cell inside of them screaming to wage a war too, ones that are pretending everyday that they’re not terrified, ones that are forgetting every day a little bit of what it means to be human in wartime. Out of the stories of all those women rises a belief for hope and hearts that are strong, despite everything they have seen. “In love we find out who we want to be. In war we find out who we are.”
Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption,” is a true testament to everything the title purports it to be: The true story of Louis Zamperini surviving the crash of a plane that bombed the Japanese during World War II, of drifting in an endless war-ridden sea for months, staying alive purely because of an undying desire to stay alive and then finally being taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese. The horrors described in this book that are inflicted on Zamperini make you truly question why he even wanted to live anymore. And it makes you see that war distorts those who are brothers, fathers and sons without it. Don the face of the war, pick up your weapon and it changes us all into something less than human. The anger within us might find some solace with Hillenbrand’s words though, “The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”
There are times when one simply needs to remember that one life, one person, can make a difference. “The Power of One,” by Bryce Courtenay reminds us all of that. Explore the struggles of 1930s and ’40s South Africa, where a boy, Peekay, grows up in a world that hasn’t allowed him to be a boy. With World War II raging across the world, the growing racial tensions and the birth of Apartheid around this child, one would think that coming of age with any semblance of hope would be a lost dream. But to Peekay it matters not that the odds are stacked against him or that the world fails him everyday. His faith in the goodness of people never wavers. It is all of humanity’s triumph when in the face of all desolation and lack of hope, one can still rise with a belief in the good. “When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.”
