Hearing the news about the bombings in London brought so many feelings to the fore, each of them jostling for room in my rattled psyche. There was relief, that no one I knew was visiting, at least that I could think of. There was shame, that I've allowed myself, for the last month, to get into a terrific panic over my first book coming out, in the face of real horror. There was worry, as I realized that I do know people in England. There is Nicki, there is Denise, there is the whole MacFarlane family in Oxford. And there are all the people who were so nice to me when we lived there as a child, or when I lived there in the nineties, people I might not know, but who'd done nothing at all to deserve getting blown up on their way to work.
I flipped on the TV to see a mangled double-decker bus, its signature red body splayed like a giant had stepped on it. The bus was surrounded by bobbies in yellow mackintoshes. Both the bus and the English bobby have always been images of safety and order, reminescent of illustrations in a million picture books. Except on my screen, instead of Richard Scarry or Pat the Postman, we have the monsters of Maurice Sendak, invisible this time, except for the trail of debris they leave behind.
I remember soon after nine-eleven, someone sent me a page from The Onion, in which the headlines said something like "GOD REPEATS DIRECTIONS: NO #&$ING KILLING. I MEAN IT THIS TIME. NO KILLING."
The two books I read on my vacation, THE KITE RUNNER and UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN seem especially pertinent today. Though one was a novel about Afghanistan and the other a non-fiction account of a Fundamentalist Mormon sect in the American West, both offered examples of how absolute moral certainties can go terribly, horribly wrong. Krakauer's discussion of the murder of a woman and her infant by her own brothers-in-law, who believed God was directing them to cleanse the earth of her (because she disagreed with their interpretation of God's word) and Hosseini's rending tale of an Afghani family torn apart by the rise of the Taliban affected me deeply. I'm left questioning the role of faith in the world. In my novel, DIANA LIVELY IS FALLING DOWN, one of the protagonists experiences the exhilaration of belief after the emptiness of atheism, and this faith provides the propelling force for his actions thereafter. When my brother died in 1992, I had a similar awakening, which I can only describe as a sense of wonder, accompanied by awe and a profound sense of mystery. Such belief, it seems to me, can only be a positive thing, until I see it used to justify the taking of another's life.
I'm reminded of a favorite Kafka quote, just a fragment that has stayed with me:
"Faith, like a guillotine, as heavy, as light."
I've always loved the way that simile captures the intense heady exhilaration of belief, and also its power to change everything in one irrevocable instant. But now I see something I never did before about the nature of the metaphor. The guillotine, that instrument of the revolution, bloodied by hands so bent on enacting revenge that they lost sight of the humanity of their victims.
Now I think this: it's great to experience the magic wonder of hoping in a larger Good, but we need to be careful that our own revelations don't blind us to the only certainty I can extract from any of this: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You, and that means, No Killing, I'm Not F%#$-ing kidding."
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