... by Bernhard Schlink is a book about Holocaust, individual responsibility, justice, collective guilt, forgiveness, the irreversibility of time, the extent of reality in memory ... The last topic fascinates me, and is discussed in depth in "The Secret Scripture" by Sebastian Barry.
"At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn't come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn't coax up the memories either. For the last few years I've left our story alone. I've made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus, the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.
At any rate, that's what I think when I just happen to think about it. But if something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feeling of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nevertheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear. Maybe I did write our story to be free of it, even if I never can be."
The protagonist, Michael, wrote a poem in the book which reminds me of another poem ... the ambivalence, the uncertainity despite the togetherness ...
"When we open ourselves
you yourself to me and I myself to you,
when we submerge
you into me and I into you
when we vanish
you into me, and I into you
Then
am I me
and you are you"
