When The Brain gets hold of something and won’t let go, I tend to just wait until The Brain is finished with whatever it is rather than trying to wrest that thing away. What does that mean? That means that when The Brain wants to do something like, say, read everything George Orwell ever wrote, then it’s best to just let The Brain have its way. Sooner or later, Orwell--or whom- or whatever the subject is--will make a misstep (by writing, say, A Clergyman’s Daughter) and The Brain will immediately drop the whole subject without another word.
Anyway, it's not a problem to let The Brain have its own way most of the time. But what I have found is this sometimes leads to some absurd or at least asynchronous experiences. Take this Christmas for example. This Christmas, instead of Christmas carols and endless viewings of A Christmas Carol, The Brain decided to fill our days reading about Soviet gulags. To The Brain I guess, nothing says it’s the holiday season like reading about men and women suffering and dying in Siberian labor camps. As if that weren’t enough holiday cheer for any one person, The Brain also decided that useful comparisons might be made between gulags and Nazi concentration camps. So off we went to read about Nazi concentration camps. (Luckily, The Brain has confined itself to online information about those, so--so far at least--my pocketbook has been safe from the prying fingers of Amazon.com.)
Here’s something I learned last night that I hadn’t known before: Some of the most notorious Nazi camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, for example, and Treblinka) were located in Poland and most of the wholesale killing of Jews happened outside Germany proper. I really hadn’t known that. I hadn’t known how extensive the network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps was and how it encompassed not only Germany and Poland, but Belarus, Latvia, Ukraine, Hungary, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Austria, and on and on. And here’s something that maybe you didn’t know: At Dachau these days, before going on to view the concentration camp there, you can stop and have a Happy Meal at the McDonald's in the train station.
That’s the kind of trivia that Kurt Vonnegut would have capitalized on, no?
But me? I just want to say: I don’t know why The Brain doesn’t enjoy a little Danielle Steele from time to time. I don’t. I don’t know why The Brain turns its nose up at juicy, colorful issues of People Magazine. As it is, the only place that The Brain allows us to read those kinds of things is at the dentist’s office, where the waiting room is chock full of celebrity rags like In Touch and house porn like Better Homes and Gardens. I actually try to get to the dentist’s office way early so that I might have a chance to eyeball some kitchen remodels or to see what shade the newest Brangelina adoptee is, but the dentist’s receptionist is always thrilled that I am early, so she works me in as soon as possible, which severely curtails my junk reading binge.
Personally, I think The Brain is a bit of a snob and something of a human suffering addict. Oddly, I’m pretty much okay with that. No, I don’t mean that I actually revel in reading about cruelty. What I look for (as The Brain is sifting through the debris of history) are stories that defy the trend towards cruelty. I look for evidence that we are human, I mean. We are indifferent and often evil, yes, but we are human and that means that we are also sentient, hopeful, capable of enduring. All of those qualities--all of them--arise, I’m convinced, from a common flame of desire.
If You Had Gone Back To Building Houses
Do you know about Simon Wiesenthal, the former concentration camp inmate turned Nazi hunter? Here is a story about him:
According to Clyde Farnsworth in the New York Times Magazine (February 2, 1964), Wiesenthal once spent the Sabbath at the home of a former Mauthausen inmate, now a well-to-do jewelry manufacturer. After dinner his host said, "Simon, if you had gone back to building houses, you'd be a millionaire. Why didn't you?" "You're a religious man," replied Wiesenthal. "You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, ‘What have you done?,’ there will be many answers. You will say, ‘I became a jeweler,’ Another will say, ‘I have smuggled coffee and American cigarettes,’ Another will say, ‘I built houses,’ But I will say, ‘I did not forget you’."
No comments:
Post a Comment