Roughly four years ago, when my second son was about to enlist in the army, I could no longer remain where I was. I was overcome with an almost physical sense of urgency and alarm that gave me no rest. I began then to write a novel that deals directly with the difficult reality I live in, a novel that describes how the cruelty of the external situation invades the delicate, intimate fabric of one family, ultimately tearing it to shreds.
“At the moment someone is writing,” says Natalia Ginzburg, “he is miraculously driven to forget the immediate circumstances of his own life … But whether we are happy or unhappy leads us to write in one way or another. When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality.”
It is hard to talk about yourself. I will only say what I can say at this time, from where I stand now.
I write. The consciousness of the disaster that befell me upon the death of my son Uri in the Second Lebanon War now permeates every minute of my life. The power of memory is indeed great and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing effect. Nevertheless, the act of writing creates for me a “space” of sorts, an emotional expanse that I have never known before, where death is more than the absolute, unambiguous opposite of life.
The authors who are here today know: when we write, we feel the world in flux, elastic, full of possibilities — unfrozen. Anywhere the human element exists, there is no freezing and no paralysis, and there is no status quo (even if we sometimes mistakenly think there is; even if there are those who would very much like us to think there is).
I write, and the world does not close in on me. It does not grow smaller. It moves in the direction of what is open, future, possible.
I imagine, and the act of imagination revives me. I am not fossilized or paralyzed in the face of predators. I invent characters. Sometimes I feel as if I am digging people out of the ice in which reality has encased them. But perhaps, more than anything, the person I am digging out at the moment is myself.
I write. I feel the many possibilities that exist in every human situation, and I feel my capacity to choose among them. I feel the sweetness of liberty, which I thought I had lost. I take pleasure in the richness of a real, personal, intimate language. I remember the delights of breathing fully, properly, when I manage to escape the claustrophobia of slogans and clichés. I begin to breathe with both lungs.
I write, and I feel that the correct and accurate use of words acts like a medicine. It purifies the air I breathe, removes the pollutants, and frustrates the schemes of language defrauders and language rapists. I write and feel my sensitivity to language and my intimacy with its different layers, with its sensuality and humor, restore me to myself, to the person I was before my selfhood was expropriated by the conflict, by the governments and the armies, by the despair and the tragedy.
I write. I purge myself of one of the dubious but typical talents that arise in a state of war — the talent for being an enemy, nothing but an enemy. I write, and I try not to shield myself from the legitimacy and the suffering of my enemy, or from the tragedy and the complexity of his life, or from his mistakes and crimes, or from knowing what I myself am doing to him. Nor do I shelter myself from the surprising similarities I discover between him and me.
I write. And all at once I am no longer doomed to face this absolute, false, suffocating dichotomy — this inhuman choice between “victim” and “aggressor,” without any third, more human option. When I write, I can be a whole person, with natural passages between my various parts, and with some parts that feel close to the suffering and the just assertions of my enemies without giving up my own identity at all.
At times, in the course of writing, I can remember what we all felt in Israel for one rare moment, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s plane landed in Tel Aviv after decades of war between the two nations. We suddenly discovered how heavy the burden was that we had been carrying all our lives — the burden of hostility and fear and suspicion. The burden of having to always be on guard, to always be an enemy, all the time. How blissful it was in that moment to do away with the massive armor of suspicion, hatred, and prejudice. How frighteningly blissful it was to stand naked, to stand pure, and watch as before our eyes a human face emerged from the narrow, one-dimensional depiction we had been seeing for years.
I write, and I give my most private and intimate names to an external, unknown world. In some sense, I make it mine. So do I return from a land of exile and alienation — I come home. I change, just slightly, what previously seemed unchangeable. Even when I describe the cruelest arbitrariness that determines my fate — whether man-made or preordained — I suddenly find in it new subtleties and nuances. I find that simply writing about the arbitrariness lets me move freely in its presence. That the very fact of standing up against the arbitrariness gives me freedom — perhaps the only freedom man has against any kind of arbitrariness — the freedom to articulate the tragedy of my situation in my own words. The freedom to articulate myself differently, freshly, against the unbending dictates of arbitrariness that threaten to bind me and pin me down.
I also write about what cannot be restored. About what has no comfort. Then too, in a way I still cannot explain, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me and leave me paralyzed. Many times a day, as I sit at my writing desk, I touch sorrow and loss like someone touching electricity with bare hands, yet it does not kill me. I do not understand how this miracle has come to pass. Perhaps after I finish this novel, I will try to understand. Not now. It is too soon.
I write the life of my country, Israel. A tortured country, drugged to the point of overdose by history, by emotions beyond what humans can contain, by an extreme excess of events and tragedy, by an excess of fear and a crippling sobriety, by an excess of memory, by dashed hopes, by a fate unique among nations. It is an existence that sometimes seems to take on the proportions of a mythic tale, diminishing our prospects of ever living an ordinary life as a state.
We authors know periods of despair and self-loathing. Our work, fundamentally, entails dismantling personalities and relinquishing some of our most effective defense mechanisms. Willingly we struggle with the hardest, ugliest, rawest, and most painful matters of the soul. Our work forces us, again and again, to acknowledge our helplessness as people and as artists.
Yet still — and this is the great miracle, the alchemy of our act — in some sense, from the moment we take pen in hand or put fingers to keyboard, we have already ceased to be a victim at the mercy of all that enslaved and restricted us before we began writing.
We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.
The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, New York, April 24, 2007
Individual Language and Mass Language
To open the International Literature Festival Berlin as an Israeli author is not only a great honor, but also a conjuncture that would have been unthinkable until not so many years ago, and even today I cannot be indifferent to its significance.
Despite the close relationship between Israel and Germany today — and between Israelis and Germans, between Jews and Germans — even now there is a place in one’s mind and in one’s heart where certain statements must be filtered through the prisms of time and memory to be refracted into the entire spectrum of colors and shades. As I stand here before you in Berlin, I cannot help but begin with the thoughts that are constantly refracted within me, in that prism of time and memory.