Only after September 11, 2001 did I grasp that Woolf's comment in "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" is real and substantial, not simply aesthetic posturing. That seems somehow backwards: one might guess that an act of terrorist violence would make thinking seem inconsequential, but that is not how I felt. When my school hosted a peace camp to protest escalating violence, I went (rare for me--I generally hate public political rallies, even tiny ones), read the Woolf essay aloud, and led a little discussion among the four or five vegetarian students and the hipper-than-me prof who sponsored the gathering. I felt like I'd really done something.
I committed myself to thinking, teaching, talking about, writing about peace. I read the paper, listened to NPR, signed and passed along petitions from moveon.org. But now I'm tired. It's been three and a half years and there's another Bush inauguration tomorrow. The steely passion with which I first embraced "thinking is my fighting" has faded and I wonder, is it still my fighting if what I want to think about is whether or not Doris Lessing is a great writer or what will happen to Harry Potter at Hogwarts next year?
I have ebbed back into the mode of cop out, of thinking as retreat. But I like it here inside the whale. And perhaps, to switch registers from Orwell to Robert McCloskey, like Burt Dow, it's there that I can best express myself...
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1 comment:
Have you read Lucy Grealy's memoir, Autobiography of a Face? It's beautiful as well. And strange too, I think, to be able to do something that's so rare-to see both sides of a friendship, two interpretations, and a little bit of what each woman means to each other-objectively.
It's a nice compliment to Truth and Beauty.
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