Read Online Writing in the Dark by David Grossman - Free Book Online

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