Finding the Words to Tell
(in memory of Charlie Lyons)

The following is an excerpt from the article, “Writing in the Dark” by David Grossman which appeared in the New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2007.

Those of you who know me, know of my interest in writers and writing from every part of the world, which is about the only hope left in a world growing increasing smaller, more dangerous. It’s not the politicians who will save us, nor religion. It’s the heart and soul of the individual artist…the painter, the poet, the playwright, the musician, the storyteller who must tell us over and over again the preciousness of life.

Those of you who know me, also know I have a special reverence for Jewish writing, “the people of the book” for whom story is faith even beyond belief.

I was thinking about all this the other night: just how fragile life is. How we think security or anything can save us, when in truth, we’re all living on the edge of the abyss. No one can prevent or predict anything.

The next morning, a phone call brought the bad news of a well-known artist in our small community, a truly unique, talented individual, a troubled soul ,a friend to many of us for over thirty years, who “word had it” taken his own life—or so the story was slowly unfolding.

Why? What refuge, when even the artist find s no peace in his hallowed sanctuary?

Everybody talks about the human condition but nobody understands it.

That same fragile ‘night before,’ I read “Writing in the Dark” by David Grossman, an Israeli novelist sadly trying to comer to terms with the recent loss of his young son, Uri, in the Israel-Lebanon war…trying to find comfort, meaning, deliverance in literature.

We are all here to spread a little more light in the dark…some of us, with words. ---nb

“…And I write also about that which cannot be brought back. And about that which is inconsolable. Then, too, in a manner I still find inexplicable, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me in away that would leave me paralyzed. Many times every day, as I sit at my desk, I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with his bare hands, and yet I do not die. I cannot grasp how this miracle works. Maybe once I finish writing this novel, I will try to understand. Not now. It is too early.

“And I write the life of my land, Israel. The land that is tortured, frantic, drugged by an overdose of history, excessive emotions that cannot be contained by any human capacity, extreme events and tragedies, enormous anxiety and paralyzing sobriety, too much memory, failed hopes and the circumstances of a fate unique among all nations: an existence that sometimes appears to be a story of mythical proportions, a story that is “larger than life” to the point that something seems to have gone wrong with the relation it bears to life itself. A country that has become tired of the possibility of ever leading the standard, normal life of a country among countries, a nation among nations.

“We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation. Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms. We treat, voluntarily, the harshest, ugliest and also rawest materials of the soul. Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists.

“And yet, and this is the great mystery and the alchemy of our actions: In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write. Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the “official narrative” of our country, nor of fate itself.

“We write. The world is not closing in on us. How fortunate we are. The world is not growing increasingly narrow. “