Jan 05, 2022
The human mind is an abundant yet fallible record of history. Until the advent of the camera, it was vivid imagination that landed our ears to the sights, sounds and feelings of the past.
Minds fail. Faulty recounting and a lack of words to describe a moment lead to things being lost. We have come to expect, and even find beauty in, our faults.
I want to talk about their experiences. Those we will never get the chance to meet.
I have been fortunate enough to get around to a couple of different countries in Europe this year. A through-line of these travels was trying to understand the Holocaust.
Stepping through the Memorial for the Murdered Jews in Berlin, my processing of seeing all those names was, strangely, a sense of wonder. What joy would these people have given to the world if they weren’t massacred? Where would the weight of the world’s scale fall if they weren’t starved of basic human dignity?
Seeing the National Holocaust Museum in Budapest, and the directory of families that were slaughtered, I wondered what it might have been like to step through their family house. Had it not been torn down and stripped of its homeliness, maybe it would have brought a nomadic comfort for a night. Perhaps it would have been the one to shine a light on a dark day for a village, commune or district.
Upon seeing the commercialisation that surrounds Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, I felt a sense of frustration and anger. I sensed a lack of regard for the what-if, and a feeling that the event of stepping through her house was more important than anything else.
Upon leaving a lecture last term, I received a text message from an old schoolmate.
It was long and expressed deep remorse at the vain attempts he had made in reaching out to his friends before shifting schools. These attempts resulted in him being ignored or a sense of confusion from the other end. All I could respond with at the time was a tacit acceptance of his apology for failed attempts at not coming off as ‘clingy’ or ‘creepy’, and an openness to further communication later on.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my friends from school, university, and other life experiences that I am no longer in touch with. The ones with whom I shared an emotional moment in the past now fill me with a sense of curiosity.
Sometimes a phone contact just doesn’t exist. Social media seems handy, but proves futile when our circles don’t overlap enough to rediscover one another. Maybe the friction of explaining the context of what has happened in my life, and vice versa, prevents either of us from taking an approachable step to active communication.
The graveyard we carry with us informs and carries us through the vast sea of human beings we continue to meet. One with epitaphs, the names of people who touched our lives at one point, as far as the eye can see.