Italics are mine

Many Paths

I attended a talk by the author of Eat, Pray, Love last week - although I did not like the book, few famous authors stop by Bethlehem, so I felt I should go; in the end I enjoyed her speech immensely (she is a very witty woman, with my sense of humor) and will at least look at her next book.

Several things she said resonated with me. She mentioned she was really only good at one thing - writing - and felt it had been a blessing, when she compared her path to that of her multi-talented friends who could not decide which pursuit would allow them to best express their gifts.

This is something I struggle with, because of the very time-consuming "day job" I have (it is actually a lot more than a day job: it is a day job, an evening job, and often also a weekend job, I snatch a few hours to write late at night before going to bed, or on Sunday mornings). I often wonder whether I would be better able to create the novels I have in mind if I did not have a career outside writing, and the thought that the publication a novel will be delayed by years because I cannot physically find the time to write due to homework, course projects and research papers often gives me pause. 

Does my academic job take me away from my goal? The truth is more complicated than that. Teaching provides me with an immediate reward, a sense that the day has not been wasted: I gave a lecture, I shared a technique with my students, I equipped them with better tools to enter the workforce. It also provides me with a structure, which I have found very helpful; I enjoy human interactions unrelated to the writing project at hand. The job, as time-intensive that it is, gives me a sense of balance.

Certainly, writing all day long every day would be nice. Maybe I will reach a point in my life, many years from now, where I will be able to do that. For now I am learning to make my peace with the different sides of me. And in contrast with the author of Eat, Pray, Love, who produced a five-hundred-page manuscript to follow her runaway bestseller but realized right before sending it to her editor that it was such a complete failure she could not salvage anything, would have (after a bit of writer's block) to throw it away and start from scratch, I can crumple drafts without second thought and dunk them into the wastebasket, knowing that I have accomplished other things that day, concrete things: a lecture, a research meeting, a theorem proved.

Bearing Witness

Two photographers were killed in Libya a few days ago (their death has been abundantly covered in the media; if you read this post months or years after the fact, and don't remember their names, you can refresh your memory here). They died in an apparent mortar attack, as they attempted to document the unrest - as they were, in a very real sense, "bearing witness".

Although "Bearing Witness" is also the title of my blog, and the main reason why I write, I have the luxury of remaining away from the front lines. My novel is about World War II - I don't have to travel to dangerous places if I want to do research; the library will do. Yet a topic I am exploring in the book is the small choices people make that, little by little, lead them dangerously close to - and sometimes over - the ethical line, and also the big decisions others take to stay on firm moral ground. (And yet sometimes the moral ground collapses under them due to others' actions, but you'll have to read my book to understand this sentence, unless I change the ending.)

Those two photographers, and more broadly the community of war photographers, made the choice of going to dangerous places so that we would be made aware of what was happening, so that we would not turn the other way. From the NYT article: "They endangered themselves so that others might see what was happening in a small port city on the coast of North Africa, a city few had heard of until they showed it to us, until it claimed their lives."

After World War II, citizens accused of collaboration defended themselves by saying they did not know about concentration camps or other atrocities (even when the concentration camp was nearby, and the smell was atrocious). Without these pictures of Libya, we would again be able to claim ignorance. But we can't. We can't, because of the sacrifice these photographers made. As much as I hope words can stir emotion, their force pales in comparison to the punch packed by the picture of a wounded child, a destroyed house, a dead body in the street. Too often we forget the risks photographers take to educate us in spite of ourselves, when we'd prefer watching reality TV shows in the comfort of our homes. They took pictures to make us feel. And cry. They just hadn't expected that they would, in the end, make us cry about themselves too.

Writers, (documentary) filmmakers, photojournalists - we all share the goal of shining a light on little-known facts, helping others seeing the world in ways they had not thought of before. But there is no question in my mind that war reporters and photographers deserve much more credit because of the risks they take.