2/9/2011 - at once humanizing and inhuman. . .

Reading is a rare pleasure for me.  Though I love it, found a rekindled love for it at the beginning of this year, I do not do it as regularly as I should or would like to.  With Sam at home, I always have a reason not to read, as he has yet to find a way to enjoy it.  Instead, we cook dinner together, eat together, watch TV, and by the time I feel like I should read for a while, it is too late.  The evening has already been whittled away and it is time for bed.

Not that I mind, as I enjoy our evening routine, and I am the last to criticize anyone on their desire for TV (I definitely exhibit signs of addiction).  But I do feel that I owe it to myself to read more, so as a compromise, I try to read when I can during lunch at work.  Where normally I would eat at my desk, I've been making an effort to take my lunch upstairs to the employee cafeteria, sit by the window, and read for a while. 

 

This afternoon, I finished the book I've been working on: Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed.  It immediately became one of my favorite books, in part because of the personalization of a national tragedy (Columbine), but also because it handled the incident with so much humanity, so much humanness.  The account of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was at once humanizing and inhuman, and reading it reminded me of Jared Loughner, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, all the large-scale tragedies that were composed of countless personal devastations.  I think it's harder to think of these events, tragic as they were, on an individual basis, because then the scale of that tragedy is exponential.

But that is just what this book made me do, see Columbine through the eyes of a survivor.  I was in college when it happened, and I only vaguely remember what I was doing when I first heard the news.  I was sad, scared, and angry, and I knew it was a horrible thing, but that was it: a horrible thing.  This book took me further: it not only brought me into the lives of the characters and made me care about them, it also taught me that there is no shortage of evil in the world, in me, and sometimes, bad things collide with good people.  We make mistakes, and mistakes happen to us; this is undeniable.  How we deal with it afterwards, who we choose to become in the face of tragedy is what ultimately defines us and what ultimately gives humanity its hope.

 

I cried while reading the final chapter.  I had a feeling I would, but I still decided to finish the book while eating lunch in the cafeteria.  So there I sat, next to a table of IT programmers and another of Cantonese women cackling loudly, and I started to cry.  

I'd like to think that it was a manly kind of cry, the kind with no other facial movements other than a quivering lip and streaming tears, so that is how I choose to recall it.