While in New York this past weekend, I read the book The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. The novel follows four characters throughout the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990's. It is certainly not uplifting, but Galloway did an amazing job of relating their stories and telling them from a noticeably-Eastern European point of view. The book begins with this great paragraph, and it actually repeats the paragraph several times:
It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.
I think this paragraph is so moving because it really captures the essence of "before" a particular (and, in this case, devastating) experience and "after" it. In the novel, Galloway is talking about the bombing of the Sarajevo Opera Hall. While I've never experienced the bombing of something precious to me, I know that when certain events are scheduled to happen or just spontaneously happen, that I will be or have become different from that point forward. For scheduled events, they have been mundane things like my birthday or stressful events like the results of the bar exam. Spontaneous events included 9/11 and hearing that my mom had advanced cancer. Meeting between something scheduled and something spontaneous, I remember driving to Ohio in October 2009 and thinking to myself, "I am going to watch my mom die. When I am on these roads again, my mom will be dead. I will have crossed over." I think that idea of identifying the moments of when life was "normal" and when it has become "something else" is a perfectly Newtonian human response -- I want to stay in motion the way I was in motion, or I want to stay at rest the way I was at rest. Then, because of the change, we must grieve. In Galloway's book, the characters spend their time grieving for the way life used to be -- when it was recognizable -- and they seek whatever comforts can give them even a moment's peace remembering that previous life. Perhaps that longing is part of our penitence for being human.
It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded.
I think this paragraph is so moving because it really captures the essence of "before" a particular (and, in this case, devastating) experience and "after" it. In the novel, Galloway is talking about the bombing of the Sarajevo Opera Hall. While I've never experienced the bombing of something precious to me, I know that when certain events are scheduled to happen or just spontaneously happen, that I will be or have become different from that point forward. For scheduled events, they have been mundane things like my birthday or stressful events like the results of the bar exam. Spontaneous events included 9/11 and hearing that my mom had advanced cancer. Meeting between something scheduled and something spontaneous, I remember driving to Ohio in October 2009 and thinking to myself, "I am going to watch my mom die. When I am on these roads again, my mom will be dead. I will have crossed over." I think that idea of identifying the moments of when life was "normal" and when it has become "something else" is a perfectly Newtonian human response -- I want to stay in motion the way I was in motion, or I want to stay at rest the way I was at rest. Then, because of the change, we must grieve. In Galloway's book, the characters spend their time grieving for the way life used to be -- when it was recognizable -- and they seek whatever comforts can give them even a moment's peace remembering that previous life. Perhaps that longing is part of our penitence for being human.
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