Osler's Razor

This week, I was in New York for work (more on that in a few days-- a big announcement!). I was working in Manhattan and staying in Brooklyn. I traveled back and forth on the F train.

I like to have something to read on the train, so I stopped into a beautiful little bookstore called Terrace Books. For three dollars I bought a used copy of Elie Wiesel's Night, a memoir of his time in Nazi concentration camps. I had read the book before, when I found it in a "free book" box in the Baylor philosophy department, and decided to read it again.

Of course, it is not an easy book. "Unbearably painful" was part of a blurb on the back, and the cover blurb described the "terrifying power" of the story within.

On the train, I found myself sitting next to a Hasidic man who was also reading. Next to him was an Indian woman reading a book, and next to her was an elderly Chinese man reading a book. The train wends through Brooklyn's neighborhood-- Coney Island, Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Midwood, Borough Park, Kensington, Windsor Terrace, Park Slope, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and DUMBO-- so the train carried a remarkable variety of people. Just as remarkable was that it seems to be a last vestige of book-reading in the US. Sure, a lot of people were staring at their phone, but the lack of service seems to have driven others to the old-school ways.

Wiesel was 15 when the Hungarians turned over half a million Jews to the German machinery of death. He traveled through several concentration and extermination camps with his father, only to have his father die after months of torment. The horrors he witnessed are nearly unspeakable, but it is important and remarkable that he spoke them.

In the course of the book, Wiesel sees the worst of humanity, and it leads him away from the God that had been at the center of his life: "But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy."

Many have read Night,  but fewer know that the autobiographical book (Wiesel calls it his "deposition") is the first in a trilogy. The second book, Dawn, is a novel which carries the story in a fictional direction during and after the holocaust. The third book, Day, is also a fictional account of the same person, who is now in New York City and is hit by a cab. It is an odd trajectory, to go from truth in such a grounded, horrifying way, on to imagined, later outcomes. Or maybe it isn't. Don't we all do that, at times? We process the worst things by imagining not a remaking of the core event, but ourselves. It is a way of survival, of coming out to meaning. We cannot deny that there was a Holocaust, but we sometimes imagine ways we could transcend the horrors that people-- even ourselves-- can do. It is a way of finding hope. When I arrived in Manhattan, I set to my work with greater focus.

As I finished a particularly grueling passage of the book, I wanted to turn to the Hasidic man next to me and hear his thoughts. He was two inches away, his tall black hat inclined towards his own book. How could his book about God co-exist with this one? He had a way. But I did not ask.

Here in Minnesota, the lakes are sparkling, and throngs of people will soon be flying around them on bikes. The rains have brought everything to a brilliant green, and there is a faint scent of smoke from barbecues over the lawns. How do these go together under one God?

That, I don't know.