Atonement Crisis

Reading has always been my hobby of sorts. If boredom should ever befall me, I always made sure that it would never surprise me bookless. Going to the library was to me what going shopping was to many other girls my age. Still is. The mere act of taking home a shiny new book to devour fills me with unimaginable glee. In an instant, an insecure young woman is transformed into a euphoric young child holding a huge chocolate bar, impatiently awaiting the moment in which she will pore over her new acquisition, smearing herself with a new exciting story. My pursuit of books soon expanded to one of writing, as I longed to have this power of words, this alluring power of enchantment, with which I was imbued constantly as I read these stories. I longed to one day spellbind my readers as much as my favorite authors did to me. But quite recently, I have hit a metaphorical block. A crisis of sorts, brought about my recent reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

Atonement is a book on the power of words. Briony, a thirteen year old girl witnesses something she does not understand, quite possibly a crime, and being an aspiring storyteller with a vividly avid imagination, attempts to put the pieces together as a way to try to explain what happened. But as it turns out, Briony is dead wrong and accuses an innocent man of a crime he did not commit. Or is she really? This is the question the book asks: what differentiates the truth from a lie? And where is that line (if there is a line) drawn, separating real life from fiction?

When asked about what we had read by our teacher, the general consensus in my English class was that no one really liked Briony. Hysterical, hyper-orderly, and slightly spoiled, Briony simply did not appeal to them. But to me, it was as if I was looking into a mirror. Briony’s slightly melodramatic play and bossing around of her cousins on how to properly act brings back to me the vague recollection of bossing around my cousins. I was also trying to make a slightly melodramatic movie. Now, I have never condemned anyone with my stories like Briony did, but as a child, I was slightly prone to hysterics, and obsessively insistent upon the idea that good was good and bad was bad (despite my constant doubts suggesting that it might be otherwise). That was how I’d been taught the world worked, and I believed it with vigorous enthusiasm. Bad guys could be easily distinguished by their physical deformities, devilish horns, and some sort of evil expression stamped on their faces. And the good guys were the beautiful exemplary specimens of the human race, always steadfast and true. Nothing bad ever happened to them, and justice triumphed as the bad guys always got their fair share of punishment. Would ISIS even exist if the bad guys had trademark devil horns and general ugliness, and stood out like sore thumbs?

So you see, writing has always been a subject of curiosity to me, and I often debate whether I should call myself a writer. Atonement heightened this debate, as like Briony, I often find myself with melodramatic characters and stories. The only stories that I have are those which I have lived myself, taken from experience rather than imagination. Needless to say, I am not satisfied with this. Experience has taught me that everything is not as simple and orderly as I’d sometimes like it to be, and I’m absolutely fine with that. Writing about the mostly unknown concept of evil interests me far more than writing about good, which has been drilled into my consciousness from the moment I was born. Stories have climaxes, and a room full of perfectly virtuous gods would never reach a climax. Now, imagine Zeus and Hera in a room together and you’d definitely get some thunder. After all,  the Universe itself did not begin with peace but with a disruption of that peace: a  Big Bang.

But soon enough, I find myself with the infinite probabilities of character, and why limit myself to my own point of view if there is so much richness and diversity? Yet to do this, I would have to try to understand people, just as Briony tries to do in a story she writes from three different points of view. As Briony writes the same story over and over to atone for her crime, I weave my stories in an attempt to further understand the world, myself, and others. But a question posed by Atonement is, to what extent can we understand others?  

After reading Atonement, I have begun to observe people more carefully, what they say, do, think. I’ll never know silly details like  how my sister bears to touch her uncomfortably large callous on her middle finger, or the reason behind a friend’s negative attitude towards Magical Realism; just as I’ll never know exactly what the reasoning of a murderer is or fully understand the reasons behind a lie. I can only grasp the surface of the eternal struggle that is living. A living that is not confined to good and evil, but is mostly somewhere in between. Now, the real challenge wouldn’t be to write about good or evil, but about the relationship between the two and  try to understand its complex workings. Well, better said than done.

I might never come to terms with the meaning of my existence, to be at one with myself, to reconcile my perception of reality and reality itself. Word by word written on my tabula rasa I can explore and modify my own reality, stretching its pioneering edges far into the unknown. Perhaps I will never know the Truth behind all the debris of opinion and clouds of bias. I’ll be one more voice in an already saturated vacuum, another book on a shelf, inches away from Truth but not quite there. Now I ask myself why we read and write books, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t read and write books for immediate answers, we read and write them for the questions they make us ask. A book is not an idea, it’s a process. One that a writer goes through, and close behind, comes the reader. And I realize that the thrill is not in the book itself but in the active experience of  a fiery discovery and reflection. And these questions, these bonfires, are eventually appeased by science, religion, or any other form of atonement, and even by the same storyteller who lighted it.  But which is better, the question or answer? The anticipation or the reassurance? I know now why I’m a writer. Not for the sole purpose of digging out gold nuggets of Truth. My purpose isn’t to understand, to grasp a concept that might just as well be impossible to grasp. My purpose is to try and enter the boundless world of possibility. Answering questions and washing away fires is not my trade.

Lighting them is.