For whom the bells don’t toll

The great Roman philosopher king Marcus Aurelius’s book Meditations was read a hundred times by Wen Jiabao, the former prime minister of China. JK Rowling, the writer of the Harry Potter series, calls it her inspiration. Former American president Theodore Roosevelt describes it as his leading light. And the four-star American general James Mattis deems it compulsory in the warfare. The list of admirers goes on and on.

What remarkable characteristic does this book have that its significance has not diminished even after centuries? Generally, people consider that besides wisdom, the distinct aspect of the book is that it is a personal journal of the Roman King, Marcus Aurelius, not a book written for people. In these ‘journals’, Marcus is talking to himself in the darkness of night.

Being the most powerful man and holding his status above all, King Marcus could not lay bare his sentiments and thoughts on others. He, therefore, started journaling so that he might improve his vision. As a result, when those journals were published in book form in 1558-59, they drew an overwhelming response from all. The distinct beauty of the book lies in its spontaneous freshness. Because, it was not meant to empress the particular circles of society; rather through it, a person though seems to be talking to himself in solitude, yet his broader focus is his people.

A research report, ‘What we write may not be what we say’, by eminent researchers of various American universities, spells out that speaking and writing are noted differently in different parts of the human brain. Suzanne David, a management thinker at Harvard Medical School, essays her emotions and reflections for the Haward Business Review, which she reckons is a better practice than in the vogue. Thus the questions: what makes journaling so important and what is the journaling of emotions and how is it accomplished? The objectives of journaling may vary as such: plan out goals; write poetry, drama, and stories for exposition of one’s creativity; and ink the pages with the day’s experience. Whereas, if the emotions and feelings rooming in the subconscious are expressed in writing, it may unburden it in a big way. And successive steadiness would keep it safe from effects and after-effects. Because, if feelings are not shared, they begin to eat the body slowly, and cause unimaginable harm to sentiments.

The most horrible tragedy of our society is that its people are used to enduring injustice and unfairness without protests as if they are physically impaired. I worry if they go on accepting likewise, they may implode one day. If they do not, then the words of Yeats “the persistent persecution turns a heart stone” are appropriate for them.

In contrast, people who stood up and scaled the walls of the Nazi concentration camps, are not only remembered with reverence but also eulogised for their courage of challenging the callous criminals in detention. One such courageous soul was Elie Wiesel, the writer of Night, who, just a moment before the collective extinction, escaped from the hill of Moriah, where more than seven hundred thousand helpless people were subjected to a terrible extinction. He was just 17 then, but he preserved in his memory the brutality to narrate it to the world so when he was given the Nobel Prize for peace, at the Swedish Academy, he in his address emphasised: “That what is necessary for existence is equally essential for its memory, however, it depends on us how we fulfill this responsibility.” As, great historian Simon Dubnov, who was our guardian till his last moment, kept advising his fellows in the ghetto of Riga consistently: “Friends, write down everything you have seen and experienced here.” His words were attentively heard and made innumerable would-be dead history and journal writers whose efforts would be a beckon of light for people everywhere. Since giving witness to someone in those days was unthinkable, most of them left their testimonies in the forms of poems, letters, journals and snippets of novels. Some of these are well known to the world, while others are yet to be made public.

Accordingly, what is being given out to the wretched in this realm of God, first, should be written by them; but if they cannot, it ought to be voiced by those who are witnessing their plight. This may sound parallel to the tribulations of the captives of the erstwhile concentration camps. But in our case, the situation is grimmer because here the executioner is our own.

Ernest Hemingway, the legendary writer, begins his novel, For whom the Bell Tolls, with the following famous lines by John Donne, “Nobody is an island and everyone is a piece of the continent, if sea sweeps away even a boulder from it, the continent is devoid of a portion of it. Similarly, humanity also gets smaller for me, when one of my friends or dear ones departs.” Let alone a person, here a populace of the poor is set to be swept away by the vicious currents, yet nobody is taking notice of the evolving tragedy; perhaps because they do not matter in the larger scheme of things. Since they are insignificant in the eyes of the aristocracies, they would not be existing for people beyond the mountains, and would perish from the memory imperceptibly. It’s because they are not as fortunate as the captives of the concentration camps were, who had chroniclers to write about their drudgeries while here the deprived have nothing such as if they were writing on water. Now seeable and in moment effaced by surging waves.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2022.

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