Love Searches – Creative Responses To Terror

I continue to slowly and carefuly read the diary of Anne Frank.  I am also reading Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise. 

I have read Elie Wiesel’s Night and some of his other novels.  I have studied Schindler’s List many times.  And I have read numerous other accounts and histories of that tragic period.

It is fascinating to observe and to try to ascertain how people choose to live and respond to looming and indefinite dangerous circumstances.  Some people choose to become more creative in diverse ways.

Reading Anne Frank, I get the consistent impression she wrote each entry with a mindfulness that each entry may be her last.  Conversely, Irène Némirovsky, when faced with similar persecution and pending doom, chose to begin a 5 novel series, with sweeping and patient narratives. 

Both creative styles are defiant and beautiful. 

The first style, Anne’s, is more focused on being as honest and direct as possible, with terror ever present and knocking at the door.  It’s as if she’s always writing with the knowledge that literally her time to write may run out sometime that day. 

The second style, Irene’s, is honorable, humane, and defiant by choosing to start something large, long, and epic, refusing to live as if tomorrow will be her last day – refusing to allow her enemies to keep her from telling the fully-fleshed out kinds of stories she wanted her life and her work to be able to tell.

From Anne Frank’s diary: 

“I asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts.  Jacque refused.  I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did.  Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy.  Sometimes I find them so exquisite I have to struggle to hold back my tears.  If only I had a girlfriend!” – Thursday, January 6, 1944.

“The sun is shining, the sky is deep blue, there’s a magnificent breeze, and I’m longing – really longing – for everything:  conversation, freedom, friends, being alone, I long . . . to cry!  I feel as if I were about to explode.  I know crying would help, but I can’t cry.  I’m restless.  I walk from one room to another, breathe through the crack in the window frame, feel my heart beating as if to say, “Fulfill my longing at last . . .”
     I think spring is inside me.  I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul.  I have to force myself to act normally.  I’m in a state of utter confusion, don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do.  I only know that I’m longing for something . . . Yours, Anne”  – Saturday, February 12, 1944.

© All rights reserved by the respective artists.

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Love Searches

Love searches for creative ways to oppose cycles of terror
Love searches for ways to oppose imposed silences and censorship
Love searches for ways to reveal the false assumptions that lead to fears
Love searches for ways to teach alternatives to violence

When faced with a problem,
Love begins to search anew

Love searches

~ OneMoreOption

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Anne Frank on Wikipedia

Irène Némirovsky on Wikipedia

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