Mark Matousek

When people are in need, you must be present. When people suffer, you must let them know you__e suffering with them._ __he good side of bad acts?_ I say. __ would not say that from horror comes goodness. That would be giving horror too much credit. But goodness prevails in spite of horror.

Survival requires a dose of madness__hat cynics call __oping against hope___ust like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. __urvivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us,_ observed one Holocaust expert. __heir will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst.

As one widow put it to me, __trength doesn__ mean being able to stand up to anything, but being able to crawl on your belly a long, long time before you can stand up again.

joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life__ terms

You go on with your life, because life goes on,_ says Isabel. __ou see this in anyone who has survived a traumatic situation. My own daughter died, for example._ Her only daughter, Paula Frias, died of porphyria in 1992 at the age of twenty-seven. __t first you think you can__ live with this,_ says the author, who just turned sixty-five. __t__ just too much. Then life begins to take over. One morning you wake up and you want to eat chocolate. Or walk in the woods. Or open a bottle of wine. You get back up on your feet._ __hen you can, right?_ __ou have no choice!_ Isabel insists. __ou cannot let the bullies keep you on the floor! I have been on my knees a thousand times, and I always get up.

The French have a term for this brazenness: je m__n foutisme, the brave art of not giving a damn.

Reinvention is my philosophy, if you want to call it that,_ he says, looking out the window. __magination is the key to creating a life that is ever new._ Stanley turns his eyes to me. __e are each of us a changeling person,_ he says. __e are not going to be the same decade after decade. Wisdom results from confronting not only one__ desires and capacities but also one__ limitations._ __he Layers,_ one of Stanley__ best-loved poems, is his crystallization of this wisdom. I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road is precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: __ive in the layers, not on the litter._ Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

joy is not just about being happy. Joy is a rigorous spiritual practice of saying yes to life on life__ terms,

The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts._ I have trouble imagining that this éminence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. __here__ a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this,_ he tells me. __t says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects._ He pauses for a moment to let this sink in. __f course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows,_ Wiesel says. __ut there is no way out of what we__e seen._ __nd how do we live with what we know?_ I ask __ow can we live with not knowing?

Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.