You Are What You Read 2
Posted by Anne on Jun 30, 2012 in Writing | 11 commentsI’ve always liked the writing of Os Guinness. He never shies away from the difficult questions. In Unspeakable he tackles the question of how a good God can permit atrocities to continue throughout history.
Towards the very end of the book, he relates the story of Philip Hallie. A Jewish boy from Chicago, he grew up in a world of arbitrary cruelty. After the Second World War, he left the army and studied philosophy, eventually to pursue a lifelong analysis of the nature of the Holocaust.
You are what you read.
Hallie’s major work was highly acclaimed but inevitably it drew him deeper into depression and violent, restless anger. After a frightening confrontation with his family one night, he went out in order to try to walk off his black mood. Arriving at his office, he sat down in despair. He realised he had become the very thing he had read about for so long: the face of cruelty was not only a Nazi doctor cutting off a Jewish boy’s toe or ear without anaesthesia, it was his own.
As he sat there, appalled, his eyes lighted on a bookshelf devoted to the French Resistance. Recalling that those stories of heroism always made him feel better, he went to the shelf and there discovered a small book he could not remember reading. He quickly realised why. It was not about force. By the end of the third page, his face was itching. He found his cheeks were wet with tears. At first he thought despair had overwhelmed him because he had not cried for decades. But as he went on, he realised that the heart he’d hardened as he’d read about atrocity over the years was cracking open at the surprise of rare ‘pure goodness’.
The story that changed Philip Hallie’s life was about a tiny village Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in central France. Despite an SS battalion stationed a short distance away and the shadow of death hanging over them, the Huguenot villagers had banded together and opened their homes to save thousands of Jewish children. Later when Hallie began to lecture about Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, he would encounter people who had been saved by the efforts of the villagers. And, as Os Guinness points out, perhaps the last Jewish child saved by those French villagers was in fact Hallie himself.
We are what we read.
Philip Hallie recognised this. He saw the truth of it for himself: you cannot subject yourself to a reading diet of unremitting cruelty and come away unscathed. Yet we’re told so often that an unremitting reading diet of despair has no effect on YA readers because hopelessness reflects reality for them. Why give the illusion of hope when there is none?
The failure to recognise that this is a philosophical stance, as much a ‘faith’ as any belief that hope transcends despair, is a curious one. Do writers reflect reality or create it? That’s a question I’d like to tackle next time.
Hi Annie,
Thank you for sharing Philip Hallie’s experience. It’s an awesome story I’d like to add to my collection of evidence as to why literature and stories are powerful. It also gives those of us who write a boost in our motivation. I’ll bookmark this for sure and look forward to your next post, when you tackle that last question you asked.
Blessings,
Paula
Hi Paula,
In your collection of evidence, have you come across other similar anecdotes?
Love this post.
Where were you when the Twitterverse was screaming YA Saves?
They were insisting that the dark themes not only do no harm, but they help. They say their books are full of hope and healing. They say that depressed young people see themselves in the depressed characters in books. And they find hope to keep on living.
My problem is with their understanding of hope and healing. Their books are full of people saving themselves. People conquering eating disorders, maybe. But without God, there is no salvation, so are they helping the young people or hurting them?
Hi Sally
I wasn’t aware of the conversation on Twitter until about a month later. I was staggered by the results of the poll though – that over 89% of people thought the dark themes in YA are helpful…
To a degree that’s true. It is helpful to walk in another person’s shoes and understand their life. But if the only sort of book on offer is about depression and suicide and that becomes your diet, that’s a different story.
Thank you, Annie! I greatly enjoyed this. Beautiful shock to know about the genuine love of this Huguenot village. Wonderful rescue for Philip!
Yes, it matters what we read. And it is like feeding YA poison to give them a reading diet of despair. How misguided!
It surprises me how few people have heard of it. But partly that is due to the villagers themselves. They did not tell anyone for many years, because they did not consider they had done anything remarkable.
Yes, they would think this way! That they were simply Christ’s servants doing what they ought to do.
Thanks for that story. Not only what people read, Annie but what they watch on TV or at the movies or listen to affects them. I am appalled at some of the rubbish on TV that people regularly watch. It can’t help but have an effect.
Annie – great post. Love that story. Yes Dale I am with you about TV. Our TV is hidden away so that we are not tempted to just switch it on. It is only brought out by ‘invitation’. I think our home is a peaceful place as a result and our teens are not watching mindless drivel (well, only on occasion). – Asta x
Thanks for showing the scary truth. I was a Children’s Book Council judge in the early 90s when all the dark fantasy arrived in the form of magic realism. Now even the holocaust appears in picture books. Where to next?!
Annie you are a winner of my humorous devotional Tyrannosaurus Wrecks: Tips to Avoid Life’s Pits!
Blessings,
Wendy
Thanks for sharing this Anne, for me it was a great reminder that I need to find those quiet moments to fill myself with good reports of Gods invasion in the world. I work with the children of prisoners and their families , and as part of my work read a lot of material which accounts the plight of these children.
Similarly I have found , (like the villagers) …glorious stories of Gods love to prisoners can go untold because people “did not consider they had done anything remarkable.”
i look forward to your next reflection .