Just keep going.
I am not one who tries to retrofit a solution, to suggest how someone else could be saved from pain. I’ve thought of it as “minding my own business” — which is something that may have come from the Swedish introversion or Southern manners or some hybrid that includes that mash-up with a steely shot of Biblical instruction.
The idea that I’ve had anything to offer in the realm of life advice was pretty much a joke for more than half my life, considering my own puny foresight, faulty action plans, and an atrophy that caused a metaphorically undeveloped spine until my forties.
Only now, decades later, can I say that I have advice to offer and only then to those who may have echoes of my experience in theirs — younger women especially — and random souls who have slow metabolisms for basic problem solving, critical thinking, and some good ole’ twentieth-century common sense.
I am still envious of young people who have their shit together so many years before I did. Just finishing Etty Hillesum’s diary jarred those feelings loose once more. A woman in her late twenties in Holland, 1941–43, Etty wrote with spectacular abandon: she confessed, adored, questioned, retracted, dreamed, grieved, hoped, rationalized, reconciled…all in notebooks that were to her as oxygen. Her passion for Rilke, her literary scholarship, her academic and artistic enthusiasm sat on the same shelf as treasures from nature. And like Anne Frank, who was her contemporary, though more than a decade younger, Etty marveled at trees, the sky…and even when she wrote from Westerbork labor camp, she leaned toward the beauty of the heath, the precious uniqueness of each face, each story. She bound herself to be the one who would hold the impossible duty of witnessing as much as she could as truly as she could.
Etty watched the evil march in and steal away human dignity, yet she still aspired to bend to her knees, to pray. She lost her beloved teacher and companion and carried on. She bore horror and hate and carried on. She talked to the God of her conceptions, setting religion aside. Her most private holdings she delivered with a purity of intention and honesty of voice that spoke in gentle reverence to the younger self still living in my older self. Etty embodied a nurturing voice as a survival tool, a gift to the future, a healing in the world.
Several years ago after hearing Richard Rohr speak of her in a context I can’t recall, I obtained a used edition of her diary. Her words stood bound beside others shelved and not yet read. I chided myself with each passing year that I had not lifted it to even open its first pages. But the day for Etty’s diary finally arrived. There is no mistaking the impulse, what I felt as her invitation, that caused me to lift the glass front of my grandparent’s barrister bookshelf, to pull Etty’s diary into the air, and place it on my bedside table. On a rainy March morning, I plumped my purple pillows, set my coffee beside me and opened the diary, which was to become my morning companion as the days lightened to the spring equinox and through the first days of April.
As I read, I took photos of certain pages, underlined words and sentences, reread them, bracketed passages. cried, made audio recordings of entire entries. Wrapped myself in her voice. From all those cullings I will pull excerpts. I will fashion from them found poems. Share them here.
My hope is that Etty’s words will rise like an elixir from the page, that she will breathe again in a voice that whispers wisdom to us in the challenge of our now.
…that doesn’t mean you have to be halfhearted
you must make a stand
wax indignant at times
but indiscriminate hate … is a sickness of the soul
If…I began to hate people
then I would know that my soul was sick
and I should have to look for a cure as quickly as possible
Etty Hillesum, 15 March 1941, Amsterdam
