Under This Blazing Light Read Free

the anxious father right across London, unfalteringly, saying confidently from time to time ‘turn left here’, ‘mind the steps’, ‘careful, there’s a ramp’. When they reached the hospital the man asked the stranger how he could possibly find his way through such a dense fog. ‘Darkness and fog do not bother me,’ the other replied, ‘because I am blind.’
    The connection between the world of events and the world of words in books is so subtle as to defy definition, and that is why I try to approach it through parables. A writer sometimes has dual loyalties, and sometimes he has to operate like an undercover agent. He is a more-or-less respectable citizen of the kingdom of events, conscientious and law-abiding, paying his taxes and expressing opinions, doing occasional good deeds and so forth. And yet his mind is on the words that could be used to talk about the events, rather than on the events themselves.
    The two kingdoms are governed by different and even conflicting laws. In the kingdom of events one is supposed to prefer good to evil, the helpful to the harmful. In the kingdom of words there is a different kind of preference, which I am not ready to name. I shall merely insist that it is a different preference.
    In the world of events there are matters that need to be sorted out, problems demanding solutions, objectives waiting to be realised, challenges calling for effort, roles awaiting their hero. The world of words is a place of awkward, lonely choices, slightly ridiculous in their earnestness and anguish, choices between possible expressions created out of pain and remoteness, far away from generalisations. From here all events look rather odd and fussy, ludicrously touching, like a children’s game before dusk. All of this from the window of a witness who is a grouch, a layabout, a peeping Tom, an eavesdropper, who pieces his books together from remnants of the material from which events themselves are fashioned, burrowing among shreds and snatches. Literature, whether it is dealing with a disturbed student who murders a smelly old woman pawnbroker or with the exploits of kings and giants of days of yore, is always in the mixed multitude, in the margins of the caravan.
    Of course it is easy to roll out the well-known exceptions, such as Bialik’s ‘In the City of Slaughter’, a poem that gave rise - so they say - to a great historic movement; or Brenner’s stories, from which the men of action drew the phrase ‘long live humanistic Hebrew labour’, by means of which they changed the situation somewhat; or the short story ‘Hirbet Hiz’a’ by S. Yizhar, that branded its mark on the flesh of events, and may even have curbed the men of action to some small extent. But these are only apparent exceptions. There is actually far less and also far more in the poem ‘In the City of Slaughter’ than the organisers of the Jewish self-defence movement found in it. Its main point is not the denunciation of the killers coursing like horses, or the smirched honour of the Jewish people fouled in the flight of mice or the hideouts of bedbugs, but in the protest about the way the world order, the laws that guide the cosmos, are perverted and corrupted. The sun rises in accordance with the laws of nature, the acacia flowers according to its fixed rules, and the slaughterer following, like the acacia and the sun, the laws of creation, slaughters. This is not a specifically Zionist or national complaint, but a metaphysical protest that has only a slight, indirect connection with events. Similarly, Brenner’s stories are not really about the relationship between a generation and events, solutions, etc., but about the relationship between an individual and his own anguish and shame and inaction. Even the short stories of S. Yizhar, if we do not approach them through slogans, are not about relations between Jews and Arabs or between sensitive and insensitive Jews; the real point of‘Hirbet Hiz’a’ is how