Interwoven (my apologies to Katinka :-)

I’m reading a new book. OK, I’ve read about a dozen new books in the past week or so, but this one wins best of show - “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood, who is always a pretty good bet, literature-wise. Highly recommended, but you may have to read it more than once to get everything.

Here’s one of the narrator’s nuggets of wisdom: “In life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell-burst, the plummet of the car from the bridge.”

Maybe she’s right. A tragedy isn’t something that happens in an accidental or a premeditated moment; it’s not something you can capture with a snapshot. A tragedy is messy and complicated and almost never has neat seams that divide it from the joyous or the mundane. In a way, I think, our lives are imbued with tiny tragedies, waiting to intertwine themselves with other details and cause the major, identifiable heartbreaks.

But happiness is equally omnipresent and equally elusive. Even living through a tragedy, there are still moments of levity and love. A well-told tragedy has an element of beauty in it, that seed of good literature. You can tell a coherent story of one great tragic thing, but we all know that in between all those challenges and tears are the shiny happy moments, the elements of other tragedies and other joys, weaving themselves together.

A good life, or a good story, is a tapestry of the joys and the sadnesses, the great triumphs and the great tragedies. It weaves them into a whole. Without the one or the other, life is only partial, unwoven, ripped apart at the seams. In our wholeness, the threads mingle.