Patrick James Response: Second Half

[Sondra Perl]

#786

Near the end of “On Austrian Soil”, the memoir embraces a provocative inquiry: “The Question of Forgiveness” (197); and it’s a question I’ve been thinking while reading most of the memoir. How is forgiveness possible? After relating to her friends and family the story of meeting Margaret’s in-laws, Professor Perl faces incredulity and criticism. “My friends are convinced they are right,” she says. “I am the fool” (197). Foolishness, stupidity—one of many reasons to avoid forgiveness. Nobody wants to look stupid. And perhaps it is important to really take this claim seriously, to examine the inherent foolishness in forgiveness.

Experience is at the root of learning. Memory gives our lives coherency—narratives of joy and pain. And consistency keeps us from feeling like we’re free falling. If someone hurts us, we label him or her the enemy, so that we will remember, so that we will not get hurt again. If anything, it’s a survival tactic. A way to prevent future pain and suffering. But, forgiveness ignores the weight of experience, rejects the safety of memory in favor of risk—it opens the self up to the possibility of more pain. And at the heart of this there is a holy foolishness, the sacred ability of human beings to imagine healing and creativity in spaces currently dominated by pain and destruction.

And part of that healing requires a willingness to look fully into one’s own destructive capacities. Near the end of Professor Perl’s memoir, she writes: “I realized I that I could no longer condemn all Germans and Austrians. My trips to Austria have shown me that I can no longer identify only with the victims. I now ask in what ways I am linked to the perpetrators” (198). As disturbing as empathy can be in this case, it is also something that mends broken connections and heals relationships that have been destroyed.

But the difficult work of forgiveness mostly resides with those that come after the atrocities. “This is the task that falls to the next generation,” Professor Perl writes, “finding places to stand as witnesses and as friends” (202). And perhaps the younger generations can afford to risk foolishness, simply because they are not so weighted down by the heft of memory.

Considering foolishness and forgiveness together reconfigures their meanings for me—it forces me to lay aside my assumptions of what it means to be right and wrong, foolish or wise. And it also exposes the more radical aspects of forgiveness. To step out of a received narrative of crime and punishment, to choose forgiveness over resentment, is an evolutionary moment. It overhauls expectations, and breaks forward into new territory, new discovery.

[Anonymous]

#805

Hi Patrick — I think that’s well said. And I think that work of discovery, empathy, and acknowledgement of our own flaws is what makes forgiveness so unexpectedly private or internal. I think about the language of forgiveness as an active, transitive verb, how it requires a receiver and a direction to be projected toward (“Words of forgiveness are not mere words spoken into a void. They are performative: speaking them alters me” [200]), but really it’s an inner transformation that resonates within the forgiver and cycles back to strongly affect the forgiver, as well (“…Forgiveness radically affects the life of the one who forgives” [200-201]).

[Sondra Perl]

#841

A beautiful and profound rendering of forgiveness. I love “holy foolishness.”

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