Journeys through history in literature.

Richard Flanagan wrote the rivers and seas around the isolation of Tasmania, of the histories of the new colonies intertwining with the present day. Of convicts and of travellers, of families and of sons and daughters. Of the three books I have had of him, only one I have kept–the first edition of Gould’s Book of Fish, with its rare and unusual pictures and a different colour for every chapter.

Recently I borrowed a copy of Death of a River Guide from a traveller and had a read through it, letting the words rush over me. A book that is hard to put down once you are in the flow of it–I remembered that well. An auspicious debut that predicted the author’s themes. All of that literary stuff.

Sometimes things can only be explored in fiction because they are too difficult to approach through the sober, hard lens of non-fiction. Cut to Prague, scene of my new home. Reflections on Prague by Ivan Margolius, son of a man who was murdered during the Communist era. He intersperses recollections about his father with the details about what life was like in post-war Czechoslovakia, with recollections from prisoners themselves. Like the Gulag Archipelago, hard, disconcerting, real.

History as well as the future brought me here, and yet the exploration never ends the deeper one sinks beneath the surface and deciphers the stories that are told through the lenses of literature, of history, of art, of music.  It isn’t that I am perfectly secure and confident in knowing my path; indeed, often I am riddled with doubts. Seeking out mentors and answering questions still unanswered is the challenge of my lifetime, and in context, nowhere near as hard or as difficult as the moral and ethical questions that intellectual predecessors have had to face in the past. I can’t speak for their individual circumstances, I can only respect their existence.