A Guiding Rule

The more I encounter nonfiction work, whether it be memoir, essay, or any other sub-genre, the more I find the implementation of a "guiding rule" necessary. No rule can tell us how we can or should write a story, or what we should call the writing we produce, but I think the words that Joseph Hurka writes on the final page of his memoir, Fields of Light, can serve as this important axiom for nonfiction writers. 

He writes, "I am haunted by the story I have come to these pages to tell. Throughout my writing, my father's voice has been with me, giving me a simple message that now I thoroughly understand. Serve the truth, he says: resist all trespass on the spirit" (159). 

Serve the truth—let the search for truth guide us in our inquiries; let truth be more important even, than the beauty of the prose that serves as the vehicle for uncovering that truth; let the inquiry be led by a reverence for the truth and its power to restore, to remedy. 

Resist all trespass on the spirit—let discomfort of the soul, too, serve as our guide; let the intuitive resistance that arises in the face of atrocities and inhumanity fuel us; let us listen to and protect our instinctual beings.

In the section where Hurka describes his meeting with Father Maly, he shares with us many of the principles that Maly embraces. Of those principles, one is particularly similar to the one I mentioned above—to resist all trespass on the spirit. 

Hurka writes, "The communist era had offered his countrymen the lesson of 'knowing personal conviction through sacrifice,' he said, and the opportunity to 'win certain spiritual values.' It deepened for all of them the meaning of their current freedom. Freedom, according to Maly, didn't mean 'simply to do what one wants, but to accept personal limitations: then one is really free.' One must find a place inside, he seemed to suggest, where oppressive forces, whatever they may be, are not allowed entrance into the soul—and thus one gains true personal freedom" (135).

This power is perhaps the greatest power a person can obtain. It is a power that Nadezhda Mandelstam certainly carried and utilized throughout her entire life. That no one can take this away from a person, no matter if all of your physical belongings have been stolen, no matter if your body itself has been manipulated and abused, is a fact to survive by. If one always knows that they have the ability to protect their spirit and therefore knows that they will always have in their possession the most important piece of themselves, perhaps one can survive atrocities such as those we see inflicted upon Hurka's father and the people of Czechoslovakia.

Those Czech people, both young and old, have done more than survive the communist era as individuals. As a people, they survive alongside their history, and that history—still very alive and present in their everyday lives—continues to affect them (Hurka's father especially). On page 130, Hurka writes of the 1989 protest, of history's persistence: "Most of these students could hardly have been born then, and yet they marched as if they felt every moment of the last forty years in their bones." History collides with the present, neither present nor past pushing the other away but rather, in the most natural and necessary of ways, feeding one another. 

If history were to suddenly disappear, vanish—irreversibly erased, no longer influencing the present—there would be no hope of stopping the past from repeating itself. The present needs the past as the past needs the present. We need memory to know the past, and to then understand it. If we are wiped of our memory, of our ability to claim history, we are bound to live the past over and over and over again. 

But, I might add: if we are wiped of memory, if we live and relive the past, how will we even know that what we are experiencing is what we have already experienced again and again? Will we, like Hurka, suddenly feel as though we’ve been connected to something—a country, a person, a belief—for longer than is logically possible? Will we wake one day and think, I know this people, this place, this feeling. I know that I know what it was like to walk this land two hundred years ago, but I do not know how this can be true. 

And will that feeling be enough?