Earlier in 2014, I began this book column with great hope. A piece on literature and borders — rather, literature that questions and dismantles geographical boundaries. I was inspired by artist Francis Alÿs performing ‘The Green Line’— holding a can of leaking paint, he strolled along the armistice border in Jerusalem — articulating the border as an arbitrary mark on the ground. Months later, I write this as human rights are being violated in Gaza, as bodies fall out of the sky in Ukraine; something is rotten in the state of the world.

While we do what we can — attend protests, share images and articles, hit retweet and like innumerable times, perhaps make a donation — we need, at times, to reach for comfort. Instinctively, for me, it is literature.

At first, anger drove me to poetry, for poetry is anger’s swiftest, most impeccable, vehicle. The sad, eloquent Mahmoud Darwish, whose ‘Silence for the sake of Gaza’ will disquiet your heart: “[Gaza] is oranges that explode, children without a childhood, aged men without an old age, and women without desire.”

Or the brave, spit-fire enraged spoken word artist Rafeef Ziadah performing ‘We teach life, sir!’ to a pin-drop silent audience: “Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound bites and word limits.” Or Refaat Alareer, a young academic, who wrote ‘A Poem from Gaza to Israel’ with stark uncommon simplicity: “I am you. I am your past. And killing me, You kill you.”

But at thousand deaths and rising (many of whom are children), poetry ceases to make sense. The only rhythm is of gunfire, the cadence of bombs falling. And these words, perfectly placed and articulate, despite being impassioned, suddenly seem inadequate.

I turned to South African writer Koos Kombuis’ ‘Tipp-Ex Sonate’, a poem entirely bereft of text. Composed of brackets, quotation marks, an exclamation mark and a question mark, it serves as a protest against all forms of censorship and oppression.

Yet when anger wanes, it’s often replaced by despair.

In prose, I sought unintelligibility and incomprehension. In Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, I found a fragmentation so complete that the world could not be otherwise. The book, a broken mirror. A novel in which it’s hard to finish a sentence, in which most sentences remain unfinished. “See. My one act. I might be a person. Beneath the.” In Hemingway’s ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’, at the heart of the short story, I encountered a void. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name… deliver us from nada; pues nada.” From TS Eliot, I filched the coda to ‘The Hollow Men’, repeating madly like a child: “This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Comfort, though, nestled somewhere quite unexpected.

At the bottom of my bookshelf, a slim text, easily lost among the others — Henry David Thoreau’s Walden . I hadn’t read it in years, and even then not for the most poetic of purposes — while studying for an A-GRE in Literature, when I once toyed with PhD plans. I’d picked up a copy in Waterstones, stashed not under ‘Philosophy’ but the rather vacuous sounding ‘Nature Writing’. Written in 1854, Walden is, admittedly, dated, in ways that can make you wince — indigenous communities are referred to as ‘savages’ — or charm you — “For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.” This memoir — part social experiment, manual for self-reliance, satire, personal declaration of independence, and spiritual discovery — details Thoreau’s experiences over two years, living in a cabin he built by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. It isn’t the easiest to read, littered with elaborate, allegorical metaphors and complex, extended sentences, but I found within its pages a certain quietness. A paring down. A purging. An encounter as refreshing as a summery dip in a cool, isolated pond. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” he asks.

I find I have no answer.

Some lines ring eerily prophetic — “Every child begins the world anew, and loves to stay outdoors, in cold or sunshine”— while others are quietly revelatory, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” The book is filled with birdsong, the (un)silence of the forest, the rhythm of planting, growth, and harvest. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” Living is so dear.

Re-reading Walden made me realise that we, many of us, are modern-day transcendentalists, believing in the goodness of people. Of this, we must be often reminded. Thoreau’s offering is a return to spring, a rejuvenation: “Renew yourself completely each day; do it again, and forever again.” Remember, as he says, morning brings back the heroic ages.

( Janice Pariat’s novel 'Seahorse' will be published in November 2014; >@janicepariat )

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