Messenger for the ten thousandth: an interview with Elie Wiesel
Cargas, Harry James
ELIE WIESEL ON THE WRITER`S CRAFT Messenger for...
...I am not strong...
...The problem was to travel in India...
...They are sacred texts, beautiful I will come back to it when I finish the whole book...
...writing...
...For my book on the Bible, or the Talmud or Then, honestly, I realized that I will never understand India...
...thousandth...
...How could a Jew need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: understand so much about Indian mysticism...
...So, yes, literature and pain are inherently linked to one WIESEL: Writing should not be routine...
...But for that unique young man, whom earth-apples...
...ELIE WIESEL ON THE WRITER`S CRAFT Messenger for the '. - ten thousandth HARRY JAMES CARGAS Pain is essential...
...Do you want to say something about the responsibility that you have taken on CARGAS: You chose not to write for a long period of time after as a messenger...
...But really by chance...
...I could write the same free passage on certain ships and planes and I got a free page thirty, forty times...
...It is impossible to write out of happiness...
...ences...
...And not only that: whenever I was WIESEL: Oh no, it's separate...
...Even after the war, I infatuated with them as I used to be then, for this specific was often hungry...
...Yet in saying so, the pain words...
...I'm not saying by miracle now at the end of almost fifty years should find because if I were to say miracle that would mean that God myself here high performed a miracle for me and chose not to perform miracles on springy rungs...
...I have no right to speak for all...
...I have never done anything to stay alive...
...Also, I know it And I didn't want to be used, or to use, or to misuse, or to be will never leave me...
...nation...
...Does the same apply to you...
...When the ten years were up, by coincidence, I met Francois Mauriac who was so helpful to me...
...you different...
...This Indian was a Parsee - of a special while writing, and I listen to music when I write...
...Benot have been the great musical force he is without having cause we are dealing with literature, we have a certain imagisuffered as he did...
...Is that a part of these four hours...
...The four hours are mainly fic- hungry, I took a plane...
...Waiting for the_ gate...
...I could never be a Buddhist, because they are so analyze it...
...At one point I was walking with people in been explored is this: when you were a student at the Sorbonne Calcutta...
...At the end of the month I always had palpita- occasionally, and surely I read them, but I am no longer as tions...
...I met many people and I studied their customs...
...because I was extremely poor...
...India...
...I am not judging, I hope you understand...
...In the beginning it was true...
...There are other occasions - mainly non- was a time when I used to know much of the Upanishads and fiction, essays - when if I feel there is a block, I continue the Vedas and the Gitas almost by heart...
...When I told him that I was a Jew, on and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms...
...I still write my books first of all in longhand, which have written a commentary on the Bible, which I had done I know is anachronistic to many...
...Countless are crippled and discuss the kind of impact which that year had on you...
...So I was much in awe of that tradition, yet I felt it was not for me...
...But that's part of the romantic condition of a reason...
...Everyone, French poet, Alfred de Musset, said that every man is a child...
...Very often I don't keep one page 24 October 1986: 555 of these four hours of fiction...
...Since I rarely speak about my own pain, except author: in my first book Night, I would like to speak about people I don't even know, who are suffering...
...If, as a result of my CARGAS: Irving Halperin, who teaches at San Francisco State writing, you share my pain, then I would fail...
...I grasp a branch and lean By chance, I always happened to be in the eleven thousandth...
...And the fortieth time, all of a sudden I passage to India...
...When you write fiction you cannot do that...
...He said, "I know you are a student and you are poor, and so CARGAS: When do you fit in the book reviews or an article for forth, and you have to go around India...
...So I wanted to go to the end of because it helps the soul ascend to a higher degree...
...As I talked to him and explained to problem...
...Nevertheless, the next day I student...
...gate...
...it invokes the pain that is not there...
...I loved my CARGAS: Do you spend all four hours writing or is some of the being there...
...But one day I met, in a hotel, together with a diplomat friend of mine, a man to whom I was introduced as a young WIESEL: Same thing, creating mentally and writing...
...witz] was in 1945...
...Words are like prostitutes...
...But they had to let out only 10,000, then they'd stop...
...I am the owner of Air the New York Times...
...EPeace Prize, - was recently interviewed in a program at The Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum at Claremont CARGAS: Can you by doing this, in some way help redeem the McKenna College in California by Harry James Cargas.The pain of others...
...What is a CARGAS: Let's talk a little about your routine...
...But it cannot...
...And odd that I, have been the first to die because I was always sick when I was without design, a child...
...And if I had been the ten thousandth, maybe he ladderless to find would be sitting here in my place...
...I say to myself attachment I felt to those texts...
...CARGAS: Something that intrigues me about you which has not I'll tell you why...
...the raphy of Beethoven which says that the composer would hungry...
...It's difficult to jump up, to I come from a tradition which is so different that I could never find the proper book, proper text or source, then copy it and be a Hindu...
...Everything is my own work...
...towards dangling planets...
...To be a student in Paris and not be hungry is wrong...
...the Colombian earthquake victims in the mud...
...I as baby skulls, huge as pre-Edenic continents, cannot speak for all...
...We spoke and he musical background...
...I think student from Paris...
...I am not the for apple-snatching, he was sent type...
...And I came tianity, and Buddhism...
...I wish it could...
...money...
...I type fast with two fingers...
...Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 HARRY JAMES CARGAS, a professor at Webster University in St...
...Often it's not good...
...However, there is a other things...
...I went around India, from ashram to tion...
...and fumble up to air, So who is that ten thousandth...
...Classical music...
...My pain is why I decided not to write [earlier] is simply because I was something that doesn't need to be purged...
...And then when it's ready, domain...
...pain is his teacher...
...Or at least we must say: that You can pray with happiness, but then that prayer itself - person suffers unjustly...
...The methods vary...
...And when I write, if it's there - we call it the him the sources we had in common, that all mystical traditions shekinah (the presence of God) - the shekinah is on your have really the same source...
...In this sense, I accept the term messenger...
...that is why I wanted to go there...
...All I can try to do is to wanted to wait for ten years...
...writing should actually another, intrinsically part off one another...
...What caused you finally to decide that you would write...
...It would be a misused by words...
...In the to think that God beginning, they started with the Jews, and then everybody...
...designed Most of those who left were killed, either on the way, or on the the apple tree trains: starved or shot...
...The non-fiction is later on...
...What follows deals with Wiesel as pain of others...
...I cannot tell you the nevertheless because I have to develop the idea...
...Do you try to prayer of this kind...
...I am not a sportsman...
...For the non-fiction I need a lot ashram...
...I'm behind the times...
...Commonweal: 556 CARGAS: Does your writing in some way help you to purge WIESEL: I knew I would write after ten years...
...But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to in Conversation with Elie Wiesel...
...At times, I keep a page...
...so perfectly to catch on crooked branch, in acute crotch, F OR some reason that had nothing to do with me because I the narrow pointed ladder Adam would invent am not a courageous person, I am not a person of initiative, to ease his labor when as punishment I lived...
...Those of C. W. Pratt you who read Night may remember that the last week in On the Beauty of the Buchenwald was a difficult, despairing, senseless, absurd Universal Order week...
...The gate was open, people were Brown going...
...all suffering is unjust...
...My idea was to take that...
...If not, you would not be able to conjure it...
...The Americans were coming closer, so the Germans decided to evacuate the camp...
...There were 80,000 in the camp Odd and they were going to evacuate 10,000 every day...
...How can I leave that pain...
...means that I choose to be his messenger because he, I hope, now is my messenger...
...You know India is so poor, people are in the streets in you spent a year in India in absolute silence...
...I felt ten years is a mystical number, so I betrayal...
...That [Auschyour pain...
...A them from suffering...
...No one has my Kennebecs: the right to speak for all...
...they give themselves to anyone...
...There I felt at home because I knew the feel the block is removed and I continue...
...I don't speak about my suffering...
...thirty times...
...Which I did...
...To leave meant death...
...That is what I top of that, he was totally flabbergasted...
...And I was always afraid of beatings...
...they move on their little wheelchairs which they themselves fabricate...
...I was working as a journalist for But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering...
...he was so accustomed to it...
...We must curtail it, as best we can...
...Whenever you need to go somewhere, take a plane on this card...
...in his or her own destiny, has a certain relationship with pain...
...the ladder like an arrow pointing me for so many others, so I refuse the word miracle in this context...
...But WIESEL: You know I don't speak about my pain...
...I am not exaggerating...
...This is really what I feel: knobby and bare since I can't bring him back, I must try to speak for him...
...over the void to grip Sometimes I was maybe thirty to forty people away from the the perfect apple at a branch's tip...
...because you feel the need to pray - involves a pain which may not be yours...
...Therefore all one can do is redeem it...
...I felt I would go there and I would love it...
...That Also child of God...
...All those prisoners in C ARGAS: J. W. N. Sullivan has written a well respected biog- their prisons...
...below my feet, turned earth tells where And I'm very often haunted by the person who was the ten this morning I clawed down thousandth...
...I am too must stay in one place...
...the Auschwitz experience...
...And if not, I will do it Indian culture very well...
...It is a prayer of gratitude saying, "Thank write daily a certain amount of time or a certain amount of you, God, for not giving me pain...
...I didn't know how to pay my rent...
...couldn't understand how a European would know so much I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, about Indian mysticism...
...But what I would like to do is to shed light on the range of subject matter...
...of research...
...But not share the pain...
...I belong to a tradition, to a people, to a time, the Indian philosophy where suffering is not something bad, that was haunted by suffering...
...Logically, I should forth wandering from the garden...
...And there is obvious reasons...
...I'll give you a practical example...
...and the only way to redeem it is through LIE WIESEL, who has just been awarded the Nobel literature, art, poetry, music...
...I would have written commentaries manuscript finished, more or less, I type it myself, with two on the Talmud...
...Often I cannot avoid it...
...we try to imagine their pain...
...an Israeli paper in Paris, and my salary at the highest was fifty Therefore, I left India...
...But non-fiction is afterwards...
...There's a pain...
...But never would I have written a novel, or essays of I reread, recorrect, and retype it...
...the whole thing is like a nightmare...
...The only time I get up is to change the much in awe of every religious tradition, especially of those record on the record player...
...The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or 1 do counts among his twenty-three books, one titled Harry James Cargas other things...
...Can my pain prevent WIESEL: Maybe it is impossible to create without pain...
...Then, when I have my anyway, before the war...
...If somebody had pushed me forward, I stirred, shook off a clod, would have run forward and I would have been the ten became bloat toad...
...I didn't do at least of mine, anything...
...I still love to teach the Indian texts dollars a month...
...WIESEL: Not only I, but everyone who was there, sooner or later, to a certain degree, feels that he or she was a messenger sent back...
...I want to prevent suspicious of words...
...I didn't have time creating mentally...
...all those old people in their old-age homes...
...Religions are separate but mystifingers, or on your lips, inspiration is there and there is no cism is always uniting...
...Byalic, a Hebrew poet, said, people from suffering...
...Louis, I write...
...If I feel it doesn't move, I keep the page and write it again and I DECIDED to go to India, because as a journalist I could get again and again...
...24 October 1986: 557...
...So I . am taking the torchlight and am turning it to their tale...
...One, I don't know, never knew, who simply left because he hapunder my hand, pened to be there...
...texts, mystical texts in their splendor...
...However, had I not be the opposite of procedural because [otherwise] the written gone through certain experiences, I would have written, but word would become a routine word...
...I which to us Jews did not mean suffering but esoteric experiwork a lot, some sixteen hours a day...
...I would have written religious material...
...The indifference to suffering is something that I write a comparative study of the subject in Judaism, in Chris- could not tolerate...
...I don't want you University, wrote a book entitled, Messengers from the Dead, to have pain...
...is there...
...For even see the suffering...
...I need the caste, the most successful caste in India...
...I would have remained in the totally religious fingers...
...Therefore, after awhile, I left...
...director of the Athenaeum, Professor John Roth, who himself has published a book on Wiesel (A Consuming Fire, John WIESEL: "Redeem the pain of others" is too presumptuous for Knox Press) arranged the dialogue, which covered a wide me to say...
...Would you care to the hundreds, in the thousands...
...This forty-one times...
...him, he became friendly and then he gave me a special card...
...So I explained to the music...
...make something out of that pain, to find a meaning to it and share that meaning...
...Yet, when I WIESEL: The impact came before...
...come back, take back a page and write it again, twenty times, So I had my share of hunger...
...Suffering is something personal and discreet...
...do not give it to secretaries or to typists...
...I still am...
...I want you to get the meaning of the pain, not the a volume of criticism about Holocaust literature...
...Hassidism, there's a lot of research...
...I don't want it to leave me...
...I couldn't that mystery: What is the mystery of suffering...
...I would discipline...
...We never suffered because of Buddhists...
...I wanted to write a compara- walked with somebody there who was a German, he didn't tive study on asceticism, meaning "voluntary suffering...
...chapter devoted to your work, as you know...
...I these kinds: for human rights or for the sake of other victims...
...At that time it was easy for me to travel to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering...
Vol. 113 • October 1986 • No. 18
