On reality – Ariel Dorfman in NYT:
‘Maybe what I regretted was that I was not, after all, the hero I had dreamed of becoming.
Nestled inside that regret was something deeper and perhaps more devastating. We — Allende and his most enthusiastic followers — had promised a socialist paradise without exploitation and instead delivered our people into a reactionary hell. Even though our failure was collective and even though I was a mere 31, I felt responsible for this catastrophe. I regretted that I had not been able to see the abyss into which we were headed, had not been wise enough or mature enough to have found a way to avoid so much death and destruction.
Regret can paralyze you, corrode your worth, grind you into depression. Or it can compel you to help forge a future where nobody will need to spend years searching for redress for their grieving souls, a tomorrow where we are not condemned to mourn those whose only sin was to fight for a more decent and just world. I chose the path of struggle against tyranny, forging myself into a spokesperson for human rights, vowing never to forget what I owed to those who had died that day at La Moneda and in the many years that followed. I could not change the past, but I could try to ensure that its pain would not be repeated.’
(…)
‘It took me a while to read their book, but when I did I discovered, to my amazement, that Claudio had not slept at La Moneda the night of Sept. 10, as I had believed all this time, but left his own house at dawn on the 11th. So he must have, without telling me, switched places with someone else. Not at all as I had imagined his final night on earth.
Could it be that the story I had told myself and told the world, the guilt and the disarray, had no basis in reality?
That memoir decentered me, undermining the identity I had built for myself for much of my adult existence. But it also added to the therapy my invented character Adrián had bestowed upon me.
There is a moment in Cristóbal’s book when the son touches tiny particles of bones that may have been his dad’s. A communion with the dead that was followed by a private burial of remains that DNA testing linked to his father. So, to the relief of his family and also of this friend, Claudio was finally placed in a grave that perhaps someday I will visit and thank him for saving my life.
And that is how at last, owing to the intervention of a fictitious character and the all too real son of a man who generously switched places with me so long ago, I have achieved a semblance of closure, the hope that I have proved worthy of the life that was gifted to me.’
Read the article here.
A friend sent me this quote (Could it be that the story I had told myself and told the world, the guilt and the disarray, had no basis in reality?) - then I read the article.
Too often, our identity, the story of our lives is built on fiction or at least stories that are only partial true.
The realization that we are not the hero we longed to be must be a common regret, but a visceral one nevertheless, most probably.