Until the Writing Hand Hurts

So, Leo finds out that someone had a copy of a book that he wrote when he was much younger and still living in Poland.  Except that they've changed the book so that everyone's name is Spanish except for Alma's.  So we know that this book, or some version of this book has to be The History of Love right? Because our character Alma is named after the character Alma from The History of Love who the author is in love with.  So who is Zvi? I have no idea.

But here is something I do know:  At the end of my last post I talked about how one major motifs of the book was silence; now we know more specifically that silence is a major motif of not the whole book but Leo's writing.  The History of Love, and both Babel and Kafka's eulogies were written by Gursky; all three discuss silence in depth and from different angles.

• The section in The History of Love, called the Age of Silence discusses a time when humans communicated without spoken word, but rather with gestures.  By all literal interpretations this would mean humans lived in a silent atmosphere, but Gursky argues the opposite.  He says that because humans communicated with their hands, and because they were almost always moving their hands to do something, they were always communicating.  Every motion, whether intended as communication or facilitating an action was interpreted by others to mean something.  We do the some thing today; there is a distinct difference between how the hands of an excited person writes and how an angry person writes, not just in the way their faces look.  An excited person may write quickly and sloppily while an angry person will grip their pen tightly, make large, dark letters, and write more slowly.  Anyway, the point is that Gursky says that people communicated more not less when they didn't use words.

• In Babel's eulogy it says that he was sentenced for the crime of silence.  It says he began to appreciate it, even in the reading he did, the music he listened to, and the things people did not say.  He could never say one word or else "destroy the delicate fluency of silence." (Krauss 115) He lived his whole life like that, and people got mad.  They beat him and they sentenced him to death, and all because he was silent, yet he stuck with it.  What good is the silence to him? What was the point, why was he silent?  Because in the end he realizes "what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard." (Krauss 115).  And anyway all of his blank manuscripts were burned, and there was no trace of him.  I'm not sure about this one.  He was so determined, but why was he so determined?

• Then the last piece we read is his eulogy for Franz Kafka.  Kafka speaks, and Kafka writes, but mostly he listens.  He can't get out of his tree because then people would stop asking for him, and they say that when he died the people could hear themselves in his ears.  Kafka left his life to observe others'. He did not make a spectacle of his loneliness because he was allowing his existence to be silent.  He lived to observe, and he wrote books on it and people loved them but they didn't care, understand, or even care to understand him or his way of life. 

So here's what I get from that: Leo thinks a lot about silence.  I mean in the first piece, the major piece of his career, Leo considers silence a good thing. Underrated.  He says there are so many ways to communicate without words.  In his later life we see him communicating his loneliness to the world through embarrassing public accidents that are completely on purpose.  We see him loving Alma so much that he lets her and his child go so that she can be happy with someone else, not fighting her for what he wants.  Is he wrong to do it? He certainly isn't happy.  In his second piece he shows Babel in his final moments of life, regretting his silence and realizing it was all for nothing.  Is that what Leo thinks his life is? A waste?  Maybe the important part is the understanding that the silence gave Babel.  The idea of gaining a new point of view.  Kafka has a similar understanding, of observing instead of acting, but I don't see how that really relates to Leo.  Maybe it does in regard to his relationship with his son and Alma, but otherwise Leo oddly enough seems to be a pretty self-focused man.  He really only worries about himself and what happens to him regardless of how brutal he is about it.