Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels - Assignment Example

"Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels A picture of the past is painted and stored in one's memories that give man different feelings in association of those memories. Memories of the past may either bring man into grief or peace - a choice that should not be ignored, easy to say yet hard to do, however whatever choice he makes shapes his personality. Although most men have become successful in choosing grief over the acceptance of the pain that they have been into. At the end, they live a life full of resentment that finds comfort in pain itself. Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces teaches us the reality that allowing ourselves to become miserable out of the unfavorable events in our past does not at all bring any consolation to the victims of these events. Grief contributes nothing but pain and unending sorrow. It is only allowing yourself be imprisoned in the past for which affects the people that you deal with at present, dragging them into feeling the same miseries that you have had in your past. We all share one world therefore it is of no wonder that we find people who share the same grievances with us. They may have different memories of the painful past, yet we find security upon knowing that somebody shares the same heartache that we have been into, lest that somebody had found peace against all the odds. No one can escape grief in a blink of an eye. The book supports the idea that healing a wounded heart requires enough time that its scar leaves a trace of that painful past "How many years pass before the difference between murder and death erodes Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are their screams now" It also took Jakob a sufficient time to be able for him to accept the realities that had happened to him and his family. He had grieved over his sister's loss that he finds himself even more miserable that he sees Bella in his wife's personality - which he eventually thought that life with her is impossible. This situation concerns the lines "the responsibility of forgiveness on behalf of the dead. No act of violence is ever resolved The bond of memory and history when they share space and time. Every moment is two moments." It is with his wife that every moment is two moments for it is with spending time with his wife that Jakob feels spending it with his sister as well. Therefore he had come into a realization that " to remain with the dead is to abandon them" Jakob thus chooses to live at present, see the beauty and the pleasures that the present bring by leaving his past behind, which means leaving Alex to give honor to his sister's memories and to look at forward to brand new memories he could keep in the future. Living harmoniously at present does not mean burying the memories of the past. It is accepting it and living with it, turning the other side of the stone into a meaningful and memorable past gaining more wisdom and strength out of that painful past. Pain is a common emotion that one feels whenever he has lost someone, or have gone through a dreadful past. However, with grief, one finds the beauty of life itself. "Then Jakob said: 'Perhaps the electron is neither particle nor wave but something else instead, much less simple - a dissonance - like grief, whose pain is love. We think of weather as transient, changeable, and above all, ephemeral; but everywhere nature remembers. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather-storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries'" These lines are just examples that grief could bring to a person. It allows us to see every privilege that we have been granted. In pain, our eyes are opened up to a world with so much to look forward to. "History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers..." Memory is involved with not alone of the pictures of the past but it is at the same time feeling the same feeling that the people in the past had felt. Memories are the emotions that people from the past that had made every picture of history an instrument of emotional strength for the people who have outlived the past and continue to live in the present. For these people from the past will soon become the living proof for the people in the present generation in conquering the past that may one way or another be similar to their situations. The product of which may be the creation of strong people of wisdom and vigor. Memories are the most precious treasures that a person could live by. It may be bad, or it may be good memories. But whatever memories that a person have, he should make use of it in a way where he may become a person that inspires and transpires the beauty of having gone through the past and living peacefully at the present by accepting the realities of pain and the sweetness of triumphantly overcoming it in the end. Acceptance of an awful past may be too hard to do - easier said than done all the time. But once you have mastered its living with it, you may even find it surprising that you owe everything that you have at present from the memories of the past - good or bad. And in Jakob's case, he has mastered his dreadful memories in drawing out strength from it and seeing the beauty out of his painful past. Jakob's excellent writing skills were honed by his emotionally rich experiences in the past. Although he had been through so much pain and emptiness due to his sister's loss, he was able to overcome his fateful past through his writings - which later on Ben, who had gone through the same appalling experience, had found solace into. Ben was then inspired by Jakob's wisdom that he soon regained himself from further misery. Fugitive Pieces is a book that achieves the most extraordinary feats. It somehow manages to be incredibly simple, and yet incredibly complex at the same time, both in its prose and in its subject matter. It charts the journey of a frightened, bereft child into adulthood and demonstrates how love, beauty, knowledge, music, and words can raise us above pain and iniquity. Simple truths like this can, and often do, sound stale in the wrong hands. In Anne Michael's they are anything but. Fugitive Pieces is a wonderful book that shows us all the possibilities of the human heart and spirit. (http://mh.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/29/1/21, June 9, 2006) Dreadful memories usually entail grief and frustration at some point. However, Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces proves this wrong. Surviving a war is one of the most terrifying experiences that may create an unpleasant picture in someone's memories. As well as surviving a holocaust. Jakob's ability to triumph over the distressing feeling that he had in his childhood reflected in his writings with which Ben, who belong to the younger generation that had gone through the same adverse situation he has, find comfort in. Pain and grief from the past had helped them find the beauty behind the awful memories of the past that they both have gone through. Works Cited: "Fugitive Pieces". http://mh.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/29/1/21. June 9, 2006. Kakutani, M. "Surviving the Past Through the Power of Words". http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htmlres=9F0CE7D71330F934A35750C0A961958260, June 9, 2006. Di Piero, W.S. "Fossil Remains" http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/20/reviews/970420.20dipiert.html, June 9, 2006. Read More