Imagination and the Holocaust Essay -- Exploratory Essays Research Pap

Imagination and the HolocaustThe great inscrutable of morals is love or a going out of our amaze got nature, and an realisation of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must(prenominal) imagine intensely and comprehensively he must put himself in the place of another and of many others the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A demurral of Poetry I believe that truly homophilee learning cant help but expand the constricted boundaries of human sympathy, of social tolerance. Maybe the truest thing to be said about racial discrimination is that it represents a profound failure of imagination.-- Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Integrating the American Mind The imagination and the ability to empathize with others is the key to living a wider life, a key to escaping the prison of a limited self. But, imagination and identification are also menacing. As we read and listen t o the words of survivors, as we study the Holocaust from all points of view, our imaginations threaten us. As I excerption up Elie Wiesels novel Night, I take the Holocaust in my hands, and I hear childrens voices in the dark. I am afraid for them and for myself. First, I am afraid my imagination will fail me, and I will be overwhelmed. The terror and humiliation of the Holocaust may so numb me that I will go into shock. I will isolate myself, deny everything -- suffering, empathy, mercy, family, God. I will experience what Wiesel experienced when his father was struck and he did null (36-37), or, in the end, I will abandon my father. Wiesel says to me, I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my fathers place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn an... ...elling and the Journey to Wholeness. radical York Bantam, 1992. Pagis, Dan. compose in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car. Truth and Lamentation Stories and Poems on the Holocaust. Eds. Milton Teichman and Sha ron Leder. Urbana and Chicago U of Illinois P, 1994. 491. Roder, Thomas, Voller Kubillus and Anthony Burwell. Psychiatrists -- the Men Behind Hitler. Los Angeles Freedom Publishing, 1995. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defense of Poetry. In English Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. New York Harcourt, Brace, 1967. 1072-087. Weinberg, Jeshajahu and Rina Elieli. The Holocaust Museum in Washington. New York Rizzoli, 1995. Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Stella Rodway. New York Bantam Books, 1960. - - -. Why I Write Making No go Yes. The Essay Connection. 4th ed. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom. Lexington, Massachusetts D. C. Heath, 1995. 40-47.