This post was written by Brooke Farnsworth, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.
Rummaging through my attic, I recently happened upon a binder, water-damaged and falling apart. As I sifted through the well-worn papers, a familiar note fluttered into my hand. I recognized the handwriting and language as my own. The letter was titled, “A Note to America,” and described my fifteen-year-old self’s tensions with the political state of the United States circa 2020. In my most juvenile language, the letter grappled with the dissonance of a country founded on freedom and the discrepancies in the subjective execution of said freedom. I had written page after page, wishing to drown the paper in my desperation to understand. I had hurled words at the page until they resembled an ink blot test, translating my wish to curse the very position of my authorial power.
After drafting that letter, I found a poem that echoed my desperation: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, “A Curse for a Nation.” Following the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the poem criticized the glaring moral incongruencies of the United States’ preachings of freedom and their enslavement of Africans. The poem exposed the blatant hypocrisy of the nation while the speaker is simultaneously “bound by gratitude, by love and blood.” The poem describes a curse and speaks of the suffering and oppression found in the nation, revealing the struggle with addressing such actions by concluding each stanza with the repeated line, “This is the curse. Write.” [1] While most would assume the curse is addressed to the nation, I consider EBB’s poem as beckoning to the reader. EBB places a curse upon the reader by imploring them to write now that they have seen the atrocities ravaging their nation. This jump from ignorance to awareness is the beginning of a curse. This is the curse: to write.
Virginia Woolf also describes writing as a curse, stating, “the nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” [2] Woolf parallels how writing serves not as a refuge from the storm, but the storm itself—something one must experience but is still devastated by. In this way of writing, we essentially hold the suffering of another for a brief moment and bleed their story into ours, letting ink flow into a blot test of our humanity. This culminates into the first step of benevolent change: to feel the sorrow of others.
During WWII, this very nature of humanity was threatened. Hannah Arendt, historian and philosopher, tells the story of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was a German officer who was eager to rise in the ranks. As he rose in power, he realized his job of coordinating the deportation of the Jews was resulting in their deaths. But, to him, it was simply following orders. His defense when on trial: he never killed anyone personally, yet the court sentenced him to death for his actions…or rather his inaction.
Similar to Eichmann, Sophie Scholl grew up in Nazi Germany and at twelve, she joined the female version of Hitler’s Youth. As she grew older, she began to recognize the blatant evil festering under Hitler’s rising power. This is where Eichmann and Scholl’s stories diverge.
Scholl began to write. She and her brother, Hans, along with several friends, started a resistance group against the Nazis called the White Rose. They distributed leaflets that pressed their fellow Germans to fight against the rule of a totalitarian state and exposed the disregard for human life and individual rights by the National Socialist Party [3].
Scholl and her brother were caught distributing the leaflets and hanged for their actions, a gruesome end to a benevolent cause. Scholl and Eichmann met the same fate, but where Eichmann failed, Scholl demonstrated humanity beyond the individual human.
On the contrary, Eichman experienced an “almost total inability to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view.” [4] This is what Arendt describes as the “banality of evil,” a kind of evil that stirs in ink unspilled. As the pen is ignored, we let evil metastasize in words unwritten, in things unsaid. We cannot be like Eichmann: failing to act because we fail to think of humanity, and failing to think of humanity because we fail to write to understand. Eichmann epitomizes this failure of consideration as he sends person after person to their death, rejecting their humanity and consequently, suffocating his own. To write is to see the other fellow’s point of view, even if that means giving up our role as a passive voyeur and accepting the burden of another, so as to understand their pain. Eichmann reveals the ubiquitous nature of evil lurking within a state of apathy, within ignoring that which makes us human: consideration of our fellow man.
Now, I do not wish to write with such a dismal trajectory, so I return to the story of Scholl. Scholl, too, stood in the courtroom. She was aware of her charges of treason. Scholl was put to death, but she her care for humanity lived long after her death. In her final moments, she declared, “Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare to express themselves as we did.” [5] Scholl chose to write and in writing, Scholl chose to experience the suffering of another. She chose to turn against the banality of evil that beckoned like the promises of sirens. Scholl was cursed with the need to write. She saw suffering and did not look away; she embraced her role as something greater than an individual—she was a part of humanity. This is the curse of being human: experiencing the sorrow of others, so as to stand with them.
When we act as writers, we essentially take on the burdens of those we write for. The ultimate example of this is found in Jesus Christ. Christ’s story speaks of the rejection of individual comfort for the greater good of all mankind. He chooses to carry the pains and afflictions of all and in essence, takes the role of divine writer—rewriting the very fate of humankind. Even Christ acknowledges the curse when He asks, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” [6] This is the curse; He must write.
I find myself once again in an attic, lit by one piercing light bulb, reading sorry attempts from my younger self to grapple with the suffering of those around me. I mutter a prayer of gratitude for this curse. For it is in this curse, I find I am not haunted by apathy, but I embrace the pain of humanity. It is here I hold to the words of EBB’s final stanza:
Go, wherever ill deeds shall be done, Go plant your flag in the sun Beside the ill-doers!
And recoil from clenching the curse Of God’s witnessing Universe
With a curse of yours. This is the curse. Write.
In her words, I place this curse upon you, reader. This becomes your curse. Write.
References
[1] Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “A Curse of a Nation.” 1850.
[2] Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Germany, Harcourt, Brace, 1928.
[3] “Sophie Scholl and the White Rose.” The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. February 22, 2020.
[4] “Did Eichmann Think?.” Amour Mundi. September 7, 2014.
[5] “White Rose Resistance to Hitler’s Regime, 1942-1943” Global Nonviolent Action Database. June 6, 2011.
[6] Luke 22:42
