I just finished Little Bee by Chris Cleave, marking the half-way point of my year of reading one book a day.  What serendipity brought me to this book, on this day?  It matches the brilliance and the beauty and the heartbreak of my very first book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  It is a superbly great book. It is powerful and genuine.  It hits with the truth that can be only found in fiction, where we become bound up with the characters — we become one with them — and their fate becomes ours. This spectacular novel affirms the very power of life, even in the face of unspeakable horror. Little Bee is a refugee fleeing persecution in Nigeria: she is in danger because she witnessed mass killings that the oil companies and the government deny ever happened. She finds herself face to face with a British couple at the height of her terror and she seeks them out again, now, in England.

Little Bee does not end with everyone tucked safely and happily in their beds, nor did The Elegance of the Hedgehog.  But both novels end with the power of hope.  Both books are about women who saw life so clearly that we readers are forever indebted to their writers for creating them, and for sharing their creations’ visions of what life could be and should be.  I will never forget Renee and Paloma, I will never forget Little Bee and Sarah.  This book is a must-read, and a book to be shared and lent and given many times.

While I was reading this book, which concerns horrors in Nigeria committed in the name of oil, I put the book down and realized again what  I have realized (and written about) before.  As much as people like to talk about how everyone on earth is connected, that is not true. There is not some invisible spirit or tether or karma or God uniting us all. We have to forge connections, make connections, support and nurture connections.  We are not all connected: it is a fact that saves us but it is our shame, as well.  It saves us because if we knew everything horrible going on, we would drown in tears.  We cannot know everything, because to feel the waves of genocide, rape, torture, to hear the sounds of bones being broken, children being torn from their mothers, girls being used and tossed out, would kill us too. We connect to those we can see and touch; we protect the ones we can. But even then, a sister can die and you won’t even know it until you get the phone call driving home over the Henry Hudson Bridge after what you thought was a very good day. That is the world.

We will never have karmic revelations about others but we can move out beyond our everyday (and very important) connections, and connect with the world at large. We can know what is going on out there, if we try to find out.  And when we do find out about atrocities, deprivations, sufferings, and madness, what can we do?  What should we do? We are decent people, we reach out through good organizations, we try to keep our government as clean as possible and working to help others (hence the fury over government-sponsored torture), we send reporters, money and clothes and medicine, and some people send themselves.

Everyone must make their own connections and their own self-treaties for dealing with the horrors of the world.  For me, I believe that I owe to every person deprived of possibility in their own lives to appreciate and realize the possibilities in my own.  To live simply and truthfully, to laugh and to smile and to love, and to enjoy what they never could. I was lucky at one time to have the opportunity to represent an immigrant seeking refugee status.  He had a horrible story to tell of torture, and the scars to prove it. Without my law firm allowing me to help him, I don’t know if he would have received refugee status or not.  But I do know that he lives now quietly and safely in New York State. I am grateful for the freedoms I have, and I was grateful to give someone else the possibility of such freedoms.

And very importantly, I understand that always clamoring for more things, for an easier way to do this or a cheaper way to do that, is a problem.  Because, honestly, it is the clamoring for more that accounts for so many troubles in the world.  Wars over oil, over diamonds, and over all those resources we are too damn hungry for. We have to find out the costs, educate ourselves as to where this stuff is coming from: knowledge will not come through telepathy but only through us being willing to hear what people with weak voices are trying to tell us.  Weak in power, not weak in soul. I do believe in soul but I do not believe all souls are connected: we have to bring ourselves to be known and to know.

In the first pages of Little Bee there is a phrase remembered during a funeral: the dead man had stated “Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have left this commentator a little lost.”  Those words struck me, because they reminded me of what I wrote when I began the 365 project in trying to explain why I wanted a year of reading one book a day: “personally and in the world at large, I feel a little lost; what is my purpose in life, what is my place in the community, where is our country, the world, heading? And does any of this matter at all?“  Thanks to books like Little Bee, I am finding answers, making connections, and feeling fully engaged with life. Yes, it all matters, it matters at all and a lot.

I will end with the wisdom passed on by a Jamaican refugee to Little Bee: “yu only be livin one life, darlin.  Don’t matter yu don’t uh-preshie-ate part of it, cos it don’t stop bein part of yu.“  One life.  The sad parts and the happy parts, all of it is yours: appreciate it.