Atonement

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels is one of my favorite books from my last term of school. Michaels the poet-author writes in a gorgeous prose. I could have underlined every line with my pencil. She packs a pretty punch, so the selection below could have come from any page and made just as much sense. Included in the syllabus for the Canadian Historical Novel, this book along with several others, revealed a new theme in English Literature I hadn't discovered yet. Atonement. While the definition seems very grandios and complex in my head, atonement is the compensation for a wrong, or the act of atoning for a sin or wrongdoing. In this case, we mean the atonement of history. I wrote four essays on the topic this term with varying degrees of success. You soon realize that every book is about atonement. Start looking. I double dog dare you.

From Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

'Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city' (5).

'The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name' (17).

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I just had one of those baboom-baboom-baboom moments my favorite professor talks about. When the fragments come together to form a whole. When you start connecting the dots. This kind of revelation is one advantage of my recent conversion to insomnia.

I read the popular book The Kite Runner when it was published in 2003. Today I picked it up for a second time and found my favorite theme in the first paragraph. Atonement.

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From The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

'I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn't just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins' (1).

Baboom-baboom-baboom.