Back to the garden

I always have difficulty blogging and engaging in social media during a tragedy. My feelings run deep, and I can rarely sum them up in 140 characters without feeling trite. The perpetual heartache from the ISIS attacks in these weeks have hampered my ability to be pithy and clever in a status update. 

Thank God the book is not dead, because through the pages my worry takes on long-form. I read books to escape, and write them unravel complications. The tome becomes a yarn that takes time to unsnarl. Books have taken up a great deal of my cognitive energy during this time of global tragedies, as our country tries to remember who we are, as a nation of immigrants. My attention turns to dystopian novels, as they set up alternative visions of the future.

I watched the final installment of the Hunger Games, the adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s trilogy that uses a modern vision of Rome to explore the many facets of violence, consumerism, entertainment and inequality. Not to be a spoiler, but the last scene was a comfort. It was a return to Eden, the garden where innocence is born. It was a reminder that even if everything that we have built crumbles in a heap of global-warmed, war-torn rubble, the garden persists.