More on forgiveness and the perfect Lent book

Forgiveness has been a theme of the weekend. A very interesting conversation in Leicester Square on Friday afternoon.
And then the end of The Railway Man - which is very hard to read without tears. Eric Lomax forgave his torturers. I cannot believe it. But it took him time. He also said that he could never forget.
B. on Friday afternoon said that forgiveness isn't as easy as all that. It involves talking to the person involved and understanding - really understanding, not just making a token, emotional gesture. (Forgiveness is something we should aspire to. Of course. For some of us, it's the most difficult thing.)

Prisoner at Changi POW camp, Singapore

In the final pages of The Railway Man Lomax writes about forgiving someone involved in his torture in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Singapore for making a crude radio.
It is the most appropriate read for Lent that I can imagine. He forgives a man who was involved in torture aimed  at breaking him to the point of death: torture so vile that 50 years on the torturer is still physically affected by the memory.
Lomax  is - almost miraculously - able to meet the man (called Ngase) and come to terms with what happened. It is - as my friend B said on Friday afternoon - a progression. It takes time - from the moment that he realised he had found his tormentor to feelings of rage and hatred - then a maelstrom of thoughts of what to do. Revenge, or a meeting? He finally travelled to Singapore to meet Ngase and talk to him.

"He looked up at me; he was trembling, in tears, saying over and over 'I am very, very sorry...'

They returned to the place they first met - the camp now built over with new housing. They visited war memorials.  Then they flew to Osaka to visit Ngase's home.
Then Lomax so touchingly - forever mindful of procedure - decided that some kind of formal gesture of forgiveness was needed and visited him for a final time in Tokyo, in his hotel room: 'I had decided to give him a piece of paper which I thought would meet both our needs...'

"I read my short letter out to him, stopping and checking that he understood each paragraph. I felt he deserved this careful formality. In the letter I said that the war had been over for almost fifty years; that I had suffered much; and that I knew that although he too had suffered throughout this time, he had been most courageous and brave in arguing against militarism and working for reconciliation. I told him that while I could not forget what happened in Kanbury in 1943, I assured him of my total forgiveness.
He was overcome with emotion again, and we spent some time in his room talking quietly and without haste."

Just how Lomax summoned such humanity - I don't know.Reading of it touches me to the core, though.

Shadowy figures and a definition of hell

Lunchtime Veronese at the National Gallery. Veronese born in Verona - but a Venice painter.

The Family of Darius before Alexander (about 1565-7).  Darius, King of Persia, was defeated by Alexander the Great. Here he is being brought before Alexander. This painted for the country palace of the Venetian Pisani family at Montagnana near Padua.

The painting is huge and the reproduction doesn't do the colours or the composition justice. But very striking is the shadowy quality of the horses (bottom left) and figures on the balustrade, as if they were sketched in and not quite there.

More shadowy figures and a vision of hell in The Railway Man/Eric Lomax.

The cell in a Victorian prison in Singapore:

"The door was shut and we looked around our new home. It was totally, empty: a stark oblong space, about nine feet long, six feet across and with a very high ceiling.  The walls were peeling, had once been thickly painted in white and were utterly blank. The door was solid and steel-clad, with a rectangular slot like an English postbox. There was a small window, very high up in the end wall, through which we could see the sky. It seemed to be a nice day outside. "

The food:

"The main events .... were the delivery of the so-called meals three times a day. Each consisted or rice and tea, or at least a quantity of slightly discoloured hot water which looked like tea. This was our main fluid intake for the day, and thirst usually preceded it by many hours."

 The first sight of fellow prisoners who had been there for some time:

"In the yard were about twenty prisoners, most of them apparently unable to walk. Some lay flat out; some were crawling on their hands and knees. Several were totally naked. Almost all had one thing in common: they were living skeletons, with ribs and bones protruding from shrunken flesh."