新編大學英語第三冊unit12 Text D: The Shame of Hunger

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UNIT 12 AFTER-CLASS READING 3; New College English (III)

The Shame of Hunger

Elie Wiesel

A survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel has won a congressional medal and the 1986 Nobel Prize for Peace. He delivered the following speech at Brown University on April 5, 1990, at the presentation of the Alan Feinstein Awards for the Prevention and Reduction of World Hunger. Wiesel, whose parents and sister died in the Holocaust, spoke passionately on this topic.

1 I have been obsessed with the idea of hunger for years and years because I have seen what hunger can do to human beings. It is the easiest way for a tormenter to dehumanize another human being. When I think of hunger, I see images: emaciated bodies, swollen bellies, long bony arms pleading for mercy, motionless skeletons. How can one look at these images without losing sleep?

2 And eyes, my God, eyes. Eyes that pierce your consciousness and tear your heart. How can one run away from those eyes? The eyes of a mother who carries her dead child in her arms, not knowing where to go, or where to stop. At one moment you think that she would keep on going, going, going to the end of the world. Except she wouldn't go very far, for the end of the world, for her, is there. Or the eyes of the old grandfather who probably wonders where creation had gone wrong, and whether it was all worthwhile to create a family, to have faith in the future, to transmit misery from generation to generation, whether it was worth it to wager on humankind.

3 And then the eyes of all eyes, the eyes of children, so dark, so immense, so deep, so focused and yet at the same time, so wide and so vague. What do they see? What do hungry children's eyes see? Death? Nothingness? God? And what if their eyes are the eyes of our judges?

4 Hunger and death, death and starvation, starvation and shame. Poor men and women who yesterday were proud members of their tribes, bearers of ancient traditions and culture, and who are now wandering among corpses. What is so horrifying in hunger is that it makes the individual death an anonymous death. In times of hunger, the individual death has lost its uniqueness. Scores of hungry people die daily, and those who mourn for them will die the next day, and the others will have no strength left to mourn.

5 Hunger in ancient times represented the ultimate curse to society. Rich and poor, young and old, kings and servants, lived in fear of drought. They joined the priests in prayer for rain. Rain meant harvest, harvest meant food, food meant life, just as lack of food meant death. It still does.

6 Hunger and humiliation. A hungry person experiences an overwhelming feeling of shame. All desires, all aspirations, all dreams lose their lofty qualities and relate to food alone. Diminished by hunger, man's spirit is diminished as well. His fantasy wanders in quest of bread. His prayer rises toward a bowl of milk.

7 Thus the shame.

8 In Hebrew, the word hunger is linked to shame. Of all the diseases, of all the natural diseases and catastrophes, the only one that is linked to shame in Scripture is hunger the shame of hunger. Shame is associated neither with sickness nor even with death, only with hunger. For man can live with pain, but no man ought to endure hunger.

9 Hunger means torture, the worst kind of torture. The hungry person is tortured by more than one sadist alone. He or she is tortured, every minute, by all men, by all women. And by all the elements surrounding him or her. The wind. The sun. The stars. By the rustling of trees and the silence of night. The minutes that pass so slowly, so slowly. Can you imagine time, can you imagine time, when you are hungry?

10 And to condone hunger means to accept torture, someone else's torture.

11 Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.

12 There is a story about the great French-Jewish composer Daniel Halevy who met a poor poet: "Is it true," he asked, "that you endured hunger in your youth?" "Yes," said the poet. "I envy you," said the composer, "I never felt hunger."

13 And Gaston Bachelard, the famous philosopher, voiced his view on the matter, saying, "My prayer to heaven is not, 'Oh God, give us our daily bread,' but give us our daily hunger."

14 I don't find these anecdotes funny. These anecdotes were told about and by people who were not hungry. There is no romanticism in hunger, there is no beauty in hunger, no creativity in hunger. There is no aspiration in hunger. Only shame. And solitude. Hunger creates its own prison walls; it is impossible to demolish them, to avoid them, to ignore them.

15 Thus, if hunger inspires anything at all, it is, and must be, only the war against hunger.

16 Perhaps of all of the woes that threaten and plague the human condition, hunger alone can be reduced and ultimately conquered, not by destiny, nor by the heavens, but by human beings. We cannot fight earthquakes, but we can fight hunger. Hence our responsibility for its victims. Responsibility is the key word. Our tradition emphasizes the question, rather than the answer. For there is a "quest" in question, but there is "response" in responsibility. And this responsibility is what makes us human, or the lack of it, inhuman.

17 Hunger differs from other disasters such as floods in that it can be prevented or stopped so easily. One gesture of generosity, one act of humanity, may put an end to it, at least for one person. A piece of bread, a bowl of rice or soup makes a difference. And I wonder, what would happen, just imagine, what would happen, if every nation, every industrialized or non-industrialized nation, would simply decide to sell one aircraft, and for the money, feed the hungry. Why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't the next economic summit, which includes the wealthiest, most powerful, the richest nations of the world, why shouldn't they decide that since there are so many aircrafts, why shouldn't they say, "Let's sell just one, just one, to take care of the shame and the hunger and the suffering of millions of people."

18 So the expression, "the shame of hunger", must be understood differently. When we speak of our responsibility for the hungry, we must go to the next step and say that the expression "shame of hunger" does not apply to the hungry. It applies to those who refuse to help the hungry. Shame on those who could feed the hungry, but are too busy to do so.