Five Minute Reflection
While reading Between Two Kingdoms, I kept coming back to a story in a book I once picked out in my high-school library purely for its title. Through the main character in the novel The Idiot, Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky shares a personal story. He had been brought to the scaffold for execution for a political crime. Fortunately for him and his future readers, Dostoevsky was unexpectedly reprieved. But there was a period of time during which he was certain he was about to die. What was going through his mind?
He calculated that he had about five minutes left. This felt like “a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time.” He divided up the time into three parts. The first would last roughly two minutes during which he would bid farewell to his companions. The next two minutes would be for self-reflection. During the final minute he would simply look around. After dividing his time, he indeed said good-bye to his friends, asking them “some very usual everyday questions, and being much interested in their answers.” Then he focused on himself as “a living, thinking man” who in three minutes “would be nobody.” What will happen then? The question consumed him; he wanted to solve it “once for all” in the remaining moments. But suddenly a few rays of light caught his attention. They were emanating from a church spire in the distance. A thought came to him that these rays were “his new natures” and that he would soon “become one of them.”
Then came hope: “What should I do if I were not to die now?... How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!” These thoughts weighed so heavily on him and became “such a terrible burden” that he wished the executioners “would shoot him quickly and have done with it.”
This is the age of difficult conversations. Some are ready for them, very ready. Others are not. They would say anything, do anything, to avoid them. Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms is one such conversation. It is about illness, pain, death, the burden of hope. It is about cancer. Getting inside Jaouad’s mind, we come dangerously close to her body, to malignant cells. We feel uncomfortable, sad, scared for her. We think about those we lost or will lose one day. We think about ourselves. We have nightmares and want to stop reading. But the very existence of the book is evidence of something of a happy ending. So, we keep reading to get there, together with Jaouad. Then, the book ends, and we are left alone with our thoughts. We are left perhaps more ready for difficult, important conversations.