On the Horizon: Memories of World War II
Written and Narrated By: Lois Lowry
Length: 38 mins
So brief, so touching—just luminous
Dunno why On the Horizon by esteemed author Lois Lowry got a bare 4-stars over on Audible… what? too short?
This was the last of the five Listens I’d had down for the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and I used it for the last cuz I’d rather thought it might encapsulate from pre-Infamy to post-Apocalypse, just what it meant to be an innocent during some of the most horrific times in history. And so?
Well done, Ms. Lowry—Brava…!
It’s kinda difficult for me to get all spastically thrilled about this book, as I’d dearly like to, as I’ve a habit of doing when I’m surprised and moved by a work, and it’s like this, see: How on EARTH can one cheer when one has been reminded of absolute emotional devastation, of incredible moral ambiguity? I s’pose it helps to look through this lens with someone who was a child during that time, a non-combatant thrust into it all.
Told in striking verse, Lowry starts us off in Hawaii, but a child, walking and playing on the beach. Later, much later, after old film is fixed and transmuted to VHS video, whilst watching with friends, one of Lowry’s companions has her back up the video—Just what is that, in the background, on the horizon?
Behind the gay little girl is the Arizona, that part of the American fleet which was first to meet its absolute devastation in the opening moments of what we now simply call Pearl Harbor. Almost half of the individuals who lost their lives that day came from the Arizona, so this slow movement of the ship behind the girl is at once somber and a mark that one is looking at History: One sees the doomed, one honors the dead.
And the whole of this barely 38 minute book is just that, little snippets of catching men, catching children, catching history through time. Whether Lowry is telling us of twin brothers, one burned and bloody, crying out for his brother who will never be found, or whether she is telling us of a little boy gone in the flash of Hiroshima’s hellfire, soon to be buried with his best friend, the tricycle he’s so fond of, Lowry captures the desperate humanity in wars which will never be civil, will never be humane.
There’s a lot of “serendipity” flowing through the work. What are the odds of capturing the Arizona in that moment in time? What are the odds of seeing another child in Japan, across the way in the playground, unable to reach across the breach of savaged/damaged cultures, only to meet again so much later, now with the life experience, the knowledge, to reach a real communion? And how is it that Americans travel to Japan and bow in sorrow over the little tricycle, disinterred and now a somber reminder in Hiroshima? And how is it that Japanese travel to America and bow in sorrow, above the sunken Arizona as it still sends up trickles of oil?
That Lowry narrates this herself is, I think, what gives it its quiet power. She knows what she means, and she unspools the rhythms, the rhymes, in a smooth, heartfelt manner, not a bit of singsong to be had. No, just the brokenhearted yet hopeful tones, the voice of sorrow and loss that comes and finishes to tell us, to remind us to be kind and mindful.
I dunno that I believe its message of hope—I look around today, I view the way I’ve lived my own life, and it all seems to me that each generation forgets until it has to relive the past anyway. That said, however, my own mournful musings if you will, for younger listeners yessss, please dear GOSH let them all have hope. Let them all be taught through audiobooks, works such as On the Horizon, that kindness matters, seeing our shared humanity matters. Perhaps my own generation has let them down, but works such as this go on and on.
Let them be guides for our children…
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