The Speed of Light (Paperback)

Julian's sister, Paula, carries this same trauma in an opposite way. She thrusts herself into the world as a potential opera singer. While she drives herself relentlessly outward into the world, she is unable to help Julian, who retreats to an internal life of suffering in which he often watches eleven television sets simultaneously and stays within a few blocks of his home at all times.
It is while Paula is traveling in Europe that Julian meets Paula's housekeeper, Sola. Sola's family was also the victim of mass brutality, but her response to this loss is so different than Julian's or Paula's that she is able to bring a new energy into Julian's life and the result is the wondrous mystery of this book.
The 20th Century was dominated by unprecedented collective traumas the impact of which is usually ignored in explanations of why there is such massive cultural and individual dysfunction today. Yet, it is fairly easy to see the collective impact of the massive crimes against humanity the world has lived through in the last 100 years. The brutal killing of so many people has left a visible scar across the personal, physical and political landscapes of our planet. The continuing search for solutions to intractable poverty and oppression in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America are part of the living collective wounds we must all confront as world citizens.
Rosner's book takes us into the internal world of just three lonely survivors of these holocausts and yet their story offers a penetrating insight into our collective pain and our potential path toward recovery and wholeness. She reveals in her lyrical style how an individual can be deeply wounded by a collective crime and somehow triumph over that wound by sharing her need for love as a way out of the pain. Survivors often become bitter, angry, souls, who shut themselves down and pass on their pain to others. Yet if just one wounded soul can rise above these responses and realize that it is the lack of love that caused the wound, the results can be a gentle, magnificent triumph of healing. Survivors such as these finds their way to finally end the continuing rupture of their own living spirit.
This is the important message of this wonderful book. Whether our wounds are the consequence of a collective trauma or a more random loss of love through illness, accident or individual abuse, the paths of the compulsive achiever or the lonely cynic will not bring us the healing we need. Our path to healing lies in reaching out from behind that wound and finding our common humanity with the love of others.
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