Of the half-dozen or so leaves I’ve kept from those final days, […] there are exactly three short lines I’ve found worth preserving. And even these have interest not because there is anything about them that is close to imperishable, but because, artless as they now seem, they were at least wrung like vital juices from a being whose survival was in question for a time.Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.The query: ‘At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?’And the answer: ‘Where was the man?’

The second life I have resurrected from the void may be a little too facile, but I have kept it. Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at a certain level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lumplike English syllables, and as I see them now on the ledger’s page, the page itself the hue of a dried daffodil and oxidized slowly by time into near-transparency, my eyes are arrested by the furious lining – scratch scratch scratch, lacerations – as if the suffering Stingo, whom I once inhabited, or who once inhabited me, learning at firsthand and for the first time in his grown-up life about death, and pain, and loss, and the appalling enigma of human existence, was trying physically to excavate from the paper the only remaining – perhaps the only bearable – truth. Let your love flow out on all living things. 

William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (1979)