Palm Digital gives Cold River a Cause for Hope

What's the point of being a sole survivor if you're not convinced the world will read your story in the end? Somehow an awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely. I'm a survivor - nothing more, nothing less. I don't fear life, I don't fear death and I don't fear literary humiliations.
The struggle against forgetting is unending and according to Elie Wiesel: Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened.
Somewhere in the depths of my foolish soul I nurture one conceited notion: One day, perhaps - one day - something shining will be prised out of all this raw skeleton...swimming in my Cold River
Like a good father or a beautiful view, a work of art is harder to describe than to recognise. Professor Gombrich once said that there was no such thing as art, only artists. Which begs the question, what makes an artist?
Vaclav Havel says that they are those who ‘celebrate our existence by making us more conscious of it.’ Art is a language and that it must have something to say:
Learning the foreign language of a sole survivor ... is a lifelong lesson, but having my first daughter born exactly 9 months after the Velvet Revolution is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable illustrations of how the unpredictable language of hope can spring from the most appalling of tragedies.
Consider sending constructive editorial suggestions to jozefimrich@authorsden.com
· First Palm Digital Media Edition