Johanna's Secret by Maya Northen Augelli

Author:Maya Northen Augelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-06-13T12:40:25+00:00

Chapter 11

My alarm beeps too loudly, waking me from a sound sleep. Despite having slept well, coffee is a necessity, and I wander downstairs to put on a pot. While it brews, I pulled out my ever-handy to do list and start organizing my tasks: revise two articles, video lecture, text Greg, call Billy. I laugh at having to make a reminder to communicate with the outside world, but I know myself, and I’ll get caught up in my day and not remember until way later than I intend.

I’m glad to find that my articles from the night before look more promising than I anticipate. After about thirty minutes of fine tuning each, I fire them off to the respective editors and cross the first task off my list. The video lecture is next and, as always, my nemesis. Last week’s topic of fascination with tragedy got rave reviews - or as rave of reviews as a school lecture garners- and more than a couple of students requested a follow-up. To oblige, I’d sent a list of questions to the class to aid in the process, and asked them to submit their own questions to me. Now, as I read through some of their responses, Im impressed by their curiosity and creativity. Is it shameful to be captivated by a tragedy? Especially something that happened long ago, like the Titanic? We had used the Titanic as one of the ultimate examples of people’s interest in re-living mass tragedy. Why are we not as drawn to exciting surprises as tragic ones? I add that to my list of questions to answer.

Are people who work in psychology as captivated by tragedy as the rest of us? Or can they break it down so that it’s no longer intriguing? A taste of my own medicine, I think with a smile. It’s only fair that I answer from my own perspective. I give this one some thought. We might be more intrigued by it, in fact. We want to see what went wrong, study the mindset of the people involved, discover how it could possibly have been prevented. Of course, as in any profession, this analyzation is as much based on the personality of the professional as it is on the trade itself. I can only speak for myself.

I look back at the list of questions, searching for one more to include in the pile. “Is a tragedy ever too great to attract this type of morbid fascination?” Bingo, I have a winner! No, I think. Even something as horrendous as the Holocaust has been made into a motion picture. Wars, with tens of thousands of deaths have been turned into hollywood phenomena. Partly, of course, this is done to educate, and remember, so that the lives lost aren’t forgotten, and hopefully so that, as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself. But partly, we are fascinated, morosely so, with loss and death and terror. Personal tragedies, on the other hand, may indeed be too great.

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