Atonement

This isn't a movie or book review, but I did read the book and see the movie last month, and I have to say that they both made a profound impact.

I find McEwan's endings unsatisfying--not because they're unrealistic, and not even because they're unhappy, but because they're absolutely bereft of hope. I suppose that's very modern of him, but I want at least a smidgen of hope that life for the characters after the book ends isn't necessarily wretched and devoid of joy.

So I went to see the movie armed with knowledge of the ending, and the filmed version did not disappoint. I was wondering how the script would take the interminable internal monologue of the book and put it all on film, but it managed to do so very artfully. I was mesmerized by the performances, the photography, and even the music.

And then a revelation came to me as I was driving away from the cinema. (I should add here that I should never drive after seeing a good film. I always leave feeling as though I'm seeing the world so differently, as if through a fishbowl or a funhouse mirror, that what I'm seeing now is through such a different lens because the movie has affected me so profoundly.) I realized as I pulled away that I understood why I hated the narrator of the book/movie so much: I could totally identify with her. She spends her adult life trying to atone for a youthful mistake that is, in many senses, utterly unforgivable.

And that's exactly how I feel, only--I have no idea what my sin was. All I know is that I've paid--dearly--for a sin I've committed, but the sin is unknown to me.

My ex-husband, in one of many attempts to psych me out, once told me, "I know what you did in college. I read your diary." Now, I did keep a diary in college, and it was out where anyone could pick it up and read it. So it could have been true. And the answer could have been any number of things. What didn't I do? And yet I knew it was just an attempt to ferret out of me some previously unconfessed crime so that he could point out that "perfect people" like me are far from perfect. Duh.

But it wasn't anything I did in college, that much I know. But I know that the stain was on me by the time I moved to DC in 1990, because I vividly recall wandering around the National Gallery, identifying with at least three paintings of Mary Magdalene. One of them, "Penitent Magdalene" by Titian, actually moved me to tears because I saw myself on that canvas. Yet I still can't seem to arrive at it. Perhaps it's nothing but residual Catholic guilt. Perhaps it's from blaming myself for something that never could have been my fault to begin with.

I watch Nearly Perfect Husband with awe, knowing that he's done nothing that's left him with a residual feeling of having sinned. He's unblemished. And I'm grateful to be with him because I don't know many people who are so, relatively speaking, spotless.

Is it something that would make him shrink with horror if he knew? Would you?