C.S. Lewis certainly succeeded to “throw light from a new angle on the life of men� in his classic Screwtape Letters from a senior admin demon to his C.S. Lewis certainly succeeded to “throw light from a new angle on the life of men� in his classic Screwtape Letters from a senior admin demon to his active recruiter and destroyer-of-souls nephew.
“Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy� [Y]ou must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable [to the demons] qualities inward into the will.� Very helpful in raising children as the pass through stages.
“The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.�
“The Future is, of all things, the least like eternity� Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as� Communism, which fix men’s affections on the future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future.�
On cowardice vs courage: “This, indeed, is one of the Enemy’s [God] motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you [demon nephew] do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.�
Democracy as political system vs an excuse for dumbing down society Treating everyone the same results in a decline of excellence replaced by mediocrity. We aren’t all “equals.� This notion has indeed worked its way into our educational system. Instead of increasing resources for the weaker students, my daughter’s public middle school got rid of the honors program the year she was first eligible. Her magnet public high school is perennially under attack for elitism. In the meantime, San Francisco elites have pretty well taken their ambitions and their children out of the public school system. The remaining public high schools are filled through a lottery system favoring kids in neighborhoods with the lowest test scores. We can’t plan our younger son’s future. It will happen to us if we manage to stay here. He doesn’t have the grades or scores to get into the magnet school. San Francisco is a chilling example of Lewis’s warning about killing the middle class. The ridiculous price of higher education in the US and the lack of vocational preparation is another related national tragedy that regularly horrifies me. ...more
I felt obliviated and terrified by the visceral imagery in this examination of the USSR’s murderous past. The allegory and the reality smacked me acroI felt obliviated and terrified by the visceral imagery in this examination of the USSR’s murderous past. The allegory and the reality smacked me across the face and instilled that terror I feel when I think about why we are here on earth, God, the absence of God, the horror of humanity, my insignificance, outer space and looming death/immortality. Prose poetry, stumbling through fog and allusion and literal death. The penultimate scene is a doozy. Nightmares tonight for sure.
In an article by Lebedev, he describes a real moment in his life when he figured out a very significant thing was not at all what he had assumed. This moment combined with his travels east and north compelled him to tell his idiosyncratic version of the gulag archipelago and post-Soviet Russia. I most certainly did not understand much of what he tried to convey. I’ve been to places in the former Soviet Union, talked to many people there and here, read a lot, studied Russian�. “Oblivion� can probably be truly felt and digested by someone who lived there and lived through at least the lies, if not the horror, of the great experiment of communist tyranny.
One of my stock phrases pops up yet again: It’s really tough to maintain a healthy nation when the past is not dealt with. Japan seems to be pulling it off. Russia, not so much. The book depressed the hell out of me, but I felt I had to go there. Trump’s victory coincided with me finishing “Oblivion� so I’m extra sickened. OTOH, Trump is no Stalin. So I have that for solace as I try to get through the next 4 years. Trump is no Stalin. Happy face emoji.
Though I have not/could not read it in the original Russian, I’m betting this is a first-rate translation. The translator, A. Bouis, has a real way with words. ...more
Trippy, drunken, twisty-turny day in the life of Venedikt Erofeev. Mostly monologue, mostly on a train, totally sauced. Pretty deep philosophy expressTrippy, drunken, twisty-turny day in the life of Venedikt Erofeev. Mostly monologue, mostly on a train, totally sauced. Pretty deep philosophy expressed through lol allusion (I couldn't catch or connect all of it). He puts a premium on imagination and the future. The eponymous protag (who has never seen the Kremlin despite living in Moscow -- hahaha) remains as likeable as he is disgusting. It takes a lot to get me repulsed by a drink. Erofeev is up to the task! A bit grossed out here in sunny, health-obsessed California.
The drinking, I suppose, is a Soviet-times metaphor for ""We are deprived of freedom of will and are in the power of the arbitrary which has no name and from which there is no escape."
"We must honor... the dark reaches of another's soul. We must look into them even if there's nothing there, even if there's only trash there." This is what 43 should've said after he looked into Putin's soul.
On, I suppose, the Bolsheviks: " revolution acieves something essential when it occurs in the heart and not the town square." Amen.
On us, I suppose, in the West: "I moved from fire to fire with a single alarming thought: why wasn't anyone in the world willing to have anything to do with us? Why such silence in the world?"
On communism (after a famous statue of the personification of the hammer and sicle come to life): "And the worker hit me on the head with his hammer and then the peasant woman gave it to me in the balls with her sickle."
On dying: ".. without accepting this world, perceiving it close up and far away, inside and out, perceiving but not accepting." A real fighter of the good fight!
I read it as a 4-star but missed some stuff and I read it in English (an agile translation). I believe it would be a 5-star book when read by an educated person who understands the whole book in Russian. ...more
Satire, fable, allegory, magical realism�. It’s all that and more. A charming horror of a book. So very thankful that manuscripts don’t burn. I named my daughter Margaret. But that's just a coincidence....
I share some of my favorite life questions and motifs with Bulgakov: people unquestioningly doing what they do because they’ve always done it, or a childlike sense of lack of agency; emotion in politics disguised as ideology; white being black and 2+2=5, or how to respond to a disregard for truth; enemy-generating politicians or, dehumanizing the “other�; the existence of God and his lack of intervention, or perhaps, more terrifying, his non-existence; our deep, disturbing need to be entertained above, seemingly, all else; the death of expertise and disdain for elites; the impossibility of science and rationalism to fully explain the world; self-inflicted suffering; repressed and unleashed passion/fury/creativity; altruism; the greyness of life, as opposed to black and white; and cognitive development or “psychological age� of adult humans. I have just started reading Robert Kegan. Bulgakov was operating at high level of development, obviously. He inspires me. Thanks be to God that Dzhugashvili appreciated "The Days of the Turbins" to an extent that likely saved Bulgakov's life.
Translation Preface should have been at the end as a summary. End notes should have been footnotes. I did not trust this translation as a whole. My bilingual friend who knows Russian Lit recommends Mirra Ginsburg as a superior Russian-English translator. Sadly, my library doesn't have her version....more
**spoiler alert** Magnificent masterpiece of metaphysical monstrosity. It’s both literally and figuratively a stunner. Likely the best book on Bolshev**spoiler alert** Magnificent masterpiece of metaphysical monstrosity. It’s both literally and figuratively a stunner. Likely the best book on Bolshevism I’ve read. As I climb the ladder of understanding how such bad ideas and horrific policies all went down, I estimate my understanding of Darkness at Noon at, possibly, more than 75%. I was deeply moved by Rubashov’s story. Koestler got me sympathizing with an Old Bolshevik True Believer. Koestler clearly laid out the convoluted thinking required to keep believing, even during the Red Terror.
I find communism repulsive. A goal of wiping out individuality is alien to me (among other crazy commie modus operandi). “WE HAVE REPLACED DECENCY BY REASON.� taps Rubashov to his cell neighbor. “I plead guilty to having put the idea of man above the idea of mankind.� “The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives—and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one.�
It is clear Rubashov is gonna take a bullet to the back of the head. The tension in the novel derives from the battle, not the climax. An interrogator, Gletkin with obvious peasant roots and a Stalinist Homo Sovieticus, advises Rubashov: “The only way in which you can still serve the Party is as a warning example--by demonstrating to the masses, in your own person, the consequences to which opposition to the Party policy leads.� Gletkin wants Rubalov to sacrifice himself for the party by confessing to absurd crimes both sides know he did not commit. Rubalov did commit thought crimes when his inner voice began to question some of the means, though never the end. Rubalov is conditioned not to garner sympathy, rather to garner revulsion in the masses to create within him an enemy to hate. He wills himself into a scapegoat. “The Gletkins had nothing to erase; they need not deny their past, because they had none. They were born without an umbilical cord, without frivolity, without melancholy.� “Perhaps it is not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion.� I don’t even think it’s ;logical. It’s crazy outside of real science.
Rubashov is a taut and vivid amalgam of the stories of the guys Koestler ran with back in the day. I appreciated Rubashov’s discovery and description of his inner voice, a separate self that disagreed with ‘him� but did not speak out loud. “It was obviously an essential part of his being, to remain out of reach of the logical thought, and then to take one unawares, as from an ambush�.�
Also noted his torment over the meaning of life. Russian literature is wonderfully full of this particular torture. Thinking about it also terrifies me. So I try not to. I just do the best I can making sure I see strangers as human beings, my loved ones are cared for and setting my children off the best I can without losing myself. Communism provide no answers for Rubashov in the end.
The battle royal between Rubashov and his interrogators was as sublime as it was depressing. I misunderstood the “die in silence� admonishment until the end of the novel.
On the Bolsheviks: “Never has so much power over the future of humanity been concentrated in so few hands�. Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas�: with death.� Whoa. Slow down there.
I have heard a version of this said of contemporary US in response to a Trump victory, that we should have to pass a test before we can vote. “The amount of individual freedom which a people may conquer and keep, depends on the degree of its political maturity. The aforementioned pendulum motion seems to indicate that the political maturing oif the masses does not follow a continuous rising curve, � but that it is governed by more complicated laws.� I would posit that 30% of my fellow citizens voted identity and emotion, rather than their self-interest, in our last presidential election. “The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests.�
“Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs�.� Our 30% may not be quite prepared for modernity.
On the “Neanderthal� Gletkin: “Arguments simply did not penetrate his ears. They were blocked up by the wax of centuries of patriarchal mental paralysis.� “Gletkin read monotonously, without any intonation, in the colorless, barren voice of people who have learnt the alphabet late, when already a grown-up.� Those good ol� Bolsheviks were such classists. Fighting for classlessness? They feared and despised the peasants.
I don’t trust the translation I read. I found some errors and it did not flow well. Some of it seemed to be directly translated as opposed to translated the way native English speakers actually talk. You can see it above in the quotes I have chosen. Furthermore, I was often unsure which “he� was referring to which character. I had to reread many passages when I realized I had assumed the wrong “he� was the subject.
I'm not sure if this is the edition I read. I recommend something more recent. ...more
This is the most useful book I have read so far. It has given me a history, vocabulary and structure with practical examples for how to understand humThis is the most useful book I have read so far. It has given me a history, vocabulary and structure with practical examples for how to understand human behavior and how to live a better life. I found my Scientology, my Zen. Irvine rationally illustrates with history and philosophy (mostly Stoics), science (biology and evolution) and insight. I am not a student of philosophy so I am undoubtedly putting too much pressure on this book. I assume others have made some of his points but this book sure wrapped things up neatly for me. I had long been suspicious of the "social hierarchy game" and wasn't always sure when I was playing along or what a negative hold it had on me. I knew social media encouraged and amplified this game but was also queasily attracted to it. I have been suspicious of flattery, PC tyrants, insults and people who want to radically change human behavior to fit their vision. Furthermore, I have been fretting away about our rotting culture, bad actors worldwide, our sclerotic national politics and my children's future. Finally, I knew I couldn't change these things and it was freaking me out. But I can change myself. I have identifiable internal values to live by. Irvine's remedy for living well is all about that. As Navy Seal, Mark Owen's, rock climbing coach reminds him, "Stay within your 3-foot world". In other words, control what you can control. Highly recommended for all humans. Makes a great stocking stuffer!...more
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