Tag Archives: C. Wright Mills

Do People Change?

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses.  This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years.  People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

The United States is very much a psychological society.  Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities.  It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become.  These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made.  They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as “the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.  In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

That it is all noise, all signal – no silence.  That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us.  Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye.  It is screen time in fantasy-land.

This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin.  Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

“Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status.  It’s just great “fun.”  Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot.  “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness.  Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds.  So many flavors.  Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia.  The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly.  Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

“Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

“Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

What’s up?

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

The instinct of self-defense has disappeared.  “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense.  But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution.  We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage.  Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals.  The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had.  His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years.  Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally.  They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, “if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations.  But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.  In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.  This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.  It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change.  It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary.  This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda.  Freedom has become a slogan only.  We have generally become determined to be determined.

To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide.  Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one own’s death(s) with courage and hope.  The loss of illusions.  This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are.  That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level.  It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives.  Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now.  Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died.  The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral.  Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks.  A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show.  But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually.  It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations.  They walked away.  It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference.  As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation.  She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today.  Rightly so.  The U.S.A. is snapping.  It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us.  Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters.  One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA.  As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?”  And why was he assassinated?  Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed.  He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

The short answer is: Rarely.  Many play at it while playing dumb.

Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist.  Where we exist.  “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.”  Time always tells.

The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

It seemed apposite.

Snow, Death, and the Bewildered Herd

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Few people at this hour – and I refer to the time before the breaking out of this most grim war, which is coming to birth so strangely, as if it did not want to be born – few, I say, these days still enjoy that tranquility which permits one to choose the truth, to abstract one in reflection.  Almost all the world is in tumult, is beside itself, and when man is beside himself he loses his most essential attribute: the possibility of meditating, or withdrawing into himself to come to terms with himself and define what it is he believes and what it is that he does not believe; what he truly esteems and what he truly detests.  Being beside himself bemuses him, blinds him, forces him to act mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism.

-Ortega Y Gasset “The Self and the Other”

As I write these words, the house is being buried in a snowstorm. Heavy flakes fall slowly and silently as a contemplative peace muffles the frenetic agitation and speed of a world gone mad. A beautiful gift like this has no price, though there are those who would like to set one, as they do on everything.  In my mind’s eye I see Boris Pasternak’s Yurii Zhivago, sitting in the penumbra of an oil lamp in the snowy night stillness of Varykino, scratching out his poems in a state of inspired possession.  Outside the wolves howl. Inside the bedroom, his doomed lover, Lara, and her daughter sleep peacefully.  The wolves are always howling.

Then my mind’s lamp flickers, and Ignacio Silone’s rebel character, Pietro Spina (from the novel Bread and Wine) appears.  He is deep into heavy snow as he flees the Italian fascists by hiking into the mountains. There, too, howl the wolves, the omnipresent wolves, as the solitary rebel – the man who said “No” – slowly trudges in a meditative silence, disguised as a priest.

Images like these, apparitions of literary characters who never existed outside the imagination, might at first seem eccentric. But they appear to me because they are, like the silent snow that falls outside, evocative reminders of our need to stop the howling media streams long enough to set our minds on essential truths, to think and meditate on our fates – the fate of the earth and our individual fates. To resist the forces of death we need to concentrate, and that requires slow silence in solitude.  That is why the world’s archetypal arch-enemy, Mr. Death himself, aka Satan, aka Screwtape, advises his disciple Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters to befuddle people against the aberration of logic by keeping them distracted with contradictory, non-stop news reports. He tells him that “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream.  Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’ “

It is a commonplace to say that we are being buried in continuous and never-ending information. Yet it is true.  We are being snowed by this torrent of indigestible “news,” and it’s not new, just vastly increased in the last twenty-five years or so.

Writing fifty-eight years ago, C. Wright Mills argued:

It is not only information they need – in the Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it….What they need…is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.

Today, as we speed down the information superhighway, Mills’s words are truer than ever.  But how to develop an imagination suffused with reason to arrive at lucid summations?  Is it possible now that “the information bomb” (attributed to Einstein) has fallen?

Albert Camus once said that “at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”  While that is still true today, I would add that the feeling of an agitated and distracted bewilderment is everywhere to be seen as multitudes scan their idiot boxes for the latest revelations. Beeping and peeping, they momentarily quell their nervous anxieties by being informed and simulating proximity through the ether. Permanently busy in their mediated “reality,” they watch as streaming data are instantly succeeded by streaming data in acts of digital dementia. For Camus the absurd was a starting point for a freer world of rebellion. For Walter Lippman, the influential journalist and adviser to presidents and potentates, “the bewildered herd” – his name for regular people, the 99 % – was a beginning and a wished for end. His elites, the 1 %, would bewilder the herd in order to control them. His wish has come true.

A surfeit of information, fundamental to modern propaganda, prevents people from forming considered judgments.  It paralyzes them. Jacques Ellul writes in Propaganda:

Continuous propaganda exceeds the individual’s capacity for attention or adaptations. This trait of continuity explains why propaganda can indulge in sudden twists and turns.  It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday.

Coherence and unity in claims aren’t necessary; contradictions work just as well.  And the more the better: more contradictions, more consistency, more complementarity – just make it more.  The system demands more.  The informed citizen craves more; craves it faster and faster as the data become dada, an absurdist joke on logical thinking.

Wherever you go in the United States these days, you sense a generalized panic and an inability to slow down and focus.  Depression, anxiety, hopelessness fill the air.  Most people sense that something is seriously wrong, but don’t know exactly what. So they rage and rant and scurry along in a frenzy. It seems so huge, so everything, so indescribable.  Minds like pointilliste canvases with thousands of data dots and no connections.

In the mid-1990s, when the electronic world of computers and the internet were being shoved down our throats by a consortium of national security state and computer company operatives (gladly swallowed then by many and now resulting in today’s total surveillance state), I became a member of The Lead Pencil Club foundered by Bill Henderson (The Pushcart Press) in honor of Thoreau’s father’s pencil factory and meant as a whimsical protest: “a pothole on the information superhighway.”  There were perhaps 37 1/3 members worldwide, no membership roll, and no dues – just a commitment to use pencils to write and think slowly.

“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau asked.  “We are determined to be starved before we are hungry.”

So I am writing these words with a pencil, an object, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, which haunts our present electronic world by being a ruin of the past.  It is not a question of nostalgia, for we are not returning to our lost homes, despite a repressed urge for simpler times. But the pencil is an object that stands as a warning of the technological hubris that has pushed our home on earth to the brink of nuclear extinction and made mush of people’s minds in grasping the reasons why.

I think of John Berger, the great writer on art and life, as I write, erase, cross out, rewrite – roll the words over and look at them, consider them.  Berger who wrote: “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper”; that “most mainstream political discourse today is composed of words that, separated from any creature of language, are inert….dead ‘word-mongering’ [that] wipes out memory and breeds a ruthless complacency.”

The pencil is not a fetish; it is a reminder to make haste slowly, to hear and feel my thinking on the paper, to honor the sacredness of what Berger calls the “confabulation” between words and their meaning.  I smell the pencil’s wood, the tree of life, its slow ascent, rooted in the earth, the earth our home, our beginning and our end.

Imagining our ends, while always hard, has become much harder in modern times in western industrialized nations, especially the United States that reigns death down on the rest of the world while pretending it is immortal and immune from the nuclear weapons it brandishes. Yet the need to do so has become more important. When in 1939 Ortega y Gasset warned in the epigraph of a most grim war coming to birth so strangely, as people acted “mechanically in a frenetic somnambulism,” he was writing before nuclear weapons, the ultimate technology. If today we cannot imagine our individual deaths, how can we imagine the death of the earth? In a 1944 newspaper column George Orwell made an astute observation: “I would say that the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.” He connected this growing disbelief to the modern cult of power worship.  “I do not want the belief in life after death to return,” he added, “and in any case it is not likely to return.  What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact.”

I think that one reason we have not taken notice of this fact of the presence of a huge absence (not to say whether this disbelief is “true”) is the internet of speed, celebrated and foreseen by the grandmaster of electronic wizardry and obscurantic celebrator of retribalized man, Marshall McLuhan, who called the electronic media our gods whom we must serve and who argued that the extensions of human faculties through media would bring about abstract persons who would wear their brains outside their skulls and who would need an external conscience. Shall we say robots on fast forward?

Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse accepted as a “mediated reality” through so-called smart devices, we know – or should – that we are in big trouble.  John Ralston Saul, a keen observer of the way we live now, mimics George Carlin by saying, “If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.”

Saul is also one of the few thinkers to follow-up on Orwell’s point.  “Inexplicable violence is almost always the sign of deep fears being released and there can be no deeper fear than mortality unchained.  With the disappearance of faith and the evaporation of all magic from the image, man’s fear of mortality has been freed to roam in a manner not seen for two millennia.”  Blind reason, amoral and in the service of expertise and power, has replaced a holistic approach to understanding that includes at its heart art, language, “spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.”  People, he argues, run around today in an inner panic as if they are searching for a lost forgotten truth.

Zygmunt Bauman, the brilliant sociological thinker, is another observer who has noticed the big hole that is staring us in the face.  “The devaluation of immortality,” he writes, “cannot but augur a cultural upheaval, arguably the most decisive turning point in human cultural history.”  He too connects our refusal in the west to contemplate this fact to the constant busyness and perpetual rushed sense of emergency engendered by the electronic media with its streaming information.  To this end he quotes Nicole Aubert:

Permanent busyness, with one emergency following another, gives the security of a full life or a ‘successful career’, sole proofs of self-assertion in a world from which all references to the ‘beyond’ are absent, and where existence, with its finitude, is the only certainty…When they take action people think short-term – of things to be done immediately or in the very near future…All too often, action is only an escape from the self, a remedy from the anguish.

McLuhan’s abstract persons, who rush through the grey magic of electronic lives where flesh and blood don’t exist, not only drown in excessive data that they can’t understand, but drift through a world of ghostly images where “selves” with nothing at the core flit to and fro. Style, no substance.  Perspective, no person.  Life, having passed from humans to things and the images of things, reduced and reified.  Nothing is clear, the images come and go, fact and fiction blend, myth and history coalesce, time and space collapse in a collage of confusion, surfaces appear as depths, the person becomes a perspective, a perspective becomes a mirror, a mirror reflects an image, and the individual is left dazed and lost, wondering what world he is in and what personality he should don. In McLuhan’s electronic paradise that is ours, people don’t live or die, people just float through the ether and pass away, as do the victims of America’s non-stop wars of aggression simply evaporate as statistics that float down the stream, while the delusional believe the world will bloodlessly evaporate in a nuclear war that they can’t imagine coming and won’t see gone. Who in this flow can hear the words of Federico Garcia Lorca: “Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood/A river that goes singing/past the bedrooms…”?

If you shower the public with the thousands of items that occur in the course of a day or a week, the average person, even if he tries hard, will simply retain thousands of items which mean nothing to him.  He would need a remarkable memory to tie some event to another that happened three weeks or three months ago….To obtain a rounded picture one would have to do research, but the average person has neither the desire or time for it.  As a result, he finds himself in a kind of kaleidoscope in which thousands of unconnected images follow each other rapidly….To the average man who tries to keep informed, a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he cannot understand.

Jaques Ellul wrote that in 1965. Lucid summations are surely needed now.

Here’s one from Roberto Calasso from The Forty-Nine Steps: “The new society is an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.”

Anyone who sits silently and does a modicum of research while honestly contemplating the current world situation will have no trouble in noticing that there is one country in the world – the U.S.A. – that has used nuclear weapons, is modernizing its vast obscene arsenal, and has announced that it will use it as a first strike weapon. A quick glance at a map will reveal the positioning of U.S. NATO troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders and the aggressive movement of U.S. forces close to China.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki make no difference.  The fate of the earth makes no difference. Nothing makes a difference. Obama started this aggressiveness, but will this change under Trump?  That’s very unlikely. We are talking about puppets for the potentates. It’s easy to note that the U.S. has 1,000,000 troops stationed in 175 countries because they advertise that during college basketball games, and of course you know of all the countries upon which the U.S. is raining down death and destruction in the name of peace and freedom.  That’s all you need to know.  Meditate on that and that hole that has opened up in western culture, and perhaps in your heart.

“If you are acquainted with the principle,” wrote Thoreau, “what do you care for myriad instances and applications?”  Simplify, simplify, simplify.

But you may prefer complexity, following the stream.

The snow is still falling, night has descended, and the roads are impassable.  The beautiful snow has stopped us in our tracks. Tomorrow we can resume our frantic movements, but for now we must simply stay put and wonder.

Eugene Ionesco, known for his absurdist plays, including Rhinoceros, puts it thus:

In all the cities of the world, it is the same.  The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden.  If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.  And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.

Ionesco emphasized the literal insanity of everyday life, comparing people to rhinoceroses that think and act with a herd mentality because they are afraid of the solitude and slowness necessary for lucid thought. They rush at everything with their horns.  Behind this lies the fear of freedom, whose inner core is the fear of death.  Doing nothing means being nothing, so being busy means being someone.  And today being busy means being “plugged into the stream” of information meant to confound, which it does.

I return to the artist Pasternak, since the snowy night can’t keep me away. Or has he returned to me? I hear Yurii Zhivago’s uncle Nikolai speaking:

Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.  How many things in the world deserve our loyalty?  Very few indeed.  I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it ….What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible to not know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history….Now what is history?  It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies.  Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith.  You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment.  And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels.  What are they?  To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy.  Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself.  And then the two basic ideals of modern man – without them he is unthinkable – the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.  Mind you, all of this is still extraordinarily new….Man does not die in a ditch like a dog – but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work.  Ouf!  I got quite worked up, didn’t I?  But I might as well be talking to a blank wall.

I look outside and see the snow has stopped.  It is time to sleep.  Early tomorrow the plows will grind up the roads and the rush will ensue.  Usefulness will flow.

But for now the night is beautiful and slow. A work of art.