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| QUOTATIONS 970-986 |
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| 970. On August 6,1945 Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In a few seconds the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of people were killed. Fifty years later, on August 6, 1995, American television devoted 90 min. of yet another program to tell us what went "behind the scenes" of this already universally known and well-documented historical event. A lot of the old and some new information was provided about planning and execution of the bombing. The parts played by different members of the American administration of the day, their relative degree of involvement and "share of responsibility"were analysed and speculated upon at length. And yet, having learned all this, I was left with the same nagging question I always have after watching similar "investigative reports" which purport to uncover some hidden, unrevealed hitherto truth about well-known political and social occurrences. And the question is "who cares?". What does it matter who was personally responsible for the decision to use the Bomb, President Truman or Secretary of War Henry Stimson? Or, if it was decided collectively by a group of politicians and generals, do we really have to know their names, whether they were unanimous in their decision, and if not, who voted "yes" and who "no'? Or whether it was done to save the lives of American soldiers getting ready for the invasion of Japan, or to scare Russians - a warning to Joseph Stalin that United States was not to be pushed around? And so forth, and so on. And while it may be an interesting (and useful for the modern historians and political scientists, looking for the application of their inquisitive and professional energies) exercise, it couldn't raise Hiroshima from the ashes nor resurrect its inhabitants killed in the nuclear blast. And even from the purely historical point of view, in a few hundreds years the names of almost everybody involved , their personalities, their motivations, etc. will be no more important, and as justifiably forgotten, as the names of Nabuchadnezzar's generals. All that will remain in History are the most significant and indisputable facts: in the first instance - the destruction of Hiroshima and death of tens of thousands of its inhabitants from the atomic bomb in August 1945, and in the second - the fact that somewhere around 596 B.C. the city of Jerusalem was sacked by the army of the Babylonian king Nabuchadnezzar and the thousands of Jews who survived the devastation were carried into the Babylonian captivity. All the rest are just the historical footnotes slowly turning into dust as they richly deserve. And now the time has come to address the more immediate problem, one that is concerned not so much with the past but with the present and which greatly exercises nowadays the imagination of both the extreme "left" and the extreme "right", albeit from the different prospectives, - the problem of conspiracy theories and the suppressed or withheld truth which the ordinary people are deprived of by the deceptive and sinister machinations of the powerful but anonymous cabals. Now, considering the fact that all these suspicions flourish despite the unprecedented amount of information available today to every Tom, Dick and Harry, does it make any sense and shouldn't we dismiss such people as simply paranoid? Surprisingly, the answer to the first question is "Yes, it does", and to the second "No, we shouldn't". For first of all, it is quite understandable that the more we know the more we want to know - we can call it "information addiction". But what is even more important, dare we say crucial in this case, is that though everyone is sold, by now, on the idea that the knowledge equals power, yet it is abundantly clear from our every day experience that it is not the case, that while our knowledge increases almost exponentially, our power to act upon this knowledge and to influence the events that affect our well-being progressively diminishes, and we are actually more powerless to do so than our "ignorant" ancestors. But this maxim - "knowledge equals power" is so ingrained in a modern psyche, that it is a perfectly natural thing to assume (as the "far left" and "far right" do) that the knowledge which doesn't translate into power must be the wrong, not the true one, and that the real, the empowering knowledge is denied them by those possessing the "real" power, and not by the despised governments of the day, about which we all know more than we wish to. Perhaps the bitter truth, the one they cannot accept, and which probably is the main cause of the frustration and anger of both "right" and "left" revolutionaries, is that there is no other "truth", that they already know more than enough to act upon it, and that what they really lack is not some "hidden" knowledge but the courage and resolve to do so and change the situation which makes them unhappy, frustrated and powerless. But to return back to the question of the adequacy of information we possess or, in other words, how much do we really have to know, both quantitatively and qualitatively, to feel well informed. First of all, it is clear (even to some not familiar with Hegelian dialectic) that as far as information is concerned the quantity and quality of it are inseparable and the duality in this case is as artificial as in many others. Secondly, it should also be accepted as almost axiomatic that all the information one receives not only from the external sources but even from one's own experience is both limited and distorted. The real question then is - how much it is limited and distorted and what could be done practically to rectify it? And for this the knowledge of causes of it hardly matters if one can do nothing about them. By analogy taken from Nature, the knowledge of the causes of an earthquake, for example, is irrelevant to our safety. What is important is to find the best ways to protect people and property from its effects. And so in politics, one has to know the facts, while the motivation and machinations of those who have caused these facts to happen are for all intent and purpose irrelevant as well. To go back to History (one cannot escape it, can one?) We all know that the World War Two had started on September 1, 1939, or that the Nazi Germany attacked Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. We also know all the basic facts - number of divisions, tanks, artillery fielded, what cities were destroyed, how many people get killed, etc., etc. And all these basic facts, the destruction, the suffering, cannot be changed, whether this was the result of the international conspiracy, well-thought out military plan, Hitler's madness, or the numerous accidents life is so full of. Thus, in all our search for some hidden truth the most we can find out is that some politicians had lied, some generals blundered and some news media men and historians connived in it. So what? The politicians always lie, the generals invariably blunder, and there are more than enough people in the media and social sciences who would eagerly connive in concealment and distortion. Is this the hidden truth we have to waste our time and energy to search for? The dead have nothing to gain from it, and the living will go on, as they always did, learning nothing from the past and repeating the mistakes of their forefathers again and again. Admittedly, the characters and motivation of the major historical figures must be an interesting subject for psychologists to analyse or for budding politicians, honing the art of popularity and deception, the examples to imitate. But for the rest of us, the ordinary people, it is but a curiosity, fascinating perhaps, but ultimately irrelevant and forgettable. And as for those who took part in these events, and especially ones who became their victims, it hardly matters. One who is killed or maimed isn't going to benefit from the findings what was the real motivation of the killer or the assailant. And so to repeat, it is not the scarcity of information but the lack of the means to act upon it that should be the main concern of those who have already plenty of the first and very little if any of the second. And not just to act but to do it when it still matters and not post factum, after the game is over and what is left for them then is to play "Monday quarterback", an admittedly poor substitute for the real thing. 971. Those who are forever trying to maintain the optimistic myth of the fundamental human decency and to convince us (and probably themselves), despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that men (and women) are essentially good, I would like to refer to any sizable dictionary each of which contains hundreds of terms evolved to describe human depravity, the terms that withstood the test of times and have been proven to be the useful tools for the numerous generations to comprehend the depth and the extent of villainy their fellow men (and women) were capable of, and not, as the same optimists would like us to believe, just the unfair and slanderous invention of a few hopeless misanthropes. 972. Sometimes I wonder, if all these numerous, but minor and essentially harmless irritants, annoyances and discomforts that each and everybody experiences almost daily throughout life, is not the way of Nature to prepare us for the inevitable few real tragedies nobody could be spared of sooner or later? 973. In order to maintain some degree of tranquillity in my daily existence and stop worrying myself to death about what may or may not happen, which is a sure way to insanity, I had to bury, in my imagination, the people I love the most long before they were actually dead. 974. When I say "black" after you've said "white", it is not necessarily to be contrary and create disharmony in our conversation, but rather to try introducing a counterpoint into it, so as to make, by breaking the monotony of unison, the music of interaction somewhat more polyphonous. 975. The religion is the product of man's obsession with causality which, in its turn, is driven by his even greater preoccupation with survival. 976. If one doesn't like to do something, it's usually because he had discovered through the repeated disappointments of failures (the number and frequency of which depend on one's persistence or stubbornness) that he isn't good at it. Because it is in human nature to try initially almost anything and, if successful, to perpetuate the pleasure of the accomplishment by doing it again and again, whenever the opportunity presents itself. 977.In a crowded room the first person who makes a remark about it states the obvious fact. The second, who says the same thing, could be considered as simply supporting the first one. The similar pronouncement by the third is already redundant, and by the fourth, fifth, and so on becomes progressively and alternately boring and annoying, as each successive speaker repeats what all previous one have said before him. This and similar analogies come to my mind when I hear for the umpteenth time the same worn out interpretation of a modern painting or a sculpture, which looks like a chaotic pile of disjointed and unrelated shapes and colours, or of a modern musical composition, which sounds like a chaotic mixture of discordant notes and mutilated passages produced by the instruments out of tune, or of a modern poem, which reads like a chaotic collection of semi-decipherable words and truncated sentences, as the true reflection by the art of the chaotic, discordant, semi-decipherable, etc., etc. modern existence. For the same art and the same interpretations have been with us by now for almost 100 years. And if the first or the second critic, who had noticed this poignant similarity, had some claim on insight, after it has been repeated by literally thousands and thousands of people, it has become just as boring and annoying as in the above analogy. 978. There must be a moment in the life of every man in general, and every poet in particular, when one begins to feel that whatever he has to say is deserved to be heard as it is, straight from the heart, simple and unadorned. And until this point of intellectual and emotional liberation is reached, the first doesn't start to live, and the second to write fully and freely. 979. There are too many examples in history to enumerate, showing that physically unattractive men and women achieved, on the average, much greater success in almost every field of human endeavour, but especially in philosophy, literature and arts (which demand special dedication and immersion into from its practitioners) than the attractive ones. One of the most obvious explanations for this phenomenon is that they have to strive so much harder to win other's people attention and favour (which is the primary motivation and driving force of human behaviour) by other means, rather than the usual ones of the physical appeal. The other and perhaps more important reason is that as far as personal relations, which admittedly take so much out of one's life, are concerned the unattractive people do it as a rule on their own terms, at their own convenience, when and with whom they want, and don't have to waste neither time nor energy to fend off the numerous unwanted suitors drawn not to the content of their mind and soul but to the features of their faces and shapes of their bodies. 980. Being a relative, or a friend, or an acquaintance of a writer one has no choice but to resign to the inevitable fate of becoming one day just another batch of grist to this writer's creative mill. And the only thing left for such a person is to hope against hope that nobody else will notice it. 981. First, everybody but everybody tries to convince you of the virtue of being an individual. But when you finally decide, against your better judgement, to become one by making some tentative attempts at semi-original opinions or some mildly peculiar behaviour, the very same people are even more eager to point it out to you that there is absolutely nothing specifically unique about what you say or do. Or, which is even worse, you are accused, sometimes in no uncertain terms, of turning into an arrogant, conceited s.o.b., who thinks he is better than everybody else. 982. Ideally everyone wants to be loved and respected for what he really is . But in most cases, one has to settle eventually for being appreciated mainly for what could be got out of him. 983. There are undoubtedly some people who would help you for your sake only. But there are many more who see your need as their opportunity to show how much better, or better off they are than you. 984. "Oh, what a weary task God has given men to labour at under heaven in the few days they have to live" to make sense out of what does not make any sense and to find meaning in what has no meaning. 985. You all probably have heard a story that if all money were at some point redistributed equally, to start the history afresh, so to speak, in the relatively short period of time they would again be concentrated in the hands of a small group. And it shouldn't come as a big surprise if the very same people who had money before will represent the majority of the "new" rich. The similar tendency of regression (or progression, depending on one's political ideology) from the initial state of equality to the ultimate inequality can be observed, in general, in other human relations. Take, for example, a group of people who got together to discuss some topic of mutual interest and came to this meeting all expecting, allegedly, to be the equal participants, given equal time and opportunity to express their views and opinions. Yet, very soon in the process of conversation , unless some precautionary measures are taken and vigilantly maintained, the familiar phenomenon of separation of this presumably group of equals into a small outspoken minority, which will "hog" the lion share of time, and a large silent majority, which will be left with almost no opportunity, inevitably takes place. So it is clear (one has just to look at one's own life to concur) that the egalitarianism is never automatic and spontaneous, but rather unnatural to human interaction, be it economical, social or personal. But if we all agree that treating each other as equals is a more civilized and humane way of coexistence, then the conscious efforts have to be constantly applied to sustain and perpetuate it. Yet, despite the obvious fact that very few are happy with the way things stand now, such efforts are never more than half-hearted and feeble. For though in theory everybody but the most privileged or those desperately striving to become ones, are in favour of the idea of equality, it seems that in daily interaction with others most of us either unwilling or unable to try hard enough to practice it. And who knows what degree of personal or collective unhappiness is needed to change this almost universal pattern of human behaviour. 986. I feel ambivalent about Toronto. I honestly don't know whether to like or dislike it, to praise or to condemn. At first, it shocked me by its coldness and indifference, it crushed me by the harshness that was too much to bear for someone who grew up in a warm and welcoming town on the Black Sea, for the one who has spent his tender years surrounded by people generous with friendliness, love and attention. But in Toronto, in the seventies when I arrived here, and for me, this was nowhere to be found. And defenceless, I was being relentlessly and mercilessly destroyed, physically and emotionally, by it. Yet, this arrogant, icy city also woke me up. It forced me to look with unprotected eyes at the reality of human existence, uncompromising, non-negotiable, finite. It has taught me a lesson which happy, care-free life never does, that our days are numbered, and shouldn't be wasted in the lulling somnolence of immobilizing warmth. Then I began to write to relieve the pain, to spread the ointment of words over the wounds of rejection, to lick them with the tongue of explanation and reconciliation, to resume my life in the new incarnation. For suddenly, in this inhospitable place, I was doing what I always wanted but was too comfortable to do before, in the bosom of my complacent past. And now, I think, I'm beginning to understand the terrible and irresistible attraction the cities like Moscow, St.Petersburg, Berlin, London, New York held for the young and coddled provincials, like I was in my sunny youth. They sense, perhaps subconsciously, the inescapable urge, the necessity to die first, in order to be reborn to the new exciting and creative life they dreamt of in their sleepy, smothering towns. And those monstrous, indifferent and cruel metropolises provided them with the ample opportunity for the first and beguiling promise of a chance for the second, for the death and the rebirth. |
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