He looked like what he could have been, an Old Testament prophet.
Those who today claim courage might first compare their lives with his, and then be silent.
Reagan. John Paul II. Fallaci. Solzhenitsyn. All gone. Who is there to replace them?
Truly, there were giants in the earth in those days.
Update: From The Gulag Archipelago.
It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
From his Harvard Commencement Address.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.
Hat tips: American Digest and Brothers Judd.
4 Comments;
Scipio:
Perhaps the loss of interest in the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflects a disassociation in the moral sensibility of the so-called Free World. It’s true that his contempt for atheism and his disgust with the new generation of Russian robber barons are at odds with the “wisdom” of the hour. But his standpoint isn’t merely an unfashionable intellectual posture: it’s a profound critique of the world being created by modern liberalism.
Today is the anniversary of Shelley’s birth, August 4, 1792. I believe that Solzhenitsyn would have admired the following poem:
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Hi Scipio:
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the great writers of our time and will be sorely missed. You don’t have to agree with everything he said to recognize that he spoke the truth when so many were willing to look the other way for political convenience. The “Gulag Archipelago” is a difficult read because of its subject matter but should be required reading for any history course dealing with th e20th century.
Remember him and his family in your prayers.
Dear Alex:
In a morally bankrupt world, men like Solzhenitsyn are out of place. They function as Jeremiahs and Cassandras, warning us of the coming Apocalypse, but few listen.
Shelley could have been writing of a traveler 1000 years hence, who stumbles upon the remains of a great civilization—our own. He might marvel at the wonders such a culture once brought to bear, but now was laid waste, vanished under the shadows of time and returned to dust.
Dear Raymond:
I was assigned to read The Gulag Archipelago in college. I was dumbfounded at the evil described therein, and the blindness of our civilization that paid it little heed. Such wickedness has been repeated many times—in Iraq, the Sudan and around the world. We never really learn. Our politics seeks an easy escape from such malevolence, but such a course always ends in blood and terror. Today such things happen in foreign lands. One day they will happen here.