1
20
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ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND 21401
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FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1981-82
September 18, 1981
Mr. Edward G. Sparrow, Dean
St. John's College, Annapolis
Poet's Word, Poem's Silence
September 25
Mr. Daniel 0. Vena
Princeton University
On Contemporary General
Relativistic Cosmology
October 2
Mr. Joe Sachs, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Fury of Aeneas
October 9
Professor Rom Harre
Oxford, England
Romantic Science and the
Origins of Field Theory
October 16
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 23
Dr • Leon Kas s
The Hippocratic Oath:
Thoughts on Medicine and
Ethics
University of Chicago
October 30
Brother Robert Smith, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Proof and Pascal
November 6
Professor Ralph Lerner
University of Chicago
Franklin, Spectator
November 13
Professor Thomas Banchoff
Brown University
The Fourth Dimension and
Computer Animated Geometry
November 20
The Madison Trio
Concert
November 27
Thanksgiving Recess
No Lecture
December 4
Mr. William Mullen, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Dance of the City
in Plato's Laws
December 5
&
6
King William Players
December 18 January 3
Winter Vacation
January 8, 1982
All College Seminar
Murder in the Cathedral
January 15
An Evening of Music by
Douglas Allanbrook
Concert
January 22
Mr. Thomas May, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Augustine's Final Pilgrimage:
Athens to Jerusalem
c '
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No Lectures
,, ,
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�FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE - 1981-82
Page Two
January 29
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical
Research, Chicago
Beauty
February 5
Mr. William Darkey, Tutor
St. John's College, Santa Fe
The Darkling Singer
February 12
Long Weekend
No Lecture
February 19
Mr. Thomas Slakey, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The World of Thomas Aquinas:
Man in Place
February 26
Mrs. Gisela Berns, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
March 5
Mr. Kent Taylor, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Schiller's Drama- Fulfillment
of History and Philosophy in
Poetry
The Power to Think Nietzsche's
'Eternal Return'
March 10-21
Spring Vacation
No Lectures
March 26
Professor Donald Gray
Manhattan College
Creation or Evolution:
Must We Choose Between Them?
April 2
Paul Tobias, cello and
Elizabeth Moschetti, piano
Concert
April 9
Mr. Michael Platt
University of Dallas
Sonnet 94
April 16
Mr. William O'Grady, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
On Almost Seeing Miracles:
Thoughts on King Lear
April 23
Professor Richard Rorty
Princeton University
Heidegger Against the
Pragmatists
April 30
Mr6 Burton Blistein
Artist-in-Residence
St. John 1 s College, Annapolis
What is the Use of
Art Anyway?
May 7
Professor Gordon Feldman
Johns Hopkins University
The Language of
Modern Physics
May 14
Mr. Paul Roche
University of Notre Dame
Portrait of Sappho
May 21
Commencement
�
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Description
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Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
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2 pages
Original Format
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paper
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Office of the Dean
Title
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Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule - 1981-82
Date
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1981-1982
Description
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Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1981-1982 Academic Year (duplicate pages included).
Identifier
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Lecture Schedule 1981-1982
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
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text
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
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pdf
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Sparrow, Edward G.
Vona, Daniel O.
Sachs, Joe
Harré, Rom
Kass, Leon
Smith, Brother Robert
Lerner, Ralph
Banchoff, Thomas
Mullen, William
Allanbrook, Douglas
May, Thomas
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Darkey, William A.
Slakey, Thomas
Berns, Gisela N.
Taylor, Kent
Gray, Donald
Tobias, Paul
Moschetti, Elizabeth
Platt, Michael
O'Grady, William
Rorty, Richard
Blistein, Burton
Feldman, Gordon
Roche, Paul
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
October 2, 1981. Sachs, Joe. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3723" title="The fury of Aeneas">The fury of Aeneas</a> (typescript)
February 26, 1982. Berns, Gisela. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1083" title="Schiller's drama">Schiller's drama</a> (audio)
February 26, 1982. Berns, Gisela. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/1089" title="Schiller's drama">Schiller's drama</a> (typescript)
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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7e5702a16b71bfd8f5aac6ab5cd8ec47
PDF Text
Text
I
•
ST
JoHN's CoLLEGE
ANNAPO LI S. MARYLAND 2140 4
Fou N D LO
September 16
!• ·'~~> A ~ K 1
Nc; WilliAM\
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H<>O I
FORMAL LECTURE/CONCERT SCHEDULE 1983-84
Mr. Samuel S. Kutler, Dean
St . John's College, Annapolis
On Freedom
September 23
Mrs . Mera Flaumenhaft, Tutor
St . John's College, Annapolis
Looking Together in
Athens: The Dionys ian
Tragedy and Festival
September 30
Mr. Robert Goldwin
American Enterprise Institute
James Madison and the
Bill of Rights:
Something More Than a
Change of Mind
October 7
Mr . Charles Bell, Tutor
St . John's College, Santa Fe
The Axiomatic Drama of
Classical Physics
October 14
Long Weekend
No Lecture
October 21
Mr. Carey Stickney, Tutor
St. John's College, Santa Fe
The Tears of Odysseus
October 28
Miss Eva Brann, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Intellect and Intui tion
November 4
The Fine Arts Quartet
Concert
November ll
Professor Jose Benardete
Philosophy Department
Syracuse University
November 18
All College Seminar
Death in Venice
November 25
Thanksgiving Holiday
No Lecture
December 2
Professor Ray Coppinger
Hampshire College
The Evolution of Behavior
in Humans and Dogs
December 9
Mr. Samuel S . Kutler, Dean
St . John's College, Annapolis
(POSTPONED)
,
TELEPHONE 301 • 263 • 2171
Infinity
On Comp lex Number s
�January 6
Maryland Heritage Concert
January 13
Professor Richard Morris
Columbia University
How the Great Peace of
1783 Was Made and Ratified
January 20
Mr. William Mullen, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Dances of Plato
and Pindar
January 27
Judith Gray, Soprano
Concert
February 3
Mr. James Beall, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
February 10
Long weekend
February 17
Mr. John Bremer
On Plato's Polity
Trotter Institute of Philosophy,
Management, and Education, Houston, Texas
February 24
Mr. Mortimer J. Adler
Institute for Philosophical Research
March 2
Professor Ernest L6 Fortin
Department of Theology
Boston College
Political Philosophy as
Prophesy: Dante's Comedy
March 30
Leo Smit, Piano
Concert
April 6
Mr. Howard Fisher, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
A Grecian Urn
April l3
Mr. Peter Kalkavage, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
The Song of Timaeus
April 20
Mrs. Wendy Allanbrook, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
Don Giovanni's Proper
Music
Galactic Nuclei, Active
Galactic Nuclei, and Quasars
No Lecture
Parts of Life
April 27
Mr. William Banks
Pomona College
Claremont California
May 4
Mr. Elliott Zuckerman, Tutor
St. John's College, Annapolis
May 11
Professor Paul Barolsky
Delartment of Art
University of Virginia
Botticelli's - - - Vera:
Prima - The Anatomy of a
Masterpiece
May 18
Dr. Peter Arnott
Winchester, Massachusetts
~1arionette
May 25
Commencement Weekend
Perceptual Experience and
the Mechanisms of Human
Vision
On the Opening Chord of
Wagner's Ring
of Clouds
No Lecture
Performance
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and for a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>. <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://anchor.fm/greenfieldlibrary" title="Anchor.fm">Anchor.fm</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy84Yzk5MzdhYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw" title="Google Podcasts">Google Podcasts</a>, or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe.
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Title
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St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis
Identifier
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formallectureseriesannapolis
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
2 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
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Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
Formal Lecture/Concert Schedule 1983-84
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1983-1984
Description
An account of the resource
Schedule of lectures and concerts for the 1983-1984 Academic Year.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lecture Schedule 1983-1984
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
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St. John's College
Type
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text
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
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pdf
Contributor
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Kutler, Samual S.
Flaumenhaft, Mera J.
Goldwin, Robert A., 1922-2010
Bell, Charles
Stickney, Carey
Brann, Eva T. H.
Benardete, José A. (José Amado)
Coppinger, Raymond
Morris, Richard
Mullen, William
Gray, Judith
Beall, James
Bremer, John
Adler, Mortimer Jerome, 1902-2001
Fortin, Ernest L.
Smit, Leo
Fisher, Howard
Kalkavage, Peter
Allanbrook, Wendy
Banks, William
Zuckerman, Elliott
Barolsky, Paul, 1941-
Arnott, Peter
King William Players
Relation
A related resource
April 13, 1984. Kalkavage, Peter. <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3809" title="The song of Timaeus">The song of Timaeus</a>
Friday night lecture
Lecture schedule
-
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5ba73bb36fea2d9347c83561852ceb30
PDF Text
Text
�Editor's Note
FROM
OUR READERS
'
With this issue the St. John's Review begins to charge
new subscribers. Old subscribers, St. John's alumni and
friends, students and their families will continue to receive the magazine without charge. My desire to turn the
St. John's Review into an unambiguously public magazine
and to win an additional audience prompts this decision.
From now on the St. John's Review will appear three
times a year1 in the fall, winter, and summer-L.R.
Editor:
Leo Raditsa
Managing Editor:
Thomas Patran, Jr.
Editorial Assistant:
Janet Durholz
Consulting Editors:
David Bolotin,
Eva Brann,
Curtis A. Wilson.
Unsolicited articles, stories, and poems are welcome,
but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned comments are also
welcome.
THESTJOHNSREVIEW (formerly The College) is published by
the Office of the Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland
21404. Edwin J. Delattre, President, Edward G. Sparrow, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the fall, winter, and summer. For those
not on the distribution list, subscriptions: $12.00 yearly, $24.00 for
two years, or $36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address
all correspondence to The St. John's Review, St. John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXIII
WINTER 1982
Number2
©1982, St. John's College. All rights reserved. Reproduction in
whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Cover: Thick-billed Murre by J. J. Audubon; photograph courtesy of the
New-York Historical Society, New York City.
Composition: Britton Composition Co.
Printing: The John D. Lucas Printing Co.
ON" 'SEXISM' IS MEANINGLESS"
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin (" 'Sexism' is Meaningless") seems not to be able to
distinguish between what is in fact the case and his personal
prejudices, which he calls "factual beliefs" -a strange term since
if they were factual, they would presumably be knowledge, not
belief. Mr. Levin is, for example, concerned about the degradation of language as exemplified by the use of the word "sexiSm"
which, according to him, either has no reasonable meaning or
"simply encapsulates and obscures" the confusion which feminists have about their subject. To illustrate his notion of rhetorical abuse of language he chooses the word "exploit" which he
says means "to uSe another without his consent." From this definition it is then easy to argue that to use "exploitation" to describe contractual wage labor is to employ a rhetorical trap to
denounce wage labor itself. It was, however, not my impression
that consent, itself a rather tricky concept to analyze, had much
to do with exploitation. So I checked the dictionaries I have
around the house, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, the
American College Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary,
and the Oxford English Dictionary, and, curiously enough, none
of them used or implied the word "consent" as part of its definition. To quote just one of the four, the New Collegiate Dictionary, "exploit la: to turn to economic account (a mine); b: to t.ake
advantage of; 2: to make use of meanly or unjustly for one's own
advantage." I quote this not to be pedantic or to score cheap
points, but to indicate hQw Mr. Levin confuses his private view
of the world and language with that shared by most of the rest of
the English-speaking world. "Exploit" and "exploitation" are perfectly legitimate terms to use to describe contractual wage labor
if one believes either that surplus value is at the root of capitalist
profit, or, to be less doctrinaire, if one simply believes that
employers have, on the whole, more power than employees and
can use that power to arrive at less than equitable contracts
-not, I believe, a very radical position.
But we should turn to more substantive matters. When Mr.
Levin asserts in his title that "sexism is meaningless", this seems
to me to have two possible interpretations: l, that the term is
without clearly definable meaning; and 2, that there is no phenomenon corresponding to the term, whatever it might mean in
some loose, confusing way. I believe Mr. Levin to be wrong on
both counts.
As to the meaning of "sexism", Mr. Levin says the following:
" 'Sexism', then, is typically used to describe either the view that
there are general, innate psychological differences between the
sexes, or that gender is in and of itself important." He further as~
serts that "the first view is simply a factual belief supported by a
vast body of evidence, and the second view, however objectionable, is held by almost no-one." "Neither view," he asserts, "is
worth attacking." But, as I understand them, both are worth attacking, because the first is, I think, though clearly a belief, not
factual, and the second is, I believe, held by virtually everyone,
not no-one.
(continued on page 2)
�1
HESTJOHNSREVIEWWINTER82
•
1
I
3
George Dennison
Shawno (narrative)
24
Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
33
The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an Aspect
of Modern Idolatry Robert Loewenberg
44
Proof and Pascal Brother Robert Smith
52
Five Translations
57
The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization or Germanization?
Charles G.Bell
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
63
Io (poem)
Laurence Josephs
64
Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
65
Hephaestus (poem)
Laurence Josephs
66
Mozart's Cherubino
Wye jamison Allanbrook
75
The Fury of Aeneas joe Sachs
Indro Montanelli
REVIEW ESSAYS
83
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation:
Philosophy and the Mi?Tor of Nature, by
Richard Rorty
review essay by Arthur Collins
90
Afghanistan Fights: The Struggle for Afghanistan,
by Nancy Peabody Newell and
Richard S. Newell
review essay by Leo Raditsa
AT HOME AND ABROAD
98
Letter from Vietnam jean Dulich
FIRST READINGS
102
Laos; Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard, Au nom de Ma?X et de
Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un peuple, une culture disparaissent, review by Leo Raditsa
106
A Dead Man's Knowledge; Varlam Shalamov, Graphite, review
by Lev Navrozov
Inside front cover-FROM OUR READERS
Michael Levin's "'Sexism' is Meaningless"
and Harry V. Jaffa's "Inventing the Past"
1
�(continued from inside front cover)
To defend the view that there are innate
psychological gender differences, Mr. Levin
says that he doubts that his daughter will
become a quarterback, not because of her
size, weight, and strength, but because of
psychology. I agree with him that it is unlikely that his daughter will become a quarterback, but I also believe that it is almost
equally unlikely that his son will become
one. It is a well-attested "factual belief'
that very few quarterbacks are the sons of
philosophy professors, not because of genetic psychological deficiencies but because
they are raised in homes where athletics is
valued less than other things. I think it is
also very likely that if Mr. Levin raises his
daughter praising her for docility, obedience, and gentleness and raises his son
praising his drive, aggressiveness, and assertiveness that his son will turn out more
aggressive than his daughter. And, in fact,
it is clear that that is, on the whole, how
sons and daughters have been raised. I
hope it is not necessary to rehearse the
whole dreary range of environmental differences that boys and girls are subjected
to, ranging from dressing daughters in
dresses and sons in pants (my wife as recently as the early 1960's taught in a Connecticut school system where girls were
allowed to wear pants only under blizzard
conditions), to spending years with school
books where the boys are doctors and the
girls are nurses looking admiringly at their
superiors, or where the boys are active
while the gids can only passively marvel at
their multi-talented male counterparts.
Certainly Mr. Levin's expectations for his
daughter will have consequences, but it is
less than clear that genetic differences are
the root cause of how she will turn out psychologically. The "vast body of evidence"
which he mentions is, at best, controversial, and to assume that the case is proven
as he does is to commit that marvelous
trick one can sometimes get away with in
geometry, namely to put what you're trying to prove in the given.
As to the second view, "that gender is in
and of itself important," that seems so
clearly true that he must mean something
other than what the words seem to say
when he denies it. Clearly the difference in
the reproductive systems is crucially important, as are differences in average size,
though what the psychological consequences
2
of those differences are is open to dispute, Now, in the extremes, this is clearly true.
and what the social and political conse- However, the amount of overlap between
quences should be are really the central is- women and men in even this test is so great
that it is not clear to me that any important
sue of Mr. Levin's article.
consequences follow. For example, in the
First, however, I would like to address
two other relatively minor linguistic mat- !980 Olympic Games, the winning javelin
ters because they are revealing of the way throw by a woman was 224 ft., 5 in., a disMr. Levin argues. The first is his assertion tance about 4 ft. less than that of the male
that he suspects that "feminists avoid the winner in !948. Even granted that 1980
word 'misogyny' because it carries no con- was a good year for women javelin thrownotations of system." The real reason they ers and 1948 a bad year for men, if I were
do not use it ("avoid" is, in itself, a rhetori- looking for a large group of spear-throwers,
cal gambit to suggest some devious game I would certainly open the competition to
they are playing) is because it fails to de- both men and women, because it seem eviscribe the phenomena they are concerned dent that some women are going to be
with. On the whole, men are not misogy- much better at it than most men. That is,
nists, though the amount of violence di- the statistical superiority of men even in
rected at women is appalling, the incidence this rather uninteresting and loaded inof rape being the most obvious example, stance is not such as to conclude that an
though by no means the only one. On the army of projectile throwers should autocontrary, men like women, when they stay matically be all male. We can note that
in their place. When the recently retired Plato, not a notorious egalitarian or femihead of the Baltimore Police Department, nist (women, after all, are dismissed before
Donald Pomerlau, was under attack for his serious conversation begins), makes a simitreatment of women on the force, he de- lar point in The Republic (456b): "Then we
nied vehemently that he had any preju- have come around full circle to where we
dices against women. He really was fond of were before and agree that it's not against
what he described as "little balls of fluff." nature to assign music and gymnastic to
Now misogyny is clearly not the word to the women guardians." "That's entirely
describe such an attitude, but I think "sex- certain." "Then we weren't giving laws
that are impossible or like prayers, since
ism" is.
Second, let us look at another little ploy the law we set down is according to nature.
of Mr. Levin's. He calls attention to the ug- Rather, the way things are nowadays
liness of "sexism" and comments on its proves to be, as it seems, against nature."
Mr. Levin then moves from this example
"grating sound," suggesting that that very
rather casually to the less obvious "factual
ugliness was the motive for coining it. Perhaps we don't all share Mr. Levin's delicate hypotheses" that women are inferior in
ear, but it should be noted that in the !8th "abstract reasoning" and superior in
century, a "sexism" was a "sequence of six "child-rearing." Here again the evidence is
cards" (OED) and I doubt that its "ugli- anything but clear. It is not clear what a
ness" disturbed anyone. And words like test of abstract reasoning would be; noth''saxophone," "hexadecimal," ''textile," ing that has yet been developed can lay any
and so on seem equally good candidates for claim to validity in judging that ability; and
rejection on grounds of ugliness, though I would certainly not trust Mr. Levin's
Mr. Levin is, I trust, not bothered by them. anecdotal evidence, given his prejudices.
But let us turn to the main issues. I fully That women, on the whole, do less well
agree with Mr. Levin that "better" means than men on the mathematical part of the
nothing without more specification of con- SAT's is true, but the reasons for that are
tent or context. " 'Better'," as he says, not obvious. A few of the many possible ex"must mean better at this or that particular planations are that male students are much
task." The issue then becomes, "Are men more likely to be directed into mathematics
generically better than women at signifi~ classes than female students (anecdotal evicant tasks?" He finds that "men are so ob- dence for this is everywhere), that the imviously better at some things than women" portance of mathematics is emphasized to
that it scarcely bears discussing. His first male students more than to female, or it
example is that men can obviously hurl may be that men are generally better a.t
(continued on page 107)
projectiles much farther than women.
WINTER 1982
�Shawno
George Dennison
A marathon. Euphoria. Sights and sounds in the
corridor of dogs. Finches and morning.
We could hear our children's voices in the darkness on
the sweet-smelling hill by my friend's house, and could hear
the barking of Angus, his dog. At nine o'clock Patricia put
our three into the car and went home. My friend's wife
and son said goodnight shortly afterwards. By then he and
I had gone back to the roomy, decrepit, smoke-discolored,
homey, extremely pleasant farmhouse kitchen and were
finishing the wine we had had at .dinner. It was late August. Our northern New England nights were drawing on
noticeably toward fall, but the cool of the night was enjoyable. He opened a bottle of mezcal he had brought from
Mexico, and we talked of the writings of friends, and of
the friends themselves, and of our youthful days in New
York. He had written a paper on Mahler. We listened to
the Eighth and Ninth symphonies, and the unfinished
Tenth, which moved him deeply. We talked again. When
we parted, the stars, still yellow and numerous in most of
the sky, had paled and grown fewer in the east. I set out to
walk the four miles home.
I was euphoric, as happens at times even without mezcal. For a short distance, since there was no one to disturb
(the town road is a dead-end road and I was at the end of
it) I shouted and sang. And truly, for those brief moments,
everything did seem right and good, or rather, wonderful
and strange. But the echoes of my voice sobered me and I
stopped singing. A dog was barking. The night air was
moist and cool. I became aware that something was calling
for my attention, calling insistently, and then I realized
that it was the stream, and so I listened for a while to its
George Dennison has published The Lives of Children (1969) and Oilers
and Sweepers (1979). His story, "Family Pages, Little Facts: October,"
appeared in the St. John's Review (Winter 1981).
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
noisy bubbling. The lower stars were blocked by densely
wooded hills. A dozen or fifteen old houses lay ahead of
me still darkened for sleep.
Angus came with me. He is a pointy-nosed, black and
white mongrel in which Border collie predominates, and
therefore he is bright-eyed and quick-footed, and is amazingly interested in human affairs. He pattered along beside me, turning his head every few seconds to look at me,
and it was as if he were keeping up continually a companionable cheerful jabbering. I spoke to him at one point
and he barked lightly and jumped toward my face, hoping
to kiss me.
Abruptly he sat down. We had come to the edge of
what he imagined to be his territory, though in fact we
had crossed his line several paces back. He sat there and
cocked his head and watched me as I walked away. I had
taken only twenty steps when on my right, with jarring
suddenness, came the explosive deep barking of the German shepherd tethered to the one new house in the valley. Angus sprang up, bracing his legs, and hurled his own
challenge, that was high-pitched and somewhat frantic.
He was answered by a barking that seemed limitless. I
could hear it speeding away, the same challenge repeated
in voice after voice, and growing faint. Surely it passed beyond our village, very likely beyond our state. I was in a
corridor of barking dogs.
A soft projectile of some sort spurted from the shadows
to my right and came to rest not far from my feet, where it
turned out to be a chubby little pug. It was shaking with
excitement and was giving vent through its open mouth
to a continuous siren of indignation. The cluttered porch
it had been guarding suddenly flared with yellow light.
Two elderly spinsters lived here. They rose with the sun,
or before it, as did many of the older folk. The clapboards
of their house had been a mustard color, the trim of the
windows white, but that had been thirty years ago. The
3
�barn beside the house had fallen down, the apple trees
had decayed, the mound of sheep manure was grassed
over. Across the road, in a smaller house, lived a childless
couple related to the spinsters, and they, too, owned a
pug. While the one barked in the road ahead of me, the
other barked silently inside the house, its front paws braced
against the window and its rear paws stamping the back of
a sofa. These dogs I praised for their attention to duty.
They did not alter my mood. Brave as they were, they
were hopelessly affectionate, and I knew it, and passed on
confidently.
But now came a barking that I feared and loathed, more
savage by far than that of the German shepherd. He was
chained to a dying apple tree before a collapsing gray
house, the hard-packed yard of which was crowded with
wheelless cars. The dog was a Doberman. His barking was
frenzied. He leaped at me again and again and was jerked
back by the chain, as by a violent master. Were he free
and approaching me I should certainly try to kill him.
Overlapping these disturbing tones were the melodious
deep tones of the long-legged black hound tied before his
own little house in the strange compound farther on: a
mobile home, half of a barn, some small sheds, a corral, all
huddled before the large trees that bordered the stream.
Nothing was finished. There was an air of disconsolate
ambition everywhere, failure, and disconsolate endurance. The hound himself seemed disconsolate. He was
not tugging at his chain. He did not even brace his feet.
He followed me with his eyes, barking his bark that was almost a baying and was actually beautiful. He cocked his
head and seemed to be listening to the other dogs.
What a racket! What a strange, almost musical hullabaloo! I myself was the cause of it, but it wouldn't cease
when I passed. The sun would be up, the dogs would keep
barking, every bird awake w<;>uld raise its voice, and that
wave of noise would follow the sun right across the land.
More lights came on. The sun had not yet risen, but the
night was gone. It was the morning dusk, fresh and cool.
Birds had been calling right along, but now there were
more. At intervals I could hear roosters. There were only
three. The valley had been noisy once with crowing, and
the asphalt road had been an earthen road, packed by
wagon wheels and shaded by many elms. The elms were
garious good cheer and selfish, robust curiosity. He left
me to consort with a fluffy collie, who was not chained
but would not leave the shed it crouched beside. Now I
passed a small house set back from the road by a small
yard. A huge maple overspread the yard. Beneath the rna·
ple there stood a blue tractor, and near the tractor an
orange skidder, a pick-up truck, two cars, a rowboat, a
child's wagon, several bikes. A large, lugubrious Saint Bernard, who all summer had suffered from the heat, was
chained to the tree, and she barked at me perfunctorily in
a voice not unlike the hound's, almost a baying, but not a
challenge bark at all, or much of one. She wanted to be
petted, she wanted to lie down and be scratched, she
wanted anything but to hurl a challenge ... nevertheless,
she barked. I came to a boxer, tied; a pure-bred Border collie, tied; a rabbit hound, tied; several mongrels, not tied,
but clustered and apparently waiting for their breakfasts.
One, a black, squat hound, had one lame foot and one
blind eye, mementos of a terrible mid-winter fight with a
fox in defense of newborn pups, who froze to death anyway. She barked vociferously, but then ambled out to
apologize and be petted. How fabulous our hands must
seem to these fingerless creatures! What pleased surprises
we elicit from their brows, their throats and backs and bellies, touching as no dog can touch another dog ...
At almost every house there was a dog. At absolutely
every house with a garden there was a dog. One must
have one to raise food, or the woodchucks take it all. A
second car passed me. My euphoria was abating to good
cheer and I was aware that I was hungry. .
I was approaching the turn to my own road. In the crook
of the turn there was a trailer, a so-called mobile home,
covered with a second roof of wood. There were three
small sheds around it, and a large garden out back, handsome now with the dark greens of potato plants and the
lighter greens of bush beans. Near the garden were stakes
and boxes for horseshoe pitching. A few steps away, at the
edge of the stream, there were chairs, benches, and a picnic table. Two battered cars and a battered truck crowded
the dooryard, in which there was also a tripod, taller than
the trailer, made of strong young maples from the nearby
woods. From its apex dangled a block and chain. Bantam
stumps now, huge ones.
Even so, it was beautiful. There were maples and pines
beside the road, a few cows were still milked, a few fields
were still hayed, a few eggs were still gathered from hens,
a few pigs transformed to pork, a few sheep to mutton.
Swallows were darting about. They perched in long
against which three paddles and four inexpensive fishing
rods were leaning. Swimming suits and orange life vests
hung from a clothesline. The house was silent. All had
watched TV until late at night and all were still asleep,
among them my seven-year-old daughter's new-found
friend. The uproar of dogs was considerable here. Six
rows on the electric wires.
were in residence, more or less. The young German shep-
A car passed me from behind, the first.
And Brandy, the Kimber's gray and ginger mutt, trotted
up from the stream and joined me. His hair was bristly, his
legs short. He was muscular, energetic, stunted, bearded
and mustachioed, like some old campaigner out of the hills
of Spain. He went beside me a little way, cheerfully, but
without affection. There was no affection in him, but gre-
herd was chained. The handsome boxer was free; in fact
all the others were free, and with one exception ran to upbraid me and greet me. The exception, the incredibly
pretty, positively magnetizing exception was Princess, the
malamute, who did not bark or move. She lay at her royal
ease atop a grassy mound that once had been an elm, her
handsome wolf-like head erect and one paw crossed de-
4
hens were scratching the dirt near an aluminum canoe,
WINTER 1982
�murely and arrogantly over the other. Her sharply slanted,
almond-shaped eyes were placed close tpgether and gave
her an almost human, oriental-slavic air. It was as if she
knew she were being admired, and disdained response,
but followed me impassively with those provocative eyes.
How stran!lf she was! She knew me well. Were I to ap·
proach her she'd suddenly melt. She'd sit up and lift one
paw tremblingly as high as her head in a gesture of adulation and entreaty. She'd lay her head adoringly to one side
and let it fall closer and closer to her shoulder in a surrender irresistible in its abject charm-"! am yours, yours utterly" -as if pulling the weight of a lover down on top of
her. She ends on her back at such times, belly exposed,
hind legs opened wide, lips pulled back voluptuously and
front paws tucked under in the air. Especially in the winter, when all six dogs are crowded with the eleven humans
into the lamplight of the little home, she indulges in such
tricks. What a press there is then of dog flesh and child
flesh in the overheated room! There are times when
everyone seems glassy with contentment, and times when
bad humor, apparently passing over into bad character,
seems hopeless and destructive. Then there are quarrels
as fierce and brief as the fights of cats, and peace comes
again, usually in the person of Betsy, the mother, who is
mild and benign. She has lost her front teeth and can't afford dentures, yet never hesitates to smile. The children
drink soda pop and watch TV, while Verne, who is deepvoiced and patriarchal, with the broad back and muscular
huge belly of a Sumo wrestler, sits at the kitchen table sipping beer from a can, measuring gunpowder on a little balance scale, loading and crimping shotgun shells, and
glancing at the program on the tube. He is opinionated,
vain, and egotistical, to the point of foolish pomposity,
but he is good-natured and earnest and is easily carried
away into animation, and then the posturing vanishes. He
issues an order, directs a booming word to one of the kids
or dogs, but especially to Princess, who draws effusions
one would not think were in him. "Well, Princess!" he
roars, "Ain't you the charmer! Ain't you my baby! Ain't
you now! Oh, you want your belly scratched? Well, we all
do, Princess! We all do! But you're the one that gits it,
ain't you! Oh, yes you are! Oh, yes!"
This morning I didn't stop to caress the malamute. At
the turn in the road I heard a far-off barking that made me
smile and want to be home. I crossed the cement bridge
and turned into a small dirt road. There wouldn't be a
house now for a mile, and then there would be ours and
the road would end.
Day had begun. There was color in the sky. The moisture in the air was thinning.
The land was flat and the road paralleled the stream,
which was to my right now. Here and there along its
banks, in May, after the flood has gone down and the soil
has warmed, we gather the just-emerging coils of the ferns
called ficjdleheads. Occasionally I have fished here, not
really hopefully (the trout are few), but because the
stream is so exciting. Once, however, while I knelt on the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
bank baiting my hook, I glanced into the water, deep at
that point, and saw gliding heavily downstream a fish I
scarcely could believe to be a trout. What a passion of
helplessness seized mel I would have leaped on it bodily if
that might have succeeded. I learned later that ice had
broken the dam to a private fishpond in the hills and this
prize and many others had· fled down tributaries to the
main stream and the river.
To my left, beyond a miniature bog of alders and swale
lay a handsome small pond. Its outlet joined the stream
fifty yards on, flowing under a bridge of stout pine stringers and heavy planks. The game warden had been here
several times with dynamite, but the beavers had rebuilt
their dam across the outlet, and once again the pond was
eighteen inches higher than the stream. It was not unusual to see them. They had cut their half-tunnels under
all these banks, creating concave, sharply overhanging
edges. I had stood here with the children one night, downstream from the bridge, at the water's edge, looking for
beavers, and two had passed under our feet. It was a windless, mellow night of full moon. I saw the glint of moonlight on the beaver's fur as he emerged from his channel
under the bank, and then I saw his head quietly break the
water. The dark shape of a second beaver, following him,
glided like a phantom among the wavering images of the
moon and trees.
I could no longer hear the barking on the hill. I was very
hungry now, and intermittently felt sleepy, but here between the pond and stream the morning air was endlessly
refreshing and I entered that pleasant state of being
wholly relaxed, utterly drained of muscular energy, yet
suffused by awareness, interest, and approval ... the mild,
benign energies of momentary happiness.
Five or six bright yellow streamers-so they seemed to
be-approached me and sped by, dipping and rising.
They were finches. The pattern of their flight was of long
smooth waves, in the troughs of which they would flutter
their wings to ascend the coming slope, but fold them before the top and soar curvingly over the crest. Sleek as torpedoes or little fish, they would glide downward again into
the next trough and there extend their wings and flutter
them.
Beyond the bridge, the road began to climb. On both
sides vigorous ferns, green but no longer the vivid green of
summer, crowded the sunny space before the trees. There
was a coolness of night in the woods and it poured mildly
into the road, mingling with the warmer air.
Abruptly I heard and saw him, and though no creature
is more familiar to me, more likely to be taken for granted,
I was thrilled to see him, and gladdened, more than gladdened, filled for a moment with the complex happiness of
our relationship that is both less than human and utterly
human. Certainly I was made happy by his show of love
for me. But my admiration of him is undiminished, and I
felt it again, as always. He is the handsomest of dogs, muscular and large, with tufted, golden fur. The sound of his
feet was audible on the hard-packed, pebble-strewn road. I
5
�leaned forward and called to him and clapped my hands,
and he accelerated, arching his throat and running with
more gusto. He ran with a powerful driving stride that was
almost that of a greyhound, and as he neared me he drew
back his lips, arched his throat still more and let out a volley of ecstatic little yips. This sound was so puppyish, and
his ensuing behavior so utterly without dignity, so close to
fawning slavishness that one might have contemned him
for it, except that it was extreme, so extreme that there
was no hint of fawning, and certainly not of cringing, but
the very opposite: great confidence and security, into
which there welled an ecstasy he could not contain and
could not express rapidly enough to diminish, so that for a
while he seemed actually to be in pain. I had to assist him,
had to let him lick my face protractedly and press his paws
into my shoulders. And as sometimes happens ~'l' my euphorias and early morning solitudes, there came over me a
sense of the finitude of our world, and of my own brute
fraternity with the other creatures who will soon be dead,
and I almost spoke aloud to my dog the thoughts that I
was thinking: how much it matters to be alive together!
how marvelous and brief our lives are! and how good, dear
one that you are, to have the wonderful strange passion of
your spirit in my life!
As he wound around me and pressed his body against
mine, I remembered another greeting when I had seen
blood on his teeth and feet. He was three then, in his
prime. I had been away for several weeks-our first parting-and he had been baffled. When I came back I had
reached this very place in the road, in my car, also in summer, when I saw him hurtling toward me. His first sounds
were pathetic, a mixed barking, whimpering, and gulping
for breath. I had to get out of the car to prevent him from
injuring himself. I had to kneel in the road and let him kiss
me and wind around me. He was weeping; I had to console him. And then he was laughing, and dancing on his
hind legs, and I laughed too, except that it was then that I
noticed the blood. He had been in the house, Patricia told
me later, and had heard the car. He had torn open the
screen door with his teeth and claws, had chewed away
some protective slats and had driven his body through the
opening.
He danced around me now on his hind legs, licking my
face. I knew I could terminate this ecstasy by throwing a
stone for him, which I did, hard and low, so that he would
not overtake it and break his teeth. A few moments later
he laid it at my feet and looked into.my face excitedly.
Patricia and the children were still sleeping. I ate breakfast alone, or rather, with Shawno, who waited by my chair.
I had hoped to spend the morning writing, and I went
upstairs and sat at my table. It was ludicrous. The mere
process of holding still caused my eyes to close and head
to fall. Yet I didn't want to sleep, didn't want to abandon
that mood-too rare to be taken lightly-of happiness and
peace; and so I went into the garden and pulled up the
bush beans that had already borne and died, and carried
tall spikes of bolted lettuce to the compost pile. There is a
6
rough rail fence around the garden to keep the ponies out.
Shawno lay beneath it and watched me. I cleared a few
weeds and from time to time got rid of stones by flinging
them absently into the woods. I pulled out the brittle pea
vines from their chicken wire trellis, rolled up the wire
and took it to the barn. After two hours of this I went to
bed. Shawno had gone in akeady and was enjoying a second breakfast with the children. I had forgotten about
him, but as I left the garden I saw by the fence, where the
grass had been flattened by his body, a little heap of
stones. He had pursued every one I had tried to get rid of.
His parents. Ida's delight. His leaping. Children in
the park. An elderly scholar.
When Patricia was pregnant with Ida we were living on
Riverside Drive in New York. One bright October day we
saw a crowd of people at the low stone wall of the park.
Many were murmuring in admiration and we could hear
exclamations of delight. Down below, on the grassy flat,
two dogs were racing. The first belonged to an acquaintance in our building. She was tawny and short-haired
with the lines of a greyhound, but larger and of more massive head and shoulders. She was in heat and was leading the other in fantastic, playful sprints, throwing her
haunches against him gaily and changing direction at
great speed. The male, a Belgian shepherd with golden
fur, was young and in a state of transport. He ran stifflegged, arching his neck over her body with an eagerness
that seemed ruthless, except that his ears were laid back
shyly. The dogs' speed was dazzling; both were beauties,
and the exclamations continued as long as they remained
in sight.
Shawno was the largest of the issue of those memorable
nuptials. He arrived in our apartment when Ida was
twelve weeks old. She looked down from her perch on Patricia's bosom and saw him wobbling this way and that,
and with a chortle that was almost a scream reached for
him with both arms. Soon she was bawling the astonished,
gasping wails of extreme alarm (his needle-point bites),
and he was yelping piteously in the monkey-like grip with
which she had seized his ear and was holding him at arm's
length, out of mind, while she turned her tearful face to
her mother.
These new beginnings, and especially my marriage with
Patricia, overtaking me late in my maturity, ended a period of unhappiness so extreme as to have amounted to
grief. And I found that loving the child, cradling and dandling her, watching her sleep, and above all watching her
nurse at Patricia's bosom, awakened images of my childhood I would not have guessed were still intact. Something similar happened with the dog. I began a regimen of
early morning running, as if he were an athlete and I his
trainer, and I had trotted behind him through the weathers of several months before I realized that my happiness
WINTER 1982
�at these times was composed in part of recovered memories of the daybreak runnings of my youth, that had been
so hopeful and so satisfied as to seem to me, now, paradisal.
The dog developed precociously. He was not a year and
a half old when, in pursuit of sticks or balls that I threw for
him, he was leaping seven foot walls. He was a delight to
watch, combining power and beauty with indolent confidence, though this last, no doubt, was an illusion of his
style, for instead of hitching up his hind legs as he cleared
the obstacle at the height of his leap, he'd swing them lazily to one side, as if such feats were no more difficult than
sprawling on the floor. He became a personage in the park
and soon acquired a band of children, who left their
games to follow him, or who, more correctly, played new
games to include him. It was not only his prowess and
beauty that attracted them, but the extraordinary love he
bestowed on them. He was simply smitten with our race. I
was crossing upper Broadway with him once; he was
leashed; the crossing was crowded. There came toward us
an old gentleman holding a four-year-old boy by the hand.
The boy's face and the dog's were on a level, and as they
passed the two faces turned to each other in mutual delight, and Shawno bestowed a kiss that began at one ear,
went all the way across and ended at the other. I glanced
back. The boy, too, was glancing back, grinning widely. In
fact, the boy and Shawno were looking back at each other.
This incident is paired for all time with another that I
witnessed in New Yark and that perhaps could not have
occurred in any other city. It was in the subway at rush
hour. The corridors were booming with the hammering,
grinding roar of the trains and the pounding of thousands
of almost running feet. Three corridors came together in a
Y and two of them were streaming with people packed far
tighter than soldiers in military formation. The columns
were approaching each other rapidly. There was room to
pass, but just barely. Alas, the columns collided. That is,
their inside corners did, and these corners were occupied
by apparently irrascible men. Each hurled one, exactly
one, furious roundhouse blow at the other, and both were
swept away in their columns-a memorable fight.
I would never have known certain people in New Yark
except for the loving spirit of the dog; worse, it would
never have occurred to me that knowing them was desirable, or possible, where in fact it was delightful. The people I mean were children. What could I have done with
them were it not for the dog? As it was, I changed my
hours in order to meet them, and they-a group of eight
or so-waited for us devotedly after school. Most were
Puerto Rican. The youngest was only seven, the eldest
eleven. They would spread themselves in a large circle
with the dog in the center and throw a ball back and forth,
shouting as he leaped and tried to snatch it from the air.
When he succeeded, which was often, there ensued the
merriest and most musical of chases, the boys arranged
behind the dog according to their speed of foot, the dog
holding the ball high, displaying it provocatively, looking
back over his shoulder and trotting stiff-legged just fast
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
enough to elude the foremost boy, winding that laughing,
shouting, almost singing line .of children this way and that
through the park. I discovered that many of the by-standers I used to see at this time came on purpose to watch
the children and the dog. One elderly, white-haired man I
have never forgotten. He was jewish and spoke with a
German accent, wore a felt hat and expensive coats. He
came to our playground regularly and stood with his hands
behind his back, his head dropped forward, nodding and
chuckling, and smiling unweariedly. His face was wonderful. It was intelligent and kindly, was still strong, still handsome, and it possessed a quality I have come to associate
with genius, an apparent unity of feeling, an alacrity and
wholeness of response. Whatever he was feeling suffused
his face; he did not have attitudes and counter-attitudes
toward his feelings. One sensed great confidence in this,
and great trust in himself. The dog delighted him. It was
the dog he came to see. He deferred to the headlong, boisterous children, who, when Shawno would appear, would
shout happily and in unison, and Shawno would go to
them, bounding exuberantly, but it would not be long before the old gentleman >'vould call him, and Shawno would
leave the children, not bounding now but sweeping his
tail in such extreme motions that his hind legs performed
a little dance from side to side independently of his front
ones. The old gentleman would lean over him, speak to
him and pet him, and the dog would press against his legs
and look into his face.
We usually chatted for a few minutes before I went
home. When I asked him about his work and life he waved
away the questions with gestures that were humorous and
pleading yet were impressive in their authority. One day I
recognized his face in a photograph in the Times, alas, on
the obituary page. He was an eminent refugee scholar, a
sociologist. I discovered, reading the description of his
career, that I had studied briefly with his son at Columbia.
By this time we had moved to the remote farmhouse in the
country and our second child had been born.
Past lives. Streams. An incident in the woods. Ferocity and family concern.
Our house had been occupied by Finns, as had many
others near us. The hill, actually a ridge, sloped away on
two sides, one forested and the other, to the south, open
pasture with the remnants of an orchard. At the bottom
of these fields was a stream, and in an arm of the stream, a
sauna. It was here that the old Finn who had built the
house had bathed his invalid wife, carrying her back and
forth every day until her final illness. From this same small
pool he had carried water in buckets to the garden a few
strides away. The sauna was damaged beyond repair, but
we let it stand; and we brought back the garden, which
now was one of three. For the few years that the romance
of country living endured, it was this garden that I tended
with greatest satisfaction, carrying water in buckets, as
7
�had the old man. Just beyond the sauna a wooded slope
rose steeply. Racoons and deer erttered our field here, and
it was here that the ponies and dog all came to drink.
There were other relics of those vanished lives: handmade apple boxes with leather hinges cut from old boots;
door handles in all the sheds made of sapling crotches; an
apple picking ladder that was a tall young spruce (the bark
was still on it) cut lengthwise down the middle and fitted
with rungs of sugar maple saplings; ten-foot Finnish skis
bent at the tips with steam from a kettle. There were hills
wherever one looked, and there had been farms on all the
hills. Some of the Finns had skied to market. They had
cruised their woodlots on skis. Some of their children had
skied to school.
The hills and ridges are so numerous that in the spring,
while the snow is melting, the sound of water can be heard
everywhere. It pours and tumbles; there is a continual roaring; and when the thaw is well advanced the large stream
in the valley makes the frightening sounds of flood, hurling chunks of ice ahead of it, crowding violently into the
curves, and hurtling over falls so deep in spume that the
rocks cannot be seen. Later, in the hot weather, one hears
the braided sounds and folded sounds of quiet water. The
orange gashes and abrasions on the trunks of trees are
darkening. More trees are dead. The banks of the streams,
however beautiful, and however teeming with new life, are
strewn with debris in endless stages of decay.
The streams have become presences in my life. For a
while they were passions. There are few that I haven't
fished and walked to their source. These have been solitary
excursions, except for the single time that I took the dog.
His innocent trotting at the water's edge disturbed the
trout. Still worse was his drinking and wading in the stream.
I called him out. He stood on the bank and braced his legs
and shook himself. Rather, he was seized by a violent shak·
ing, a shaking so swift and powerful as to seem like a vibration. It shook his head from side to side, then letting his
head come to rest seized his shoulders and shook them,
then his ribs, and in a swift, continuous wave passed violently to his haunches, which it shook with especial vigor,
and then entered his tail and shook the entire length of it,
and at last, from the very tip, sprang free, leaving behind,
at the center of the now-subsided aura of sparkling waterdrops, an invigorated and happy dog. It was at this moment
of perfected well-being that one of those darting slim shadows caught his eye. He was electrified. He hurled himself
into the stream head first, thrusting his snout to the very
bottom, where he rooted this way and that. He lifted his
head from the shallow water, legs braced, and looked in
amazement from side to side. The trout had vanished so
utterly that he had no notion even of the direction of its
flight. He thrust down his head again and turned over
stones, then came up, his streaming fur clinging to his
body, and stood there, smooth and muscular, peering
down, poised in the electric stillness of the hunter that
seems to be a waiting but is actually a fascination. Years
later, after my own passion for trout had cooled, I would
8
see him poised like that in the shallows of the swimming
hole, ignoring the splashing, clamoring children, looking
down, still mesmerized, still ready-so he thought-to
pounce.
During most of the thaw there is little point in going into
the woods. Long after the fields have cleared and their
brown is touched with green, there'll be pools and streaks
of granular snow, not only in the low-lying places in the
woods, but on shadowed slopes and behind rocks. For a
whiie the topmost foot of soil is too watery to be called
mud. The road to our house becomes impassable, and for
days, or one week, or two, or three, we walk home from
the store wearing rubber boots and carrying the groceries
and perhaps the youngest children in knapsacks and our
arms. This was once a corduroy road, and it never fails that
some of the logs have risen again to the surface.
Spring in the north is almost violent. After the period of
desolation, when the snow has gone and everything that
once was growing seems to have been bleached and crushed,
and the soil itself seems to have been killed by winter, there
comes, accompanied by the roaring of the streams, a prickling of the tree buds that had formed in the cold, and a
prickling of little stems on the forest floor, and a tentative,
small stirring of bird life. This vitalizing process, once be·
gun, becomes bolder, more lavish, and larger, and soon
there is green everywhere, and the open fretwork of
branches and trunks, beyond which, all winter, we had
seen sky, hills, and snow, becomes an eye-stopping mass
of green. The roaring of the streams diminishes, but the
spreading of the green increases until the interlocking
leaves cannot claim another inch of sunlight except by
slow adjustment and the killing off of rival growth. Now
the animal presence is spread widely through the woods,
and Shawno runs this way and that, nose to the ground, so
provoked by scents that he cannot concentrate and remains excited and distracted by overlapping trails.
It was in this season of early summer that we came here.
The woods were new to me. I was prepared for wonders.
And there occurred a small but strange encounter that did
indeed prove haunting. We had been walking a woods road,
Shawno and I, or the ghost of a road, and came to a little
dell, dense with ferns and the huge leaves of young striped
maples. Shawno drew close to me and seemed perturbed.
He stood still for a moment sniffing the air instead of the
ground; and then the fur rose on his neck and he began to
growl.
At that moment there emerged from the semi-dark of a
dense leaf bank perhaps thirty steps away, two dogs, who
stopped silently and came no further. The smaller dog was
a beagle, the larger a German shepherd, black and gigantic. His jowls on both sides and his snout in front bristled
with white-shafted porcupine quills. He did not seem to
be in pain, but seemed helpless and pathetic, a creature
without fingers or tools, and therefore doomed. The uncanny thing about the dogs was their stillness. That intelligence that seems almost human and that in their case was
amplified in the logic of their companionship, was refusWINTER 1982
�ing contact of any sort not only with me but with the dog
at my side. Shawno continued to growl' and to stamp his
feet uncertainly. Just as silently as they h~d appeared, the
beagle and the shepherd turned into the undergrowth and
vanished.
I was to see these two dogs again. In the meantime, I
learned that it was not rare for dogs to run wild, or to lead
double lives; and that such pairings of scent and sight were
common. The beagle could follow a trail. The shepherd
had sharp eyes, was strong and could kill.
In the city cars had been the chief threat of Shawno's
life. Here it was hunters. He was large and tawny, and
though he was lighter in color than a deer, he resembled a
deer far more closely than had the cows, sheep, and horses
which in the memory of my neighbors had been shot for
deer-certainly more closely than had the goat that had
been gutted in the field and brought to the village on the
hood of the hunter's car. With such anecdotes in mind. I
discovered one day, toward the end of hunting season,
that Shawno had escaped from the house. At least eight
hunters had gone up our road into the woods. I know now
that his life was not at quite the risk that I imagined, but
at that time I was disturbed. I ran into the woods calling to
him and whistling, praying for his survival and wondering
how I should find him if, already, he had been shot.
Several hours later, his courting finished (probably it
had been that) he emerged into our field loping and pant·
ing, and came into the house, and with a clatter of elbows
and a thump of his torso dropped into his nook by the
woodstove. He held his head erect and looked at me. The
corners of his lips were lifted. His mouth was open to the
full, and his extended tongue, red with exertion, vibrated
with his panting in a long, highly arched curve that turned
up again at its tip. He blinked as the warmth took hold of
him, and with a grunt that was partly a sigh stretched his
neck forward and dropped his chin on his paws.
In February of that winter I saw the beagle and German
shepherd again. We were sharing a load of hay with a dis·
tant neighbor, an elderly man whose bachelor brother had
died and who was living alone among the bleached and
crumbling pieces of what had once been a considerable
farm. He still raised a few horses and trained them for har·
ness, though there wasn't a living in it. I had backed the
truck into the barn and was handing down bales to him
when a car drew up and a uniformed man got out. I recog·
nized the game warden, though I had never met him. He
was strikingly different from the police of the county seat
ten miles away, who walked with waddling gaits and could
be found at all hours consuming ice cream at the restaurant
on the highway south. The warden was large but trim, was
actually an imposing figure, as he needed to be-two at·
tempts had been made on his life, one a rifle shot through
the window, the other a gasoline bomb that had brought
down the house in flames, at night, in winter. He and his
wife and adolescent son had escaped. He was spoken of as
a fanatic, but hunters praised his skill as a hunter. A man
who had paid a fine for poaching said to me, "If he's after
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
you in the woods he'll git you. No man can run through
the woods like him." His large round eyes were a pale blue.
Their gaze was unblinking, open, disturbingly strange.
He addressed the elderly man by his last name. The
warden, too, was a scion of an old family here.
"We'd all be better off," he said, "if you'd kept him
chained.''
His voice was emphatic but not angry. He spoke with
the unconscious energy and loudness that one hears in
many of the rural voices. "He's been runnin' deer, and
you know it. I caught him at the carcass. It was still
kickin' ." The warden handed him the piece of paper he
had been carrying, which was obviously a summons. "I've
done away with him," he said.
We had come out of the barn. The warden opened the
trunk of his car and brought out the small stiff body of the
beagle. Its eyes and mouth were open, its tongue pro·
truded between its teeth on one side, and its chest was
matted with blood. The warden laid the body on the snow
bank by the barn and said, "Come back to the car a min·
ute."
The black German shepherd lay on a burlap sack, taking
up the whole of the trunk.
uyou know who owns that?"
The elderly man shook his head. No emotion had ap·
peared on his face since the warden had arrived. The war·
den turned his blue, strangely un·aggressive eyes on me
and repeated the question. I, too, shook my head. The
shepherd had been home since I had seen him in the
woods: someone had pulled out the quills.
Shawno was barking from the cab of the truck. I had
left the window open to give him air, and the smell of the
dead dogs must have reached him.
After the warden left, my neighbor went into the house
and came back with money for the hay.
"Obliged to you for haulin it," he said, and that was all.
That night, on the phone, I told a friend, a hunter, about
the dogs.
"The warden was right," he said. "Dogs like that can kill
a deer a day, even more. Jake Wesley's dogs cornered a
doe in my back field last year. She was pregnant with
twins. They didn't bother killing her, they don't know
how, they were eating her while she stood there. She was
ripped to shreds. I shot them both."
There was a crust on the snow just then. Dogs could run
on it, but the sharp hooves of the deer would break through
and the ice cut their legs. They spent such winters herded
in evergreen groves, or "yards/' and if the bark and buds
gave out many would starve. Occasionally the wardens
took them hay, but this introduced another problem, for if
the dogs found the snowmobile trails and followed them
to the yards, the slaughter could be severe.
And what of Shawno? I realized that I regarded him
habitually with the egocentricity of a doting master, as if
he were a creature chiefly of his human relations, though
certainly I knew better. I thought of the many cats his fe·
rocious mother had killed. And I remembered how, the
9
�previous fall, while our children were playing with a neighbor's children in front of our house, Shawno had come
into their midst with a freshly-killed woodchuck. He held
his head high and trotted proudly among us, displaying
his kill. It was a beautiful chestnut color and it dangled
flexibly full-length from his teeth, jouncing limply as he
trotted. He placed it on the ground under the large maple,
where he often lay, and stretched out regally above it, lionlike, the corpse between his paws. I was tying a shoelace
for one of the children. I heard a rushing growl of savagery
and out of the corner of my eye saw Shawno spring forward. I shouted and jumped in front of him. One of the
visiting boys had come too close.
I doubt that Shawno would have bitten him. Nevertheless, in that frightening moment I had seen and heard the
animal nervous system that is not like ours, that is capable
of an explosive savagery we never approximate, even in
our most violent rages.
He was with me in the pick-up one day when I went for
milk to a neighbor's dairy. There were usually dogs in
front of the barn and Shawno was on friendly terms with
them. This time, however, before I had shut the motor, he
leaped across me in the cab, growling and glaring, his
snout wrinkled and his front teeth bared to the full. His
body was tense, and instantaneously had been charged
with an extraordinary energy. Down below, also growling,
was a large black hound with yellow eyes. The window was
open. Before I could close it or admonish him, Shawno put
his head and shoulders through it, and with a push of his
hind feet that gouged the seat cover, propelled himself
outward and down on the hound.
There were no preliminaries. They crashed together
with gnashing teeth and a savage, high-pitched screaming.
The fight was over in a moment. Shawno seized him by
the neck, his upper teeth near the ear, his lower on the
throat, and driving forward with his powerful hind legs
twisted him violently to the ground.
The hound tried to right himself. Shawno responded
with siren-like growls of rage and a munching and tightening of teeth that must have been excruciating. The hound's
yellow eyes flashed. He ceased struggling. Shawno growled
again, and this time shook his head from side to side in the
worrying motion with which small animals are killed by
large ones. The hound lay still. Shawno let him up. The
hound turned its head away. Shawno pressed against him,
at right angles, extending his chin and entire neck over
the hound's shoulder. The hound turned its head as far as
it could in the other direction.
The fight was over. There was no battle for survival, as
in the Jack London stories that had thrilled me in my
youth. Survival lay precisely not in tooth and claw, but in
the social signalling that tempered their savagery, as it
tempered that of wolves. It was this that accounted for
the fact that one never came upon the carcasses of belligerent dogs who had misconceived their powers, as had the
hound.
The victory was exhilarating. What right had I, who had
10
' done nothing but watch, to feel exultation and pride? Yet
I did feel these things. Shawno felt them too, I am sure.
He sat erect beside me going home, and there was still a
charge of energy, an aura about his body. He held his head
proudly, or so I thought. His mouth was open, his tongue
lolled forward and he was panting lightly. From time to
time he glanced aside at me out of narrowed eyes. As for
me, I could not forbear looking at him again and again. I
was smiling and could not stop. I reached across and stroked
his head and spoke to him, and again he glanced at me. He
was like the roughneck athlete heros of my youth, who after great feats in the sandlot or high school football games,
begrimed, bruised, wet-haired, and dishevelled, would
walk to the dressing room or the cars, heads high, helmets
dangling from their fingertips or held in the crooks of their
arms, riding sweet tides of exhaustion and praise. And I
remembered a few glorious occasions, after I too had come
of an age to compete, when my brief inspirations on the
field had been rewarded by teammates' arms around my
shoulders.
But more than this, I felt augmented by his animal
power, as if my very existence, both spirit and body, had
been multiplied, as a horseman is animally augmented
guiding the great power of the creature. And I felt protected. It was as if somewhere within me there were still a
little boy, a child, and this guardian with thick fur and
fearsome teeth, who could leap nonchalantly over the truck
we now rode in, had devoted his powers utterly to my wellbeing.
How little of this, how nothing at all of this, came into
my account when I said at home, "Shawno got into a fight!"
Ida and Patricia came close to me, asking, "What happened? What happened?"
Ida had never witnessed the animal temper I have just
described. What she wanted to know was, had he been bitten?
If anyone had said to Shawno what the little boy says in
Ida's Mother Goose-"Bow wow wow, whose dog art
thou?" he could not have answered except by linking Ida's
name with my own. He often sat by her chair when she
ate. Three of the five things he knew to search for and
fetch belonged to Ida: her shoes, her boots, her doll. When
I read to her in the evening she leaned against me on the
sofa and Shawno lay on the other side with his head in her
lap. Often she fell asleep while I read, and we would leave
her there until we ourselves were ready for bed. When we
came for her Shawno would be asleep beside her. On the
nights when I carried her, still awake, to her bed, she would
insist that both Shawno and Patricia come kiss her goodnight, and both would. Usually he would leap into the bed,
curl up beside her and spend part of the night.
When she was five or six we bought two shaggy ponies
from a neighbor, and having fenced the garden, let them
roam as they would. The larger pony had been gelded, but
was still inclined to nip and sport. Late one afternoon I
WINTER 1982
�Down to Searles.
shoe pits by the road and games before supper and at night
under the single light at the corner of the store. Three
roads converged here. One was steep and on winter Sundays and occasional evenings had been used for sledding.
That was when the roads had been packed, not plowed,
and the only traffic had been teams and sleds. Searles's
father-the second of the three generations of C. W.
Searles-though he was known as a hard and somewhat
grasping man, would open the store and perhaps bring up
cider for the sledders. There would be a bonfire in the
road, and as many as a hundred people in motion around
it.
Searles was sixty years old when we arrived. His store
was wonderfully well organized and good to look at,
crowded but neat and logical, filled with implements of
the local trades and pastimes. Searles had worked indoors
for his father as a boy. Later as a youth, he had gone with
a cart and horse to the outlying farms, taking meat, hardware, clothing, and tools and bringing back not cash but
eggs, butter, apples, pears, chickens, shingles. Now when
he bought the pate called cretan, he knew it would be
consumed by the Dulacs, Dubords, and Pelletiers. The five
sets of rubber children's boots were for the Sawyers and
were in the proper sizes. He displayed them temptingly,
brought down the price, and finally said, "Why don't you
take the lot, Charlie, and make me an offer?" He knew
who hunted and who fished, and what state their boots,
pants, and coats were in. A death in the town affected his
business. He saw the price of bullets going skyhigh, put in
several shell and bullet-making kits, and said, "Verne,
what do you figure you spend a year on shells and bullets?"
The owners of bitches, when their dogs were in heat,
were often obliged to call the owners of males and request
that they be taken home and chained. Shawno was gone
for four days. At last the call came. He had travelled sev·
era] miles. When I went for him he wouldn't obey me, was
glassy-eyed and frantic. The only way to get him home
was to put the bitch in the car and lure him. It was pa·
thetic. He hadn't slept, was thin, had been fighting with
other males, and had had no enjoyment at all: the bitch
was a feisty little dachshund. For two days he lay chained
on the porch lost utterly in gloom. He didn't respond to
anyone, not even to Ida, but kept his chin flat between his
paws and averted his eyes. He had gone to bitches before,
but I had been able to fetch him. He had suffered frustra·
tion before, but had recovered quickly. What was differ·
ent this time? I never knew.
Apart from these vigils of instinct, his absences were on
account of human loves, the first and most protracted of
which was not a single person but a place and situation ir·
resistible to his nature. This was the general store.·
The one-story white clapboard building was near the
same broad stream that ran through the whole of the valley. The banks were steep here and the stream curved
sharply, passing under a bridge and frothing noisily over a
double ledge of rounded rocks. There had used to be horse-
come to ... "
In the summer there were rakes, hoes, spades, cultivators, coils of garden hose, sections of low white fencing to
put around flower beds, and perhaps a wheelbarrow ar·
rayed on the loading apron in front of the store. In winter
there were snowshovels, and the large, flat-bottomed snow
scoops that one pushed with both hands, and wood stoves
in crates, and sections of black stove pipe, while in the
window, set up in lines, were insulated rubber boots with
thick felt liners, and two styles of snowshoes, glistening
with varnish. At all times there were axes and axe handles,
bucksaws, wooden wedges and iron wedges, birch hooks, a
peavey or two, many chainsaw files and cans of oil. For
years he kept a huge skillet that finally replaced, as he
knew it would, the warped implement at the boys' camp.
He carried kitchenware and electrical and plumbing sup·
plies, and tools for carpentry, as well as drugstore items,
including a great deal of Maalox. All this was in addition
to the food, the candy rack, the newspapers, the greeting
cards, and the school supplies.
People stopped to talk. Those he liked-some of whom
had sat beside him in the little red schoolhouse up the
road, long unused now-would stand near the counter for
half an hour exchanging news or pleasantries. One day I
heard Franklin Mason, who was five years older than
glanced from an upstairs window and saw Ida leading Liza
and Jacob across the yard, all three holding hands. Jacob
had just learned to walk and they were going slowly. The
ponies came behind them silently. Starbright, the gelding,
drew close to Jacob and seemed about to nudge him, which
he had done several times in recent weeks, knocking him
over. Shawno was watching from across the yard. He sprang
forward and came running in a crouch, close to the ground.
I called Patricia to the window. His style was wonderful to
see, so calm and masterly. There had been a time when he
had harried the ponies gleefully, chasing them up and
down the road without respite, nipping at their heels,
leaping at their shoulders, and eluding their kicks with
what, to them, must have been taunting ease. I had had to
chastize him several times before he would give it up.
Now silently and crouching menacingly he interposed
himself between the children and their stalkers. Star·
bright knew that he would leap but did not know when,
and began to lift his feet apprehensively. Shawno waited ...
and it seemed that the pony concluded that he would not
leap, and abruptly he leapt, darting like a snake at Star·
bright's feet. The pony pulled back and wheeled, obliging
the smaller pony to wheel too. Shawno let them come
along then, but followed the children himself, glancing
back to see that the ponies kept their distance. The children hadn't seen a bit of this. "What a darling!" said
Patricia. "What a dear dog!"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
uoh 1 it's horrible. I don't practice no more, that's what's
11
�Searles, say testily, ((I seen 'em, 1seen 'em." He was refer·
1
ring to the shingling brackets that had been propped up
prominently at the end of the co[lnter. Searles had known
for two years that Mason wanted to replace his roofing; he
had JUSt learned that Mason had decided on asphalt shingles. "I might borrow Mark's brackets," said Mason, but
he added, in a different tone, scratching his face, "these
are nice, though ... "
People didn't say "Searles's place" but "down to
Searles." "Oh, they'll have it down to Se;rles." "I stopped
in down to Searles." "Let me just call down to Searles."
He was C. W. the third, but had been called Bob all his life.
Of the men in the village he was certainly the least
rural. He had grown up on a farm, loved to hunt and fish,
play poker, drink whisky, and swap yarns. But he had gone
away to college, and then to business school, and had
worked in Boston for three years. He was not just clever or
smart but was extremely intelligent, with a meticulous,
lively, retentive mind. He had come home not because he
couldn't make a go of things in the city, but because he
loved the village and the countryside and sorely missed
the people. He subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and
the New York Times, read many periodicals, was interested in politics and controversy and changing customs.
When I met him, his three children were away at college.
We disagreed irreconcilably on politics. I was aware of his
forebearance and was grateful for it. And I was impressed
by his wit and his kindliness, as when, without reproach or
impatience, he allowed certain desperately impoverished
children to come back repeatedly and exchange their
penny candies; and as when he built a ramp for the wheelchair of a neighbor who could no longer walk but was still
alert and lively.
He was not a happy man. He drank too much to be
healthy, and his powers of mind by and large went unused. Yet one could sense in him a bedrock of contentment, and a correct choice of place and work. He was tall
and bony, carried far too large a stomach, and was lame in
one leg. In damp weather he used a cane and moved with
some difficulty about the store. I came to see that most of
his friends were old friends and were devoted to him. I
learned, too, that he had forgiven many debts and had
signed over choice lots of land to the town, one for a ball
field, another for picnics. His gregarious cocker spaniel,
who possessed no territorial sense at all lounged in the
aisles and corners, and on sunny days ca'u!d be found on
the loading apron under the awning. And it was here, in
front of the store, beside the caramel colored spaniel that
one sunny day I encountered my own dog who had vanished from the house.
'
He leaped up gaily, showing no guilt at all and came beside me when I entered the store.
'
Searles, on the high stool, was leaning over the Wall
Street Journal that was spread across the counter. The moment he raised his head, Shawno looked at him alertly.
Searles smiled at me. "I've got a new friend" he said·
.
12
'
'
and to the dog, "Haven't I, Shawno? What'll you have,
Shawno? Do you want a biscuit? Do you?" Shawno
reared, put his front paws on the counter and barked.
"Oh, you do?" said Searles. "Well, I happen to have
one. "
He put his hand under the counter, where he kept the
dog biscuits that had fattened the spaniel.
"Will you pay for it now?" he said. "Will you? Will you,
Shawno?"
Shawno, whose paws were still on the counter, barked
in a deep, almost indignant way. Searles was holding the
biscuit, not offering it.
. "Oh, you want it on credit?" he said. He held up the
b1scmt, and at the sight of it the dog barked in lighter,
more eager tones. ((What?" said Searles, uyou want it
free? Free?" Again Shawno barked, the eagerness mixed
now with impatience and demand. "All right," said
Searles, "Here 'tis. On the house." He held it out and
Shawno took it with a deft thrust of his head.
I watched all this with a long-lasting, rather complicated
smile.
I said that I hoped the dog wasn't a nuisance.
((Oh, no," said Searles, uhe's a good dog. He's a fine
dog."
And I looked at Shawno, who was looking at Searles
and thought, "you wretch, you unfaithful wretch. Ho~
easily you can be charmed and bought!"
Yet I let him go back there again and again. He'd trot
away in the morning as if he were going off to work, and
then at supperbme would appear on the brow of the hill
muddied and wet, having jumped into the stream to drink:
I didn't have the heart to chain him. And I couldn't
blame him. What better place for a gregarious dog than
this one surviving social fragment of the bygone town?
There were other dogs to sport with, there was the store
itself with its pleasant odors, there was Searles, my rival,
with his biscuits, there were children to make much of
him, and grown-ups by the score. Moreover, there were
cars, trucks, and delivery vans, and all had been marked by
the dogs of far-flung places. We would arrive for groceries
or mail and find him stretched on the apron in front of the
store, or gamboling in the road with other dogs, or standing in a cluster of kids with bikes, or stationed by the
counter inside, looking up inquiringly at customers who
were chatting with Searles.
My jealousy grew. I was seriously perturbed. Somewhere within me an abandoned lover was saying "Don't
you love me anymore? Have you forgotten how I raised
you and trained you? Have you forgotten those mornings
in the park when I threw sticks for you and taught you to
leap, or our walks here in the woods, and the thousand discoveries we've made together?"
Most serious of all was his absence while I worked. I had
built a little cabin half a mile from the house. He had been
a presence, almost a tutelary spirit, in the very building of
it, and then he had walked beside me every day to and
from it, and had lain near my feet while I wrote or read.
WINTER 1982
�Often when I turned to him he would' already have seen
the movement and I would find his eyes waiting for mine.
Those inactive hours were a poor substitute for the attractions of the store, and I knew it, in spite of our companionable lunches and afternoon walks. But what of me?
One day, several weeks after his first visit to the store, I
jumped into the car and went down there rather speedily,
ordered him rather firmly into the back seat, and took him
home. The procedure was repeated the following day.
The day after that I chained him, and the day after that
chained him again ...
Life returned to normal. I took away the chain. He was
grateful and stopped moping. I saw that he had renounced his friends at the store, and I was glad, forgetting
that I had forced him to do it. Anyway, those diversions
had never cancelled his love for me-so I reminded myself, and began to see fidelity where I had established
dependence. But that didn't matter. The undiminished,
familiar love wiped out everything-at least for me.
Eddie Dubord. Sawyer's Labrador. Quills.
Just below us in the woods the stream was speeded by a
short channel of granite blocks, though the millwheel was
gone that once had turned continuously during thaw, reducing small hills of cedar drums to stacks of shingles.
There had been trout for a while in the abandoned millrace, but chubs, that eat the eggs of trout, had supplanted
them.
Upstream of this ghost of a mill, just beyond the second
of two handsome waterfalls, one stringer of a rotted bridge
still joined the banks. Snowmobilers had dropped a tree
beside it and had nailed enough crossboards to make a
narrow path. I had crossed it often on snowshoes, and
then on skis, and the dog had trotted behind, but there
came a day in spring, after the mud had dried, that
Shawno drew back and stood there on the bank stamping
his feet, moving from side to side, and barking. He had
seen the frothing water between the boards of the bridge.
I picked him up and carried him across, and could not
help laughing, he was so big, such a complicated bundle in
my arms who once had nestled there snugly.
Beyond the bridge a grassy road curved away into the
trees. In somewhat more than a mile it would join the
tarred road, but halfway there, on the inside of its curve, it
was met by a wagon trail, now partly closed by saplings,
and it was here at the corner of this spur that my neighbor, Eddie Dubord, built a small cabin similar to my own.
It was summer. The dog had gone with the children to
the swimming hole and I was walking alone carrying a
small rod and a tin of worms. I saw two columns of smoke
ahead of me, thinning and mingling in the breeze, and
then I could see a parked car and a man working at something. The smoke was blowing toward him and came from
two small fires spaced twelve feet apart. The man was
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
blocky and short. He wore a visored cap of bright orange
and a chore jacket of dark blue denim. His movements
were stiff and slow, yet there was something impressive
and attractive about the way he worked. Every motion
achieved something and led to the next without waste or
repetition. He went to one of the fires carrying an axe,
which he used only to lift some pine boughs from a pile.
He threw several on each of the fires. I walked closer, but
stopped again and watched him. We had never met, but I
knew that it was Dubord. He was seventy-four years old.
He had driven the corner stakes to mark the floor of a
cabin, had tied a cord on one of them and had carried it
around the others. Apparently he had already levelled the
cord. I watched him as he picked up a five foot iron bar
and went away dragging a stoneboat that was simply the
hood of an ancient car turned upside down and fitted
with a yoke and rope. He stopped at a pile of stones, and
with his bar levered a large flat stone onto the car hood,
which he dragged back to one of the corner stakes. With
short, efficient strokes he levered the stone onto the
ground. When finally I walked by he was on his hands and
knees firming the stone and didn't see me.
Several days later I went that way again, and without
fully knowing why, stopped to watch him. He had finished the floor and had built a low platform the length of
it, and had equipped the platform with steps. He would be
able to work on the rafters and roof without resorting to a
ladder.
He had assembled several units of studs, rafters, and
cross braces, and now as I watched he pushed one erect
with a stick, and lodged it in the fork of a long pole that
held it while he adjusted it for plumb. He nailed bracing
boards at the sides, and drove in permanent nails at the
base. His concentration was remarkable. It was as total
and self-forgetful as a child's. Later, after I had come to
know him well, I marvelled more, not less, at this quality. I
had seen him at work on almost every gadget the economy
afforded: radios and TVs, pop-up toasters, lawnmowers of
several kinds, snow-blowers, rota-tillers, outboard motors,
locks, shotguns, clocks. On several occasions I had come
close to him and had stood beside him wondering how to
announce my presence ... but it never mattered how: he
invariably looked up with a start of panic, and then
blushed. It was not merely as if his concentration had
been disturbed, but as if some deep, continuous melody
had been shattered. Then he would smile shyly and greet
me in his unassuming, yet gracious, almost courtly way.
He had already roofed the cabin and was boarding the
sides-on the diagonal, as the old farmhouses were
boarded-when we finally met. And as has often happened, it was the dog who introduced us, ignoring utterly
the foolish shyness on both sides.
The smudge fires were going again to drive away the
bugs. A small stack of rough-cut boards lay on a pallet of
logs. Dubord had just hung the saw on a prong of the sawhorse and was carrying a board to the wall when Shawno
trotted up to him and barked. He was startled and backed
13
�away defensively, ready to use the board as a weapon. But
Shawno was wagging his tail in, the extreme sweeps of
great enthusiasm, and he did something he had almost
abandoned since our coming to the country: he reared up,
put his paws on Dubord's broad chest and tried to lick his
weathered, leathery face with its smoke-haze of white
stubble beard. By the time I reached them Shawno had
conquered him utterly. Dubord was patting the dog,
bending over him, and talking to him in that slurred, attractive baritone voice that seemed to have burrs and
knurls in it, a grain and dark hue as of polished walnut,
and that he seemed to savor in his throat and on his
tongue, just as he savored tobacco, black coffee, and
whisky. And of course he- knew the dog's name, as he
knew my name, and as I knew his. It was the simplest
thing in the world to shake hands and be friends.
To hold Dubord's hand was like holding a leather sack
filled with chunks of wood. His fingers were three times
the size of ordinary fingers. He scarcely gripped my hand,
but politely allowed me to hold his. Gravely he said,
"Pleased to meet you," and then his small blue eyes grew
lively behind the round, steel-framed spectacles. "I'd ask
you in," he said, "but there ain't much difference yet between out and in. You got time for a drink?" I said I did,
and he opened the toolbox and handed me a pint of Four
Roses.
His skull was shaped like a cannonball. His jaw was
broad and gristly. Everything about him suggested
strength and endurance, yet his dominant trait, I soon
came to see, was thoughtfulness. He listened, noticed, reflected, though it was apparent, even now, that these
qualities must often have been overwhelmed in his youth
by passions of one kind or another. He had come from
Quebec at the age of twenty, and for almost two decades
had worked in lumber camps as a woodcutter and cook.
He had farmed here in this valley, both as a hired hand
and on his own-had dug wells, built houses, barns, and
sheds, had installed his own electric lines and his own
plumbing, had raised animals and crops of all kinds. In
middle age he had married a diminutive, high-tempered,
rotund, cross-eyed, childishly silly, childishly gracious
woman. They had never had children. They had never
even established a lasting peace. Her crippled mother
lived with them in the small house he had built, knitting
in an armchair before the TV while her daughter dusted
the china knickknacks and photographs of relatives,
straightened the paper flowers in their vases, and flattened the paper doilies they had placed under everything.
Dubord liked all this, or rather, approved it, but felt ill at
ease with his heavy boots and oilstained pants, and spent
his days in a shed beside the house. There, surrounded by
his hundreds of small tools, he tinkered at the workbench,
listened to French Canadian fiddle music on cassettes,
and occasionally put aside the tools to play his own fiddle.
The camp in the woods served the same purposes as the
shed, but promised longer interludes of peace.
I got to know him that summer and fall, but it was not
14
until winter-our family's third in the little town-that
Dubord and I realized that we were friends.
The deep snow of our first winter had made me giddy
with excitement. The silence in the woods, the hilly terrain with its many streams, most of them frozen and
white, but :; few audible with a muted, far-off gurgling under their covering of ice and snow, occasional sightings of
the large white snowshoe hares, animal tracks-all this
had been a kind of enchantment and had recalled boyhood enjoyments that once had been dear to me. I went
about on snowshoes, and Shawno came behind. The following year I discovered the lightweight, highly-arched,
cross-country skis, my speed in the woods was doubled,
and our outings became strenuous affairs for the dog. Often he sank to his shoulders and was obliged to bound like
a porpoise. Except in the driest, coldest snow, he stopped
frequently, and pulling back his lips in a silent snarl would
bite away the impacted snow from between his toes. His
tawny, snow-cleaned, winter-thickened fur looked handsome against the whiteness. When we came to downhill
stretches I would speed ahead, and he would rally and follow at a run.
We had taken a turn like this through the woods in our
third year, on a sunny, blue-skied day in March, and
stopped at the camp to visit Dubord.
I could smell the smoke of his tin chimney before I
could see it. Then the cabin came in view. His intricately
webbed, gracefully curved snowshoes leaned against the
depleted stack of firewood that early in the winter had
filled the overhang of the entranceway.
I could hear music. It was the almost martial, furiously
rhythmic music of the old country dances ... but there
seemed to be two fiddles.
Shawno barked and raced ahead ... and Dubord's pet
squirrel bounded up the woodpile. When I reached the
camp Shawno was dancing on his hind legs barking angrily
and complainingly, and the handsome red squirrel was
crouching in a phoebe's nest in the peak of the roof, looking down with bright eyes and maddening calm. The
music stopped, the door opened, and Dubord greeted us
cheerfully-actually with a merry look on his face.
"You won't get that old squirrel, Shawno," he said.
"He's too fast for you. You'll never get 'im. Might's well
bark ... "
"Come in," he said. ui just made coffee. Haven't seen
those for a while, Where'd you get 'em?"
He meant the skis. He had never seen a manufactured
pair, though he had seen many of the eight and nine foot
handmade skis the Finns had used. He didn't know why
(so he said later) only the Finns had used them. Everyone
else had stayed with snowshoes, which were an Indian invention.
"Nilo Ansden used to take his eggs down to Searles on
skis," he said. The Searles he meant was Bob Searles's father. "He took a short cut one day down that hill 'cross
from your place. We had a two-foot storm all night and
the day before. He got halfway down and remembered
WINTER 1982
�Esther Barden's chicken coop was in the way, but he
thought there's enough snow to get up on the roof. .. and
there was. Once he was up there there was nothin' to do
but jump, so he jumped. Had a packbasket of eggs on's
back. Didn't break a one."
In the whole of any winter there are never more than a
few such sunny days, gloriously sunny and blue. One be·
comes starved for the sun.
He left the door open and we turned our chairs to face
the snow and blue sky and the vast expanse of evergreen
and hardwood forest. He stirred the coals in the woodstove, opened the draft and threw in some split chunks of
rock maple. There was a delicious swirling all around us of
hot, dry currents from the stove and cool, fragrant currents from the snow and woods. Occasionally a tang of
wood smoke came in with the cold air.
As for the fiddle music-"Oh, I was scratchin' away,"
he said. "I have a lot of fiddle music on the cassettes. I put
it on and play along."
His cassette recorder stood on the broad work table by
the window. The violin lay beside it amidst a clutter of
tools and TV parts.
"If I hear somebody's got somethin' special or new, I go
over an' put it on the recorder. Take a good while to play
the ones I got now. You like that fiddle music, Shawno?"
-and to me: "That was a schottische you heard comin'
in."
He was fond of the dog. He looked at him again and
again, and there began a friendship between them that
pleased me and that I never cared to interrupt.
Shawno lay on the floor twisting his head this way and
that and snapping at a large glossy fly that buzzed around
him. He caught it, cracked it with his teeth, and ejected it
with a wrinkling of the nose. Eddie laughed and said,
"That's right, Shawno, you catch that old bastard fly."
The dog got up and went to him and Eddie gave him a
piece of the "rat cheese" we had been eating with our cof·
fee. For a long time Shawno sat beside him, resting his
head on Eddie's knee.
We laced our coffee with Four Roses whisky and had
second cups. The squirrel looked in at the window,
crouching eagerly, its hands lifted and tucked in at the
wrists, and its feathery long tail poised forward like a canopy over its head.
"I built that platform to feed the birds, but he took
over, so I let him have it. That's where the birds eat now."
He pointed to a wooden contraption hanging by a wire
from a tree out front. Several chicadees fluttered around
it angrily. It was rocking from the weight of the bluejay
perched on its edge, a brilliant, unbelievable blue in the
sunlight.
Eddie had hinged a tiny window in one of the panels of
the side window. He opened it now and laid his hand on
the feeding platform, a few peanuts and sunflower seeds
on the palm. The squirrel leaped away, but came back immediately and proceeded to eat from his hand, picking up
one seed at a time. Shawno went over and barked, and the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
squirrel seized one last morsel and fled. Dubord closed the
window and turned to the dog, chuckling. Again the dog
sat with him, this time laying his chin over one wide rubber boot.
I saw his packbasket in the corner. He used it daily to
bring in water and whisky and a few tools. The handle of
his axe protruded from the basket. The basket was of ash
strips, such as the Indians make. I had bought several two
towns away. Dubord had made this one himself.
"The Indians can take brown ash wherever they find
it," he said. "Did you know that? They used to camp
every summer on the Folsom place. Diamond National
owns it now. There's brown ash down there, downhill
goin' toward the pond. I used to trap beaver with one o'
the men, and he showed me."
The basket was thirty years old.
He sipped his coffee.
"Have you met Mister Mouse?" he said.
"Who?"
"Don't know if he'll come while Shawno's here."
Smiling like a little boy, he said, "Keep your eyes open,
but don't move. Don't even blink. He can see it."
He put a peanut on the two-by-four at the upper edge
of the far wall, stepped back from it and stood there making a strange little whimpering sound. Shawno perked up
his ears and was suddenly excited, but I whispered to him,
no, no ... stay.
Again Dubord made the squeaking sound, sucking air
through his lips. Presently, quite soundlessly, a roundeared gray mouse appeared on the ledge, sniffing. It crept
forward a few inches and stopped, sniffing alertly and angling the delicate long antennae of its whiskers this way
and that. It nibbled the peanut rapidly, listening while it
ate, its bulging black eyes glinting with light from the windows and the open door.
Shawno got to his feet ... and that huge movement and
the sound of his claws on the floor put an end to the performance.
We stayed for two hours. He talked of his early days in
the States, and his years in the woods. I could hear the
French Canadian and the Yankee accents contending in
his speech, the one wanting to stress the final syllables,
the other to drawl them. Shawno sat close to him, sometimes upright with his chin on his knee, sometimes lying
flat with his nose near the broad booted foot. Until now all
his friendships had been friendships of play. This was a
friendship of peace. It was one of those rare occasions on
which, perhaps only momentarily, a little family of the
spirit is formed.
It was good sapping weather. The days were sunny, the
snow melting, the nights cold. When we saw Dubord several days later he was gathering sap from the huge maples
near his camp.
A rapidly moving cloud of light gray smoke rolled over
and over in the lower branches of the trees. I skied closer
and saw that it was not coming from the cabin, as I had
15
�feared, nor was it smoke, but steam from a bubbling large
tray of maple sap.
He had shovelled away some snow and had built a fire·
place of fieldstones he had gathered in the fall. The sides
were lined with scraps of metal. The back had been cut
from a sheetmetal stove and was equipped with a metal
chimney five feet high. A shallow tray, two feet by four,
formed the top of this fireplace/stove. It was from the
tray that the clouds of steam were rising.
While I was examining all this Dubord appeared, plod·
ding blockily on snowshoes, pulling a toboggan that I rec·
ognized, since I had helped in the making of it, splitting
out boards from a squared-off log of ash, steaming the
tips, nailing them around a log to cool and set. On the to·
boggan were two five-gallon white plastic jugs, each halffilled with sap. A tin funnel bounced against one of them,
secured by a wire to its handle.
Eddie threw me a furious glance that was scarcely a
greeting. His teeth were clamped and his mouth was
pulled down. I knew without asking that he had been
quarrelling with Nellie, his wife. How long he would have
maintained this furious silence I don't know, but it was
more than he could do to hold out against the dog. A dark,
deep blush suffused his weathered round face. He
dropped the toboggan rope, and smiling helplessly at the
corners of his mouth, bowed his head to the uprearing
dog, petting him with both hands and allowing his face to
be licked.
He took off the snowshoes and put more wood on the
fire. The four foot strips of white birch-edgings from the
turning mill-had been stacked in the fall and covered.
Papery white bark still clung to them. The wood was well
dried and burned hot-the "biscuit wood" of the old
farmhouse kitchens.
The tray was slanted toward one of its forward corners,
and there, with his brazing torch, Dubord had attached a
little spigot. He drained some syrup into a large spoon,
blew on it, tested it with his finger. It was too thin to drain
off.
I helped him pour some of the new sap into the noisily
bubbling syrup. The steam was sweet and had a pleasant
odor.
Several galvanized buckets stood by the fire and we
poured the rest of the sap into them. I noticed that just as
he had not filled the plastic jugs he did not fill the buckets
-an old man's foresight, avoiding loads that might injure
him.
I went with him back to the maple trees, and at last he
broke his silence.
"Was a damn good farm here fifty years ago," he said. "!
wanted to buy it but I couldn't meet the price."
The huge maples lined the road. There were smaller
trees around them, some in the road itself, but the maples
were leafy and well exposed to the sun, and their sap was
far richer than that of forest maples. The boiling ratio
would be forty to one, or better.
Buckets, four to a tree, clung to the stout, coarse-barked
16
trunks waist high, as if suspended from a single belt. They
hung from short spouts of galvanized metal, and were cov·
ered with metal lids that were creased slightly in the middle and looked like roofs.
Since I was helping, we filled the jugs, and soon had
sledded sixty gallons to the fire.
Nellie's canary, whom they had called Buddy, had been
killed that morning. The quarrel had followed its death.
She had been cleaning its cage and had let it out to
stretch its wings.
"She could've put it in the other cage," Dubord said.
He was stirring the boiling sap with a stick of wood, and
in his anger he splashed it again and again.
"It was right there under the bed," he said. "Damn
thing shittin' all over the place! If I come in with one
speck o' mud on my boots she raises hell! I wanted to go
out. 'Don't open the door!' 'Well put 'im in the cage!'"
He thumped the tray as if he meant to drive holes
through it.
"Freddie Latham was outside fillin' the oil tank," he
said. "Nellie's mother'd knitted some mittens for the new
baby, so Nellie says to me, 'Cit Buddy,' and she comes
right past me and opens the door. 'Yoo hoo, Freddie."'
He ground his teeth a while.
"Cit the bird!" he muttered explosively. "What'd she
expect me t'do, fly up an' catch it? Damn thing flew out
the door right behind her and she didn't even notice.
Then she opened the porch door and it flew out that one
too. Damn! If I been holdin' a stick o' wood I'd heaved it
at 'er! You could o' heard her down t'village. 'Save Buddy!'
'Here, Buddy!' 'Cit Buddy!"'
Dubord never glanced at me. His eyes were re-seeing
the whole event.
"He perched on the roof o' the shed," he said, "And I
got the ladder and started U:p with some birdseed, and
Freddie went in and got my smeltin' net. Soon as the bird
saw me gittin 1 close, he flew over an' perched on the ridge·
pole o' the house. Then he flew up to the antenna, and
Nellie's whistlin' to him an' suckin' her lips. 'Eddie, git
that canary record, maybe if we play it Buddy'll come
down.'"
Dubord glanced at me fiercely and demanded: "If he
could hear it up there what'd he want t'come down for?"
"By the time I come down off the ladder the bird' d flew
up to the electric wire. He was just gittin' settled ... wham!
Some damn ol' red-tail hawk been watchin' the whole
thing. I never seen 'im. Where he come from I don't
know. Couple o' yella feathers come down like snowflakes. I thought, here's your canary, Nellie. An' I thought,
enjoy your dinner, mister hawk. You just saved me two
hund'd dolluhs."
Dubord glared at me again and said, "Yessuh! That's
what I said! Two hund'd dolluhs! That's what I spent for
birdseed! I'm tellin' the truth, I ain't makin' it up! And I
ain't sayin' Buddy et that much, I'm sayin' we BOUGHT
that much! You saw him do that Christly trick! You and
WINTER 1982
�the Missus saw that trick the first time you come down.
Sure you did! Yau had the girl with you ... "
The trick he was referring to was something Nellie had
taught the bird, or had discovered, namely, that when she
put his cage up to the feeding platform at the window, he
would pick up a seed from the floor and hold it between
the bars, and the chickadees would jostle one another until one had plucked the seed from his beak, and then Buddy
would get another. Nellie had loved to show this off.
Eddie was still glaring at me. "WHERE DID YOU THINK
THEM BIRDS COME FROM?" he shouted. "We had t'have
them birds ON HAND! We was feedin' a whole damn flock
right through the year so Buddy could do his Christly trick
two or three times a month! In bad weather he couldn't
do it 't all, but we still had t'feed the chickadees."
He paced back and forth by the evaporating tray grinding his teeth and glaring. "I guess I warn't upset 'nough
t'suit 'er," he said "God tamn! Hasn't she got a tongue!"
One last wave of anger smote him and he howled
louder than before, but there was a plaintive note in his
voice and he almost addressed it to the sky.
"IT WAS NELLIE HER OWN GODDAM RATTLE BRAIN
SELF OPENED THE DOOR!" he cried.
And then he calmed down. That is to say, he walked
around the steaming tray panting and lurching and
thumping the sides and bottom with the little stick.
He had brought some blankets in his packbasket and
was planning to spend the night.
He drained off some thick syrup into a small creamery
pail and set it aside to cool. He drained a little more into
an old enamel frying pan and with a grunt bent down and
thrust it under the evaporator tray right among the flames
and coals. After it had bubbled and frothed a while, he
knelt again and patted the snow to make it firm, and scattered the hot syrup over it. When Shawno and I went
home I had a jar of syrup for Patricia and a bag of maple
taffy for the kids.
At around two o'clock the next afternoon I answered
the phone and heard the voice of Nellie Dubord, whose
salutation, calling or receiving, it always Yeh-isss, as if she
were emphatically agreeing with some previous remark.
Eddie had not come home. She knew that he had taken
blankets to the camp, but she was worried.
"!just don't feel right," she said. "]can't see any smoke
up there. I should be able to see the chimney smoke,
though maybe not. Ain't he boilin' sap? I should see that
smoke too. Can you see it up there? Take a look. I guess
I'm bein' foolish, but I don't know ... I just don't feel
right."
I went upstairs and looked from the west windows.
There wasn't any smoke. I skied across.
There was no activity at the cabin, no smoke or shimmering of heated air at the chimney, no fire out front.
Shawno sniffed at the threshold. He chuffed and snorted,
sniffed again, then drew back and barked. He went forward again and lowered his head and sniffed.
The door was locked. I went around to the window. DuTHE ST. JOHNS
REVIEW
bard lay on the floor on his back beside the little platform
bed. He was dressed except for his boots. The blankets
had come away from the bed, as if he had clutched them
at the moment of falling. I battered the door with a piece
of stovewood and went to him. He was breathing faintly,
but his weathered face was as bloodless as putty.
He was astonishingly heavy. I got him onto the bed,
covered him with the blankets and our two coats, and
skied to the road. I saw his car there and cursed myself for
not having searched him for the key. The nearest house
was three quarters of a mile away. I telephoned there for
an ambulance, and made two other calls, then went back
and put him on the toboggan and set out pulling him over
the packed but melting trail, dreadfully slowly.
I hadn't gone twenty paces before the men I had called
appeared. The two elder were carpenters, the young man
was their helper. They were running towards us vigorously, and I felt a surge of hope.
But it was more than hope that I felt at that moment.
Something priceless was visible in their faces, and I have
been moved by the recollection of it again and again. It
was the purified, electric look of wholehearted response.
The men came running towards us vigorously, lifting their
knees in the snow and swinging their arms, and that unforgettable look was on their faces.
Ten days later Patricia, the children, and I went with
Nellie to the hospital. The children weren't admitted, and
Nellie sat with them in the lobby.
Dubord was propped up by pillows and was wearing a
hospital smock that left his arms bare. I was used to the
leathery skin of his hands and face; the skin of his upper
arms, that were still brawny, was soft and white, one
would say shockingly white.
"Sicker cats than this have got well and et another
meal," he said. And then, gravely, "Nellie told me you
went in for me. I'm much obliged to you."
"Did the girls like their candy?" he asked ... and it took
me a moment to realize that he was referring to the maple
taffy, the last thing he had made before the heart attack.
A few moments later he said, 11 How's my dog?" meaning
Shawno, and I told him how the dog had known at once
that something was wrong, and that rapt, shy look came
over his face.
A neighbor came in while I was there, Earl Sawyer, who
after chatting briefly, said to him, "Well, you won't be
seein' Blackie no more."
Dubord asked him what had happened.
"I did away with him," said Sawyer. "I had to. He went
after porcupines three times in the last two weeks. Three
times I took him to the vet, eighteen dollars each time. I
can't be doin' that. Then he went and did it again, so I
took him out and shot 'im, quills and all."
Sawyer was upset.
"If he can't learn," he said. " ... I can't be doin' that.
Damn near sixty dollars in two weeks, and there's a leak in
the goddam cellar. He was a nice dog, though. He was a
good dog otherwise."
17
�Sawyer was thirty-three or four, but his face was worn
and tense. He worked ten hours a day as a mechanic, belonged to the fire department, and was serving his second
term as road commissioner. He had built his own house
and was raising two children.
"I don't blame you," said Dubord. "You'd be after 'im
every day."
"He went out an' did it again," said Sawyer.
There was silence for a while.
"I can't see chainin' a dog," Sawyer said. ''I'd rather not
have one."
"A chained dog ain't worth much," Eddie said.
Months went by before Eddie recovered his spirits. But
in truth he never did entirely recover them. I could see a
sadness in him that hadn't been there before, and a tendency to sigh where once he had raged.
The change in his life was severe. He sold the new cabin
he had liked so much, and spent more time in the little
shed beside the house. I drove down to see him frequently,
but it wasn't the same as stopping by on skis or walking
through the woods. Nor was he allowed to drink whisky.
Nor did I always remember to bring the dog.
Most of the snow was gone by the end of that ApriL
One night Shawno failed to appear for supper, and there
was no response when I called into the dusk from the
porch. I called again an hour later, and this time I saw
movement in the shadows just beyond the cars. Why was
he not bounding toward me? I ran out, calling to him. He
crept forward a few paces on his belly, silently, and then
lay still. When I stood over him, he turned his head away
from me. His jowls and nose were packed with quills. He
could not close his mouth. There were quills in his tongue
and hanging down from his palate. The porcupine had
been a small one, the worst kind for a dog.
He seemd to be suffering more from shame than from
the pain of the quills. He would not meet my eyes; and
the once or twice that he did, he lowered his head and
looked up woefully, so that the whites showed beneath
the irises. I had never seen him so stricken.
I was afraid that he might run off, and so I picked him
up and carried him into the house. This, too, was mortifying. His eyes skittered from side to side. What an abject
entrance for this golden creature, who was used to bounding in proudly!
The black tips of the quills are barbed with multiple,
hair-fine points. The quills are shaped like torpedoes and
are hollow-shafted, so that the pressure of the flesh
around them draws them deeper into the victim's body.
They are capable of migrating then to heart, eyes, liver ...
He wanted to obey me. He lay flat under the floor lamp.
But every time I touched a quill with the pliers, a tic of
survival jerked away his head.
Ida was shocked. He was the very image of The
Wounded, The Victimized. It was as if some malevolent
tiny troll had shot him with arrows. She knelt beside him
18
and threw her arms around his neck, and in her high, passionate voice of child goodness repeated the words both
Patricia and I had already said: "Don't worry, Shawno,
we'll get them out for you!" -but with this difference:
that he drew back the corners of his open mouth, panted
slightly, glanced at her, and thumped his taiL
I took him to the vet the next day, and brought him
back unconscious in the car.
I thought of Sawyer and his Black Labrador, and saw
from still another aspect the luxury of our lives. I did not
go to bed exhausted every night, was not worried about a
job, a mortgage, a repair bill, a doctor's bill, unpaid loans
at the bank. And here was another of the homely luxuries
our modest security brought us: he lay on the back seat
with his eyes closed, his mouth open, his tongue out,
panting unconsciously. Great quantities of saliva came
from his mouth, so much of it that the seat was wet when
finally we moved him.
A walk with Ida. Waldo. Persistence of the city.
Kerosene light and an aphorism. The rock above
the town. Wandering dogs.
Spring comes slowly and in many stages. The fields go
through their piebald phase again and again, in which the
browns and blacks of grass and wet earth are mingled with
streaks of white-and then everything is covered again
with the moist, characteristically dimpled snow of spring.
But soon the sun comes back, a warm wind blows, and in
half a day the paths in the woods and the ruts in our long
dirt road are streaming with water.
Black wasps made their appearance on a warm day in
March, then vanished. This was the day that a neighbor
left his shovel upright in the snow in the morning and in
the evening found it on bare ground. It was the day that a
man in his seventies with whom I had stopped to talk
while he picked up twigs and shreds of bark from his
south-facing yard, turned away from me abruptly and
pointed with his finger, saying, "Look! Is that a bee? Yes,
by gurry! It's a bee! The first one!"
But there was more rain and more snow, and then, alas,
came the flooding we had hoped to be spared, as the
stream overflowed our lower road, this time to a depth of
two feet. For several days we came home through the
woods with our groceries in rucksacks, but again the snow
shrivelled and sank into the ground, and high winds dried
the mud. I saw a crowd of black starlings foraging in a
brown field, and heard the first cawing of crows. The
leaves of the gray birches uncurled. There were snow flurries, sun again, and the ponies followed the sun all day,
lolling on the dormant grass or in the mud. Shawno, too,
basked in the sun like a tourist on a cruise ship. He lay
blinking on a snowbank with his tongue extended, baking
above and cooling below. I pulled last year's leaves out of
several culverts, and opened channels in the dooryard
WlNTER 1982
�mud so that the standing water could reach the ditch.
Early one morning six Canada Geese flew over my head,
due north, silently, flying low; and then.at dusk the same
day I heard a partridge drumming in the woods.
Several days after Easter, when the garden was clear of
snow and the chives were three inches high, Ida came
striding into my room, striking her feet noisily on the floor
and grinning.
"Wake up, dad!" she called. "It's forty-forty!"
She was seven. I had told her the night before how
when she was four years old and could not count or tell
time she had invented that urgent hour, forty-forty, and
had awakened me one morning proclaiming it.
When she saw that I was awake, she said eagerly, "Look
out the window, daddy! Look!"
I did, and saw a world of astonishing whiteness. Clinging, heavy snow had come down copiously in the night
and had ceased before dawn. There was no wind at all.
Our white garden was bounded by a white rail fence,
every post of which was capped by a mound of white. The
pines and firs at the wood's edge were almost entirely
white, and the heavy snow had straightened their upwardsweeping branches, giving the trees a sharp triangular outline and a wonderfully festive look.
The whiteness was everywhere. Even the sky was
white, and the just-risen sun was not visible as a disc at all
but as a lovely haze of orange between whitenesses I knew
to be hills.
An hour later Ida, Shawno, and I were walking through
the silent, utterly motionless woods. We took the old
county road, that for decades now has been a mere trail,
rocky and overgrown. It goes directly up the wooded high
ridge of Folsom hill and then emerges into broad, shaggy
fields that every year become smaller as the trees move in.
We gather blueberries here in the summer, and in the fall
apples and grapes, but for almost two years now we have
come to the old farm for more sociable reasons.
After breakfast Ida had wanted to hear stories of her
earlier childhood, and now as we walked through the
woods she requested them again, taking my bare hand
with her small, gloved one, and saying, "Daddy, tell me
about when I was a kid."
"You mean like the time you disappeared in the snow?"
This was an incident I had described to her before, and
of which she delighted to hear.
"Yes!" she said.
"Well ... that was it-you disappeared. You were two
years old. You were sitting on my lap on the toboggan and
we went down the hill beside the house. We were going
really fast, and the toboggan turned over and you flew
into a snowbank and disappeared."
She laughed and said, "You couldn't even see me?"
"Nope. The snow was light and fluffy and very deep."
"Not even my head?"
"Not even the tassel on your hat."
"How did you find me?"
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
"I just reached down and there you were, and I pulled
you out."
She laughed triumphantly and said, "Tell me some
more."
While we talked in this fashion the dog trotted to and
fro among the snow-burdened close-set trees, knocking
white cascades from bushes and small pines. Often he
would range out of sight, leaping over deadfalls and
crouching under gray birches that had been pressed almost flat by the heavy snows of previous years, and then
he would come closer, sniffing at the six inch layer of wet
snow, and chuffing and snorting to clear his nose. Occasionally, snorting still more vigorously, he would thrust his
snout deep into the snow and then step back and busily
pull away snow and matted leaves with his front paws.
Watching all this, I understood once again that the
world of his experience was unimaginably different from
the world of mine. What were the actual sensations of his
sense of smell? How could I possibly know them? And
how were those olfactory shapes and meanings structured
in his memory? Snout, eyes, tongue, ears, belly-all were
close to the ground; his entire life was close to it, and mine
was not. I knew that in recent weeks complex odors had
sprung up in the woods, stirring him and drawing him excitedly this way and that. And I could see that last night's
snowfall had suppressed the odors and was thwarting him,
and that was all, really, that I could know.
After three-quarters of a mile the trail grew steep, and
the trees more numerous. We could not walk side by side;
I let Ida go in front, and our conversation now consisted of
the smiles we exchanged when she looked back at me over
her shoulder. I watched her graceful, well-formed little
body in its quilted red jacket and blue snow pants, and felt
a peace and happiness until now rare in my life.
Milky sky appeared between the snowy tops of the
trees. A few moments later there was nothing behind the
trees but the unmarked white of a broad field-at which
moment there occurred one of those surprises of country
life that are dazzling in much the way that works of art are
dazzling, but that occur on a scale no artwork can imitate.
I called to Ida, and she, too, cried aloud. The dog turned
to us and came closer, lifting his head eagerly.
The sight that so astonished us was this: several hundred birds, perhaps as many as five hundred, plump and
black, were scattered throughout the branches of one of
the maples at the wood's edge. The branches themselves
were spectacular enough, amplified by snow and traced
elegantly underneath by thin black lines of wet bark, but
the surprising abundance of the birds and their glossy
blackness against the white of the field were breathtaking.
I threw a stick at them. I couldn't resist. The entire tree
seemed to shimmer and crumble, then it burst, and black
sparks fluttered upward almost in the shape of a plume of
smoke. The plume thinned and tilted, then massed together again with a wheeling motion, from which a fluttering ribbon emerged, and the entire flock streamed
away in good order down the field to another tree.
19
�Shawno, who had remained baffled and excluded, resumed his foraging. He stopped and raised his head
alertly, then leaped forward in a bounding, enthusiastic
gallop, and in a moment was out of sight. When Ida and I
came to the spot he had just left, she, too, quickened excitedly, and with no more ceremony than had been shown
me by the dog let go of my hand and ran.
And if I had been a child, I would have followed, since it
was here, precisely here, that due to the lie of the land,
that is, the acoustics of the field, the playful, headlong
gaiety of two voices could be heard quite clearly, a girl's
voice shouting "I did, Leo! I did!" and the voice of her
brother, who was eight, replying, "Ha, ha, hal" and then
both shouting, "Shawno! Shawno!" I stood there and
watched Ida's diminutive figure running alone across the
snowy field in the direction of the house that was still to
come in sight.
I looked back for a moment down the long slope of the
field, towards the woods, the way we had come. I had intended to look for the birds, but our three sets of footprints caught my eye, and I could not help but smile at the
tale they told. They were like diagrams of our three different ways of being in the world. Mine, alas, denoted logic
and responsible decision: they plodded straight ahead,
straight ahead. Ida's footprints, in contrast to mine, went
out to the sides here and there, performed a few curlicues
and turns, and were even supplanted at one place by a
star-shaped body-print where she had thrown herself
laughing onto the snow.
But the footprints of the dog! ... this was a trail that was
wonderful to see! One might take it as erratic wandering,
or as continual inspiration, or as continua] attraction,
which may come to the same thing. It consisted of meandering huge loops, doublings, zig-zags, festoons ... The
whole was travelling as a system in the direction I had
chosen, yet it remained a system and was entirely his own.
The voices of the children grew louder. I saw the dark
gray flank of the made-over barn that was now their
home, and then saw the children themselves, running
with the dog among the whitened trees of the orchard.
These two, Gretl and Leo Carpenter, together with Ida
and myself and Eddie Dubord, complete the quintet of
Shawno's five great loves.
Gretl is Ida's age, Leo a year older. They are the children of Waldo and Aldana Carpenter, whom Patricia and
I have .known for years. But I have known Waldo since the
end of World War II, when we both arrived in New York
from small towns to the west.
Aldana was evidently waiting for me. She was standing
in the doorway, and when she saw me she beckoned. I had
not planned to stop, except to leave Ida and the dog, since
in all likelihood Waldo would be working, but Aldana had
no sooner waved to me than the broad window right
above her swung open and Waldo, too, beckoned to me,
cupping his hands and shouting. Aldana stepped out and
looked up at him, and they smiled at one another, though
his expression was not happy.
20
Aldana was fifteen years younger than Waldo. By the
time I came into the kitchen she was standing at the stove
turning thick strips of bacon with a fork. She looked
rested and fresh-it was one of the days, in fact, that her
entirely handsome and appealing person seemed actually
to be beautiful. She wore a dark blue skirt, a light sweaterblouse of gray wool, and loose-fitting boots from L. L.
Bean. Her long brown hair, that was remarkably thick and
glossy, was covered with a kerchief of deep blue.
"Waldo was up all night," she said to me, having already
urged me to eat with them. The large round table was set
for three.
She said, in a lower voice, ''We are going back."
She meant back to New York.
I had known that they wanted to. Waldo's excitement,
coming here, had had nothing to do with country life. He
had been fleeing New York and an art world that had become meaningless to him. His own painting, moreover, af
ter two periods of great success, was in a crisis of spirit,
and he had begun to mistrust the virtuosity (so he had told
me) that allowed him to cover this fact with achievements
of technique. But the isolation of country life had not had
the rejuvenating effect he had hoped for, and he had been
saying to me for a couple of months, "We won't be staying
forever . .. "
I was not surprised, then, to hear Aldana say that they
were leaving. Nevertheless, it was saddening, and I knew
that the loss, for Ida, would be severe.
I said as much to Aldana.
"We'll certainly miss you," she said. "All of you. All of
us. But we'll be back every summer."
"When are you going?"
"Soon. I don't know."
"How do the children feel about it?"
"We haven't told them yet," she said. "They've been
happy here ... but they do miss New York ... there's so
much to do ... "
I could hear Waldo walking on the floor above our
heads, and moving something. I asked him, shouting, if he
needed a hand. "I'll be right down," he called back.
Aldana looked into the oven, closing it quickly, and I
caught the aroma of yeast rolls.
The handsome kitchen had been the stables of the old
barn. The ceiling was low and was heavily beamed. Narrow horizontal windows ran the entire length of two sides
and gave fine views of our mountains, though today nothing could be seen in them but snowy woods and a misty
white sky. Many leafy plants, suspended in pots, were silhouetted in the white light. At the far end of the kitchen a
flight of open stairs led to Waldo's studio, and there also,
at that end, was Aldana's nook: a pine work table near the
window, on which there were several jars of small brushes,
a broad window-seat with cushions and many pillows, a
stool, more hanging plants, shelves with books and kerosene lamps. She was fluent in Lithuanian, and for two
years, at a leisurely pace, had been translating a cycle of
folktales for a children's book. She had done a great many
WINTER 1982
�gouache illustrations as well, and I knew that the project
'
was nearly finished.
I heard Waldo on the stairs. He stopped part way down,
and leaning forward called across to me, "Do you want to
see something?"
After the whites and blacks and evergreen greens of the
woods it was dazzling to see the colors of his work. He was
noted for these colors. Color was event, meaning, and
form.
Small abstract paintings on paper were pinned to the
white work wall, as were clippings from magazines and
some color wheels he had recently made. Larger paintings
on canvas, still in progress, leaned here and there, and two
were positioned on the wall. A stack of finished paintings,
all of which I had seen, leaned against the wall in the corner.
Waldo had placed the new painting on the seat of a
chair, and we stood side by side studying it. The paint was
still wet and gave off a pleasant odor of oil and turpentine.
Waldo's manner was that of an engineer. Physically he
was imposing, tall and strong, with a stern, black-browed,
grave face that was actually a forbidding face, or would
have been were it not that his underlying good humor was
never entirely out of sight. When he was alight with that
humor, which after all was fairly often, one saw an aston·
ishing sweetness and charm. Aldana, at such times, would
rest her hand on his shoulder, or stroke the back of his
head; and the children, if they were near, would come
closer, and perhaps climb into his lap.
The studio windows were sheeted with a plastic that
gave the effect of frosted glass, shutting off the outside
and filling the space with a shadowless white light.
Beyond one of those milky oblongs we heard a sudden
shouting and loud barking. Ida and Grell were shouting
together, "Help, Shawno! Help!" in tones that were al·
most but not quite urgent, and the dog was barking notes
of indignation, disapproval, and complaint, a medley that
occurred nowhere else but in this game, for I knew with·
out seeing it that Leo was pretending to beat the girls with
his fist, and was looking back at the dog, who in a moment
would spring forward and carefully yet quite excitedly
seize Leo's wrist with his teeth.
"It's a total dud," Waldo said dispassionately, "but it's
interesting, isn't it? Kerosene light does such weird things
to the colors. It's like working under a filter. Look how
sour and acidic it is. It's over-controlled, too, and at the
same time there are accidents everywhere. That's what
gives it that moronic look. I should have known betterI've done it before. When you rob the eye you rob the
mind."
Abruptly he turned to me and lowered his voice.
"We're going back to the city," he said. ''I'm going
down in a couple of days and see what has to be done ... "
I knew that he had not sublet his studio, which he
didn't rent, but owned-a floor-through in a large loft
building.
"We haven't told the kids yet," he said, "but I think
they want to go back. There's so much to do there ... "
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Aldana's voice came up from below. We cut short our
conversation and went down into the warm kitchen, that
was fragrant now with the odors of bacon, rolls, just·
brewed coffee, and fried eggs.
The rosy, bright-faced children stormed in just as we sat
down. Leo and Grell clamored for juice, while Ida looked
at them joyfully. Shawno came with them. He trotted to
Aldana, and to Waldo, and to me, greeting us eagerly but
without arresting his motion or taking his eyes from the
children. "Hi, Hi," they said to me. "Hi, daddy," said Ida.
All three tilted their heads, took on fuel, and with the dog
bounding among them rushed out again as noisily as they
had entered.
The sky was beginning to clear when I left half an hour
later, and it was blue now, but a pale, wintry blue. A light,
raw breeze was blowing.
I crossed the dooryard without calling to the children.
They were throwing snowballs at Shawno, except for Ida,
who was tagging along. They ran among the budded but
leafless apple trees, while the dog, who did not under·
stand that he was their target, kept leaping and twisting,
biting the snowballs with swift snaps that reduced them to
fragments.
I went alone down the snowy road to the right, toward
the river. Little clumps of snow were falling wetly from
the roadside trees.
I had been cheerful coming through the woods with Ida
and the dog, but now a familiar sadness began to creep
through me. There was an objective cause in the fact that
our friends were leaving, but I knew that this was not the
cause, the cause was old, and in truth I didn't know what
it was. It was as if this sadness, which at times was
touched by homelessness, were a zone between the animation I felt in the presence of others and the firmness I
felt in the solitude to which finally, after many years of
loneliness, I had been able to attain. And I was obliged to
pass through this zone, though I had passed through it
thousands of times already.
My solitary footprints were the only markings on the
short spur from Waldo's house to the back road, but as
soon as I made the turn I found myself walking between
the muddy tracks of a car. In ten minutes I stood on the
high ledge that overlooked the river and that invariably I
came to when I walked this way.
The river was broad in this stretch, and was still heavy
with spring flood. The water was dark. Huge pieces of ice
were strewn in a continuous line on the steep bank across
from me. The ice had been dirty with debris a week ago,
but now temporarily was white.
Two miles downriver lay the town, on which all such
villages as ours were dependent. There were its hundreds
of houses, its red roofs and black roofs, its white clapboard
sidings, its large, bare-limbed shade trees, all following the
slopes of the hills. I could see the gleaming belltowers and
white spires of the four churches, the plump wooden cupola of the town hall, also white, and several red-brick
business buildings. It was a lovely sight from this angle,
21
�but it no longer stirred me. Just the opposite. The town
was spiritless and dull, without a public life of any kind, or
any character of its own, but the usual brand names in the
stores and the usual cars on the streets.
Just this side of the town, the elegant timbered latticework of a railroad trestle crossed the river high in the air,
emerging from evergreens on one bank and plunging into
evergreens on the other.
Halfway to the trestle, where the hills, for a short distance, gave way to lowland, the broad pasture of a dairy
lay in a sweeping bend of the river. Its tall blue silo and
unpainted sheet metal barn stood close to the highway,
uphill from the fields. Black and white cows, a herd of
Holsteins which I knew numbered a hundred and fifty,
progressed across their snowy pasture toward the river, as
if without moving.
There came a loud metallic scraping and banging from
the gravel pit below me. A bucket-loader was scooping up
gravel. It swivelled and showered the stones heavily into a
waiting truck, that quivered under the impact. Another
truck, as I watched, drove down the long incline to the
riverbank.
I went home by the same route, thinking chiefly of my
work, that had become a kind of monastery, I had had to
empty it of so many things.
Shawno and the children were still playing, but they
were no longer running. Ida and Gretl were holding the
two sides of a flattened cardboard box, quite large, and
Leo, wielding a hammer, was nailing it to the rails of a
broken hay wain by the house, apparently to be the roof
of a hut. The dog sat near them, more or less watching. I
didn't call or wave, but Shawno saw me. He responded
with a start ... and then he did something I had seen him
do before and had found so touching I could not resent:
he pretended that he hadn't seen me. He turned his head
and yawned, stood up and stretched, dropped abruptly to
the ground with his chin on his paws, and then just as
abruptly stood up again and moved out of sight around
the house. What a display of doggy craftiness! It makes me
smile to remember it-even though I must now say that
this was the last that I saw him in the fullness of his life. I
did see him again, but by our bedtime that night he was
dead.
I went back alone through the woods, walking on the
footprints we had made that morning. In a scant three
hours the snow had become both wetter and shrivelled. It
was no deeper than three inches now, and was falling
noisily from the trees, leaving the branches wet and glistening.
At the bottom of the first hill, where I had to jump
across a little stream, and where that morning I had lifted
Ida, I noticed the footprints of two deer. The deer had
gone somewhere along the stream and then had come
back, running. I hadn't noticed the tracks that morning ... but I wasn't sure.
Instead of going home, I turned into the little field at
the far end of which my cabin/studio was situated. Every-
22
thing was quiet, the fresh snow untouched. I was halfway
across the field when I caught a movement in the sky.
High up, drawing a broad white line behind it, a military
jet drifted soundlessly. A moment later the thunderclap of
the sonic boom startled me ... and as if it had brought
them into being, two dogs stepped out of the woods behind my cabin. Or rather, one stepped out, a brown and
white collie, and came toward me. The other, a solemnlooking rabbit hound, stood motionless among the trees.
I thought I recognized the collie and called to it. It came
a few steps, and then a few steps more. It stood still when
it heard my voice, then it turned and went back to the
other dog, and both vanished into the woods.
I built a fire in the cabin, in the cast-iron stove, and
spent the rest of the day at my work.
Before the house at night.
As was my custom, whether I had done the cooking or
not, I mixed some scraps and pan rinsings with dry food
and went to the door to call Shawno, who ate when we did
and in the same room. Ida had come home that afternoon
with Patricia, but Shawno had not.
Half an hour later, after we had finished eating, and
while the water was heating for coffee, I went outside
again and called him, but this time I went across the road
and stood before the barn. The lie of the land was such
that in this position, and with the help of that huge sounding-board, my voice would carry to Waldo's fields, at least
to the sharp ears of the dog. I shouted repeatedly. As I
went back to the house I thought I saw movement on the
woods road we had travelled that morning. I was expecting to see him come bounding toward me, but nothing
happened and I went into the house.
We finished our coffee and dessert. Liza was staying
overnight with the twins she played with. Patricia sat on
the sofa with Jacob and Ida and read first a picture book
and then a story of Ernest Thompson Seton's, that enchanted Ida and put Jacob to sleep.
I telephoned Aldana. She said that the dog had left
them shortly after Patricia had come in the car for Ida. He
had stayed like that often with Leo and Gretl and had
come home through the woods at suppertime.
I put the porch light on and went across to the barn
again. I was preparing to shout when I saw him in the
shadows of the woods road, at the same place in which I
had thought I had seen movement before. A turbulence
of alarm, a controlled panic raced through me, and I ran to
him calling.
He lay on his belly. His head was erect, but just barely,
and was not far above the ground. He pulled himself forward with his front paws, or tried to, but no motion resulted. His hind legs were spread limply behind him. His
backbone seemed inert.
I knelt beside him and took his head on my knees. He
WINTER 1982
�was breathing so faintly that I doubted if any air was
reaching his lungs. I heard my own voice saying in the
high-pitched, grievously astonished tones of a child, "Oh,
dog, dog ... "
I ran my hand down his body. Near his lower ribcage,
even in the shadows, I could see a dark mass that here and
there glistened dully. It was smooth and soft, and there
jutted out of it numerous fine points sharper than a saw. I
.was touching the exit wound of a large-calibre bullet, in·
testines and shattered bone.
I put my face close to his and stroked his cheek. He was
looking straight ahead with a serious, soft, dim gaze. He
gave a breath that sounded like a sigh because it was not
followed by another breath, and instantaneously was heavy
to the touch.
I stayed there a long while with his head on my knees,
from time to time crying like a child.
I heard the front door open and heard Patricia calling
me. A moment later she was kneeling in the mud beside
Tiffi ST. JOHNS REVJEW
me saying, "Oh, oh, oh . .. " in a voice of compassion and
surpnse.
We conferred briefly, and I went indoors.
Ida sat on the sofa, in the light of the floor lamp, looking
at the pictures in the Seton book. Jacob lay asleep at the
other end of the sofa.
I said to her, "Ida, something has happened ... " and
knelt in front of her. She saw that I had been crying, and
her face whitened.
I said, "Shawno has been hurt very very badly ... " I did
not want to say to her that he was dead. "He's out front,"
I said. "Come."
She said, "Okay" quickly, never taking her eyes from
mine. She gave me her hand and we went outside, into
the road, where Patricia still knelt beside him just beyond
the light from the porch. She was bowed above him and
was stroking him. She looked up as we approached, and
held out one hand for Ida, but with the other kept stroking
his head, neck, and shoulders.
23
�Nietzsche and the Classic
William Mullen
Quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset quam
Horace
nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?
If you set out deliberately to make a masterpiece,
Balanchine
how will you ever get it finished?
T
O ASK WHAT CONSTITUTES A CLASSIC
is to ask
what kind of civilization we inhabit. Imagine, for the
sake of contrast, a purely archaic civilization in
which the paradigms for thought and action are so definitively expounded in the foundation myths that innovation is excluded altogether_ Then imagine, as its opposite,
a purely scientific civilization in which the piecemeal
progress towards greater knowledge and control relentlessly renders every aspect of the past an object for amusement and contempt If we like to think we have put the
first kind of civilization behind us forever (assuming it
ever existed) and yet have still not entirely succumbed to
the second (assuming it could ever entirely win out), our
conviction is somehow due to the presence of classic
works in our midst, holding at bay both the tyranny of the
past and the tyranny of the future by continuing to inspire new works in the present.
The usual lament of the classicist, of course, is directed
against the tyranny of the future, and the more threatened
he becomes by the ascendancy of science, the more Egyptological he becomes in his techniques-mummification of
the classics at all costs. But I am more interested in considering here the opposite threat, the tyranny of the past itWilliam Mullen is a Tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His book,
Choreia: Pindar and Dance, will appear in the summer of 1982 (Princeton University Press).
24
self, and its only true check, the continuous creation of
new work fine enough to take a place beside the old. The
reason we secure the presence of classic works among us
is not that they are so fine that we can never equal them
but, on the contrary, that they are so fine that they will always challenge us to equal them.
In his earliest writings on the Greeks, Nietzsche pointed
out that it is no accident that the people from whom our
finest instances of the classic are taken was one that
pushed the principle of competition to its limits, in the
spheres of poetry and art no less than athletics and politics. 1 But the power of competition to incite the artists of
our civilization to do their best is inadequately shown by
its place in the culture of a single people, for competition
between peoples as well as within them has long been a
governing principle for us. The complex civilization of the
West assumed its essential form when the Romans worked
out a truce with Greek culture whereby classic status was
granted to Roman imitations that could join their Greek
models in rank without replacing them. This notion of a
highest rank that remains open to expansion is one to
which the word itself points, the Latin classicus originally
designating someone who belonged to the highest of the
five classes into which Roman citizens were divided when
the roll of the army was called.
Classics, of course, can only be so designated by later
generations. "Le classique," as Valery put it, "c'est ce qui
WINTER 1982
�vient apnes." As a new work comes into the light it may
well seem to rival the classics of the past for brilliance but
it is impossible to say at the time whether it will also rival
them for durability. And the question of durability becomes particularly problematic when one considers that
while some classic works exist as objects-paintings, statues, buildings-others exist as performing events-music,
dance, theater. In the case of the art object the materials
of which the work is made give a preliminary guarantee of
durability and it is only a question whether the work will
continue to be valued enough to be maintained in a position of honor. In the case of the performance event, however, durability can be achieved only by revivals, where all
is at hazard because there is no guarantee that the revival
will house the original informing spirit. And the difficulty
becomes acute when one considers that the original Greek
classics in the medium we call "poetry" were actually of a
dual nature, being performance events when they first appeared and turning into classics only after being stripped
of their musical and orchestic accompaniment in order to
become durable as texts. The work done by the classic
masters of Greek music and dance has completely van·
ished, both the work done to accompany poetry and whatever autonomous masterpieces may have been executed
in these media. In what sense, then, do we really possess
the classics of Greek poetry at all, and what is it we are doing when we set about to "equal" them?
If the question of durability is made difficult by the fact
of the variety of artistic media, then we must ask what is
the ground of this variety in the first place. In order to
come into its proper flowering, a work of art must be pres-
ent to the senses as well as the mind, and the fact that we
possess five different senses is in itself enough to necessitate a variety of media that can appeal to them either severally or in combination. The variety of media is in effect
one of the conditions apart from which we would be unable to experience art at all, for it flows from our bodily
existence in time as well as space. And works of the performing arts, which require fixed periods of time to be
unfolded before us, by that very fact also require that we
accept the element of transience in their conditions of
presentation. It should be clear, then, that this is a quint·
essentially Nietzschean subject I have in hand, since it has
ultimately to do with the status of the bodily and the tern
poral. The desire for the old works of art that are kept
present to be rivalled by new ones turns out to be grounded
in the disposition·of a healthy civilization to set high value
on the presence in its midst of works by which the human
senses are exalted. It is in new work, before the mind has
set about to gain distance by reflection and categorization, that the element of sensuous presence is most obviously compelling; and by juxtaposing new work with old
we remind ourselves of the importance of remaining open
to the same intensity of sensuous presence in the classics
themselves as well as their recent rivals, even when, as in
the Gase of the performing arts, this means exposing ourselves to transient revivals in the absence of the original
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
production. Nietzsche himself had a zest for theorizing
about the differences among the various artistic media,
and I should like, therefore, to try to extend some of his
leading ideas in the course of exploring the nature of the
classic as it is incarnated in different kinds of works of art
and different conditions of presentation.
B
EFORE DOING SO, however, it is best to acknowledge
at the outset how quickly these ideas come to grief
when transferred from the realm of art to the realm
of politics. Throughout his writing there runs a notion
which, color it how one will, remains irreducibly offensive,
namely, that a statesman aiming at greatness should consider himself an artist and other human beings his medium. Curiously enough, this monster first rears its head
in an early essay on "The Greek State" in which Nietzsche
praises Plato precisely for his cool willingness, in the Republic, to treat all other citizens as mere tools and means
for the production of "the Genius." 2 That Plato's ideal Genius was meant to be a philosopher and a scientist rather
than an artist, Nietzsche proposed, is only a regrettable
consequence of his appropriation of Socrates' negative
judgment on art, and should not distract us from the essential point that on the matter of treating citizens as a
Mittel-the German word for both "means" and "medium" -Plato had got things right.
I suggest that the very oddity of this way of reading the
Republic has the advantage of forcing us to face one of
the gravest questions raised by the speakers of that dialogue as they devise a city in speech rather than in deed. It
was Hannah Arendt, using an Aristotelian distinction, who
suggested that the reason the program of the Republic
would lead to such oppressive political consequences if actually implemented is that it is based on a mistaken substitution of the category of fabrication for that of action. This
is so because the craftsman (and the Greek language did
not explicitly distinguish between artificers and artists)
must first contemplate in solitude the mental model of
what he wishes to make-its idea, shape, or form, whence
the Platonic "idea" -and must then use violence on the
medium at hand in order to realize that model as best he
can. (Compare, for instance, Republic SOla and 54la.) In
raising her objections to the analogy between craftsman
and statesman, Arendt's immediate concern was to show
how the violence implicit in it was actualized when Marxism declared the "making" of a classless society an end
which justified any "means" and hence any treatment of
one's "medium." 3 But she might equally well have given
an account of the justification of violence by Nazism
through reference to its esthetic goals, for it is well-known
how many esthetes flocked to the early Nazi movement
and how belief in the supremacy of German art served as
a stimulus to the task of creating racial purity. In order to
transform the rough block of the citizenry into the fair
statue of the state one must be prepared to hack off the
25
�racially or physiologically sick and not to flinch if this human marble happens to make cries of pain as it is hewn.
To see the notion of men as both "medium" and "means"
in its most virulent form one needs to turn to Nietzsche's
late notebook jottings collected posthumously under the
title The Will to Power. "To keep objective, hard, firm in
executing a design-this is something artists are best at.
But when one needs men for that purpose (as do teachers,
statesmen, etc.) then the calmness and coldness and hardness quickly disappear. In natures like Caesar and Napoleon one can get a sense for jdisinterested' work on their
marble, whatever may have to be sacrificed by way of
men." 4 In the face of passages like this the convenient notion of Nazis as coarse literalizers of Nietzsche's refined
metaphors breaks down. Here a proto-Nazi esthete would
find just the sort of encouragement he needed to emerge
from his esthetic cocoon into totalitarian practice. 5 It is no
exculpation of Nietzsche to argue that he expressed contempt for the particular analysis that was later to come to
power, namely, that he preferred racial mixture as a better
breeding technique than racial purity. He is as explicit in
theory as the Nazis were in practice in his contempt for
the ethical principle at issue, whose classical formulation
is Kant's imperative always to treat human beings as ends
and never solely as means.
T
to Nietzsche's complexity, however,
we must take seriously the parenthesis in the jotting
just quoted, in which he mentions as instances of
those who must use men as their medium not only statesmen but also teachers. Insofar as the contents and methods
of an educational system are not entirely pre-legislated
and supervised, there is a temptation to see something of
the artist's prerogative over his material in the way the
teacher exercises authority over his students, and in fact
metaphors of "molding minds" and "shaping characters"
are seldom absent in discussions of the way educators
transform the young. We do not feel uneasy with these
metaphors because in a society of specialists we like to
think that the various things that need to be taught are in
various hands and that accordingly some kind of benign
separation of powers holds sway. The good is taught by
the parents inculcating morality at home, the true by the
teachers transmitting knowledge at school, and the beautiful by the artists passing on skills in their studios. The
nature of the authority of the molders of the young becomes more provocative, however, when we turn from
the problematic pluralism of the present to a highly integrated society like that of archaic Greece. I am referring
now not to the theoretical programs of Plato's Republic or
Laws but to the realities of the city in the time of Pindar
and Aeschylus.
In these archaic cities the choral poets who train young
dancers to perform sacred odes in public spaces are granted
authority simultaneously to teach them singing, dancing,
26
O DO )USTICE
morality, and the tales of the tribe. In Athenian tragedy
the authority the playwright exercises over his performers
is complicated by the fact that as part of a dramatic fiction
the chorus members assume personalities other than their
own and doff them when the play is over, so that even
though they are allowed to participate in the ritual only
if they are able-bodied and free-born male citizens of
Athens, it is not these aspects of their identity which their
role in the play is exhibiting to their fellow-citizens. In a
Pindaric ode, however, the free-born young men or young
women of the city perform in propria persona and are expected by their elders to believe in the words they recite
as they dance. The elders would have dismissed a poet for
training the youth in odes that exhibited bad morals no
less than bad dancing, false tales no less than false notes.
Not that we need sentimentalize the matter by assuming
that every single member of a Pindaric chorus was a good
Boy Scout and did in fact acquire the morals Pindar had to
teach him. Enough that through participation in many
choral events a young person would be trained in the public quality of morality and learn by instinct how he was expected to act. (Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.)
Moreover, by making these young dancers the mouthpieces for what his civilization most valued, the poet was
in effect arranging a spectacle in which truth and goodness were fused with beauty, and unabashedly so. In all
this the dancers are unquestionably the medium of the
poet, but far from being denied their human dignity by
such treatment they are in fact led by it, educatively, from
the confusion of adolescence to the bracing norms of
adulthood.
EADERS OF The Birth of Tragedy will notice quite a
difference between my very Apollonian account of
these Pindaric dancers and Nietzsche's very Dionysian one of the tragic chorus. His dancers are empowered
by their song and dance to doff their identities and merge
with the primordial unity, while those I have preferred to
fix my gaze on are rather bringing their identities into perfect focus, declaring by song and dance the essence of
what it is to be a free-born and able-bodied young man or
woman in a particular city 6 Moreover, the dithyrambic
improvisations in which Nietzsche wishes to see both the
origin and the essence of the tragic chorus would seem
to have dispensed with pre-arranged choreography altogether and to require at most a leader who impersonates
the hallucinated god, whereas the odes of Pindar require
the poet's presence in the city not only as leader of the
dance during performance but also as choreographer and
chorus-trainer beforehand.' The choreographer's engagement with the dancers as the medium in which he executes a. meaningful design is in effect an aspect of dance
which Nietzsche ignores in preference to some more mys~
tical situation in which the dancers improvise through
direct contact with the powers of nature. Consider his
R
WINTER 1982
�characterization of the tragic dancers in the last sentences
of the very opening section of the book. "Man is no longer
artist, he has become the work of art: the artistic power of
all nature, to the highest delight of the primordial unity,
makes itself manifest in the thrill of intoxication [Rausch].
The noblest clay, the most costly marble, Man, is here
kneaded and hewn, and to the chisel strokes of the Diony·
sian world-artist sounds out the Eleusinian mystery-cry:
'Do you bow down, Millions? Do you divine your Creator,
World?' " 8 Both the metaphor from sculpture and the
mystical HDionysian
world~artist"
here betray Nietzsche's
unwillingness to consider the choreographer's art on its
own terms. Indeed, throughout his writings he takes infinite delight in dance as an activity and a metaphor, but
never once considers it as an artistic medium and never
mentions a single choreographer or ballet.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was positing the
chorus as the essence of the Dionysian in order to work
out an Hegelian scheme according to which the actors
represented the essence of the Apollonian and tragedy as
a whole constituted some higher synthesis in the history
of Greek genres. In order to fill in this scheme, he had to
posit Homer as the earlier type of the Apollonian, and
then lay Archilochus and Pin dar on the bed of Procrustes
as successive types of the Dionysian. Soon thereafter he
abandoned the whole Hegelian construct and began to
call in question the superiority of Athenian culture itself,
so that in the notes for We Philologists he is to be seen
playing with such tantalizing propositions as the following: "Athenian tragedy is not the supreme form we might
think it is. Its heroes are too much lacking in the Pindaric
quality."' I am, therefore, not interested in lingering to
discuss his earlier distortions, but wish rather to see what
his later use of the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction has
to say about the effects of various artistic media on those
who experience them, as artists, as participants, and as
spectators. The essential text lies in two consecutive
"Skirmishes of an Untimely Man" in Twilight of the Idols. 10
Here he restates his earlier association of the Apollonian
experience with the painter, the sculptor, and the epic
poet, and the Dionysian with the actor, the dancer, the
musician, and the lyric poet; but now he shows greater sophistication in suggesting both the physiological bases of
the distinction and the historical development which both
categories of media have undergone. In Apollonian art, he
theorizes, it is the artist's eye which is engaged, with the
result that the existence of the work as an object separate
from him is brought to the fore; while in Dionysian art,
the whole muscular and nervous system is engaged, with
the result that the artist'·becomes a mimic of whatever inspires him and hence a participant in the event which the
work of art becomes. The media of modern man are the
result of a process of specialization. The poet, the musician, and the choreographer, who used to be united in a
single performing artist who led the dance, are now three
separate specialists who do not necessarily form part of a
performance at all.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A
S HEIDEGGER HAS SUGGESTED, Nietzsche's usual
interest in his characterization of art seems to be in
the state of the artist as he creates rather than in
the independent quality of the resultant work of art or the
particular modes in which the work is experienced by others11 This is the state Nietzsche calls Rausch- rapture, intoxication, frenzy, the feeling that "rushes" over the artist
and carries him beyond himself into creation-and it is
significant that in the sections just referred to in Twilight
of the Idols, the Apollonian artist is said to experience
Rausch no less than the Dionysian, only through the eye,
rather than the nerves and muscles of the rest of the body.
But in these sections the term Rausch is actually being
used by way of prelude to another, the famous "will to
power" itself. And, surprisingly, Nietzsche here assigns
the will to power a medium of its own, architecture. "The
architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian
condition: here it is ... the intoxication [Rausch] of the
great will that demands art. Architects have always been
inspired by the most powerful men; the architect has always been under the 'suggestion' of power. In architecture ... the will to power means to make itself visible ...
The highest feeling of power and sureness comes to expression in the great style."
Since elsewhere Nietzsche goes so far as to say that everything in the world is simply one form or another of the
will to power, one is at first perplexed. 12 Surely the will to
power will also be at play in the various states (Rausch
whether of the eye or the whole body) in which artists
turn to other media, and surely the resultant works of art
will also bear witness to it. Moreover, insofar as all art
brings things into full presence to the senses-into visibility, audibility, surface-why is it in architecture especially
that "the will to power means to make itself visible"?
Nietzsche is no longer interested now in setting up any
medium as a synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian conditions, but rather in designating architecture as a medium that stands apart from them both and brings the will
to power into appearance in a special way.
A clue to his thinking here lies in the fact that this is
one of the rare occasions on which he mentions not only
the creators and participants in works of art but also their
patrons. To speak of these "powerful men" at whose b!'hest the architect creates a building is to raise the question of its purpose. In order to bring a great building into
being, an architect must employ more durable materials
than any other kind of artist, must claim more space, mobilize more resources, and give more commands. Above
all, he must consult more closely with the desires of his patron, whether individual, institution, church, or state, and
if the patron has commissioned a great building, then
these desires will reach beyond mere functionality. Whatever the intended function of the building might be, its
coming into appearance as a work of art shows that the
power of its patron is possessed of the will and the means
to stability and endurance. The patron will understand
this as well as the architect, and the cooperation of the
27
�two will always ultimately be with a view to the final effect of the building on other people. Churchill's saying,
that we shape our buildings and our buildings then shape
us, needs to be more precise. It is architect and patron
who shape the building, and it is us they are aiming to
shape by it.
I suspect, then, that Nietzsche sets such value on architecture precisely because it fuses the categories of art and
politics. And the suspicion is increased by the striking fact
that his favorite way of praising the Roman Empire is in
architectural metaphors. The most manic expression of
this association comes in The Antichrist: "Is it still not un·
derstood yet? The imperium Romanum . .. this most admirable work of art in the great style, was a beginning, its
construction was calculated to give proof of itself over millenia-to this day no one has ever again built in such a
way, has even dreamed of building in the same measure
sub specie aetemi! This organization was stable enough to
support bad emperors: the accident of individuals ought
to be insignificant in such matters-first principle of all
great architecture." 13 The praise continues into the next
section, which describes the Romans' act of consolidating
the classical heritage as "the will to the future of man, the
great Yes to all things made visible as the imperium Romanum, visible for all the senses, the great style no longer
merely art but rather become reality, truth, life . .. " 14
Underneath the dithyrambic phrasing it is not hard to
grasp the essential characteristics of architecture that
make it easy for Nietzsche to identify it with the will to
power. Any ambitiously constructed building is meant to
last longer than the lifespans of its builders and to be used
by future generations. These generations will be molded
by both the functional and the esthetic aspects of the
building. Architect and patron cooperate to cast the spell
of their power over the future both in art and in life, and
we may accept the legitimacy of this ambition without being forced to debate the morality of political ambitions for
the expansion of an imperial system in space. Roman ar~
chitecture remains our great symbol of the ambition to
make cultural institutions endure through time.
of art in its own right but also both a functional means
and a compelling symbol for the process by which a civilization honors its classical works. And as part of this process it also helps to create a space in which the new work
can be juxtaposed to the old, an act no less essential to a
healthy civilization than the preservation of the classics
themselves. To see a work of modern art exhibited in a
museum built in the neoclassical style is an experience
which, common as it may be, has some meaning if we consider the tension between old and new which these conditions of presentation intend to symbolize.
ITH ROMAN ARCHITECTURE as a paradigm, then,
I wish to bring this meditation on artistic media
to its proper culmination by offering a few examples of the ways in which some of the best works of art our
civilization has to offer have themselves symbolically acknowledged, as part of their own conditions of coming
into being, the crucial tension between the old and the
new, between that which is preserved in presence and
that which comes into presence for the first time. Buildings are not the only works of art capable of making such
acknowledgements, nor were the Romans the only people
to be conscious of their importance. I shall therefore include examples from poetry and dance as well as architecture, and take them from the earliest as well as the most
recent phases of the West. What I am looking for are cases
in which it is clear that an artist is not merely presenting a
new work of art by itself without any reference to its conditions of appearance, but on the contrary is going out of
his way to insure that the new work have old ones in its
background, and that the transience of the conditions of
its first appearance be assured of being transformed into
the durability of the conditions of preservation that will
attend it if its bid for classic status is successful.
My example from the earliest phase will be an ode of
W
Pindar, whose poetry is in many ways more archaic even
than that of Homer. The Fifth Nemean, one of his most
Mozartean compositions, is a victory ode, or epinician, for
a boy pancratiast from the island of Aegina, famous in antiquity both for its athletic statuary and its temple archi-
I
PROPOSED AT THE OUTSET that our civilization in its
essential form came into being only when the brief but
glorious artistic achievement of Greece was preserved
by the Romans in such a way that their own artistic efforts
might be juxtaposed to it. This is a process which it is one
of the most important tasks of architecture to make possible. It does so in one sphere by sheltering and setting in
relief those other works of art which endure as objects,
and in another by shaping a space for the performing arts
in which they can take on scale and project themselves to
a particular audience. If one includes churches and temples as well as museums and concert-halls, the comprehensiveness of architecture's roles becomes clearer, for
one is then speaking of sacred art and ritual performance.
A work of architecture is thus not only an enduring work
28
tecture.
To compliment his hosts, Pindar begins by having himself and his chorus of Aeginetan boys claim, as they strike
up the dance, that "I am no statue-maker, to fashion
sculptures at holiday as they stand on their own pedestals," an opening sally which may well have been underscored by choreography imitating sculptural positions for
a split second before whirling merrily on. In standard epinician form, the ode goes on to praise the boy victor, and
then to make its way back, by a series of allusions and
partly told stories, to the foundational age of the earlier
Aeginetan heroes, including the founding father Aeacus
himself, who had once saved all Greece from a drought by
supplicating his own father Zeus for rain. Finally, in its
last line and a half, the ode returns to the present and
WINTER 1982
�praises the athletic victories of the boy's grandfather in
the following language: "At the portals of Aeacus bring
him crowns luxuriant with flowers, in the company of the
blond Graces." The "portals of Aeacus" here are the fore·
court of a shrine to that hero at the center of the city,
fronting the agora, where victory dances were normally
performed. This shrine was decorated with friezes depict·
ing the same event alluded to in the ode, the moment at
which Zeus showed favor to Aeacus by showering on the
parched land; such moments of favor typically form the
climax both of the odes' mythical language and of their
choreography. Since the forecourt of hero-shrines was a
traditional place for erecting statues of victorious athletes,
the dancers may have been referring to a ritual custom according to which victors might have their crowns placed
on the statues of ancestors who had themselves been victorious in earlier games. Whether or not this is the case
here, it is clear that some kind of offering of flowers is being made before the shrine as the ode comes to its end, an
act carried out in stylized motion which is to be thought
of as a continuation of the ode's ritual choreography.
All we have left of this lovely event is the concluding
phrase quoted earlier about the portals of Aeacus and the
blond Graces: 7r/Jo8Vpoww llAtcxKofJ &ve~wv trouhvTlx 4>EPe
an</Jom;,,ara avv ~av8afs X&pwmv. Fully conscious that
his language is destined to endure as a memorial text, Pindar seems to be playing here, as often at the conclusion
of his odes, with the implication that as the never-to-be
repeated victory dance draws to its close the language
which it has sustained is begining to move into its own immortality as a text. He is seeking a symbol of the ode's
dual nature, as transient dance and as enduring text, and
he finds it in the contrast between the luxuriant flowers
out of which the young victor's crown has been woven
and the magnificently sculpted stone of the statues and
friezes at the front of the ancestral shrine. Nor is Pindar
satisfied to allude to this contrast by the language alone;
he seems also to have arranged to draw it into the circle of
the ode's choreography, by having the flowers placed in
the forecourt of the shrine at the very moment when the
language falls still and the motion of the dancers continues in silence. To this ritual motion the vivid archaic
smiles on the faces of the ancestral athletic statues and
the heroic friezes are witness, in that acclamation between living and dead which can be fully mutual only if it
is made in silence.
And somehow present in all this, through the invocation of the final phrase, is the consort of the Graces themselves, goddesses of the transient comeliness of dancing
and flowers, who as immortals can themselves never fade.
Through the fostering by these divine presences, as well
as by Father Zeus and Father Aeacus, the new work of the
poet has blossomed into public performance and is now
about to reach the moment at which it will cease to be a
ritual dance and begin to be a durable text. It is taking its
place among the immortal stone masterpieces by which
the center of the city is adorned, and by the act of naming
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
these masterpieces and declaring its place among them, it
becomes a monument to its own occasion. The old and
the new are thus made in the most essential way to belong
to each other, and the same is true of the transient and
the durable; it is a belonging registered by the combination of the several media at the occasion of the performance. The old and the durable are present as sculpture,
the new and the transient are present as dance, and sover-
eign over all is the language of the ode which both declares these dualities and transcends them.
SHALL NOT TRY to claim that such a blaze of civic splendor has been equalled by any poetic event of recent times.
If there is an absence at the center of our civilization it
may lie just here: in our inability to agree on any objects of
reverence deeply enough to summon forth our best poets
and have them arrange spectacles at the centers of our cities in which the young both embody and share our agreement in the course of their performance. Efforts to mount
such spectacles in the Twentieth Century have usually
been totalitarian parodies, and it takes only one look at
films of the Nuremberg rallies to make most people flee
back to pluralism with a sigh of relief.
Acknowledging this difficult absence, then, I nevertheless have no desire to end with yet another eloquent
grouse against the age. As Nietzsche puts it in one of his
aphorisms on the classic, "Both classically and romantically minded spirits ... are preoccupied by a vision of the
future, but the former out of the strength of their time,
the latter out of its weakness." 15 The more classically
minded tack here, the one which refuses to lapse into
complaining out of weakness, would be simply to let one's
eye rove in a fine frenzy until it lights on the best work
now being done and then to ask whether anything like the
same interplay of the old and the new, and of the durable
and the transient, is to be traced in the conditions in
which it comes into public appearance. The artists I wish
to honor by this kind of inquiry work in media which lie at
the two extremes of the spectrum I have proposed in
speaking of the combination Pindar arranges. They are
George Balanchine, whose repertory of dances currently
being offered at the New York City Ballet is acknowledged
to be one of the greatest choreographic achievements in
the century, and I. M. Pei, whose career seemed to reach
its peak recently with the opening of the East Building of
the National Gallery in Washington. And, as it happens,
next to both artists stand patrons worthy of them, respectively Lincoln Kirstein and Paul Mellon, whose roles and
intentions also deserve to be honored by reflection.
I
T
HE LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE at which the New York
City Ballet is performing right now is rather terrifying. One risks nothing in calling it currently the finest dance company in the world; the knowledgeable go
further and prophesy that what we have been seeing for
29
�Figure I: The architect's concept sketch, showing the existing network of streets
and the relationship between the National Gallery (West Building, left) and the new
East Building. The altitude of the larger of the two triangles which comprise the
new building prolongs the long axis of the old building. The numbers in the upper
part of the sketch refer to square feet of space in the two buildings. (Figures 1 and 2
courtesy I. M. Pei & Associates.)
the last few decades will someday be as legendary as Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Balanchine has been choreographing
new works for this company uninterruptedly since 1935,
and his presence has set the finest dancers in the world
knocking at its doors. Since the company lacks a "star system," the number of dancers of the highest rank it can
admit is, like my definition of the classic, theoretically susceptible of indefinite expansion. These resources of talent
have in turn enabled it to maintain a prodigious repertory
from season to season, so that in the winter and spring
seasons of 1980-81, some forty Balanchine ballets were
performed in addition to those of the company's other
choreographers. The sense of superabundance is heightened yet further by the variety of musical scores represented. Of the musicians who have written expressly for
ballet, Balanchine prefers to choreograph to scores of his
fellow Russians Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, but he has
also choreographed a series of masterpieces in homage to
Bach, Gluck, Mozart, Brahms, Bizet, and others. Coming
away from an evening with a strong program, one feels
that by some miracle time has been collapsed and the
highest graces of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries have been made present together in the
same theater, not as objects but as living bodies performing at the limits of skill under the direction of a master
fully capable of rising to the scores he has selected.
Modern technology is of course hard at work trying to
pin down these wonders, the choreography by dance notation and the performances by videotape, and Balanchine himself has lived to contemplate the production of
his works by many other companies around the world
whose stagings he has neither supervised nor seen. Some
speculate that his preponderance will only be augmented
after his death and might have something of the same
30
daunting effect as Beethoven did on later writers of symphonies, but all talk of monumental permanence is pleasantly mocked by the man himself. "I want to make new
ballets .... If you made a borscht, you'd use fresh ingredients. If you were asked to write a book twice, you'd use
new words. People say, what about posterity? What do
you preserve, I ask? A tape? What counts is now. Nobody
will ever be the same again. And I don't care about people
who aren't born yet." 16 If one wants to seek the frame of
permanence in which all this new work is held, it is to be
looked for not in recording techniques but in the concept
of repertory which Lincoln Kirstein has so well articulated.
"Increasingly, however, what pleases our audiences is rep~
ertory-illuminated, to be sure, by .well-trained dancers
.... Stars are replaceable by emergent students; choreography, in repetition, persists." 17 In any given season's of~
ferings of the New York City Ballet, there will be two or
three new works by Balanchine and two or three of his
own versions of the Nineteenth Century classics, and
both categories will be set in relief by thirty-odd of his
pieces choreographed since 1935 and deemed worthy of
repeating. Some of these are already granted classic status
by the audience, and in the rapidly changing world of
dance, anything preserved for as long as fifty years is
shown to be a classic by that very fact; others, more recent, are still making their bids and may eventually be
dropped and never revived again. The point to be stressed
is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The
consort of new and old works which this repertory maintains in performance is as healthy an image as our time
has to offer of that imperturbable ceremony, refusing to
be retarded or accelerated, by which the ranks of the classic are augmented.
T
O MOVE FROM THE STATE THEATER OF NEW
YORK to the East Building of the National Gallery in
Washington is to feel these equations change their
terms and yet remain the same. The original gallery was
completed by Andrew Mellon in 1941 as a gift to the nation, and the new free-standing extension was completed
in 1978 by his son Paul, with the superbly understated designation "East Building." The very Roman piety of the
son to the father is registered by the fact that both buildings are of marble from the same quarry in Tennessee,
and though the new building looks lighter in color now, its
stone will deepen to the same hue as that of the old in a
matter of decades. In his uncompromising demand for the
highest quality of execution, Paul Mellon sustained a
tripling of costs during construction, and the building's
prime location at the end of the Mall closest to the national Capitol only accentuates the contrast between the
level of quality to be achieved by private versus public
wealth. The old main gallery (now called the West
Building) is itself the most harmoniously executed of all
the neo-classical buildings on the Mall, and it is to the
glory of the East Building that it harmonizes with the old
WINTER 1982
�one in proportions and quality of design while speaking its
own assured modern idiom. By his choice of axes and
shapes I. M. Pei has in fact accommodated the new
building not only to the old one but also to the original
design for the streets of the city which dates back to 1791.
L'Enfant's whole system of traffic circles, with radial
avenues leading out from them and cutting diagonally
across the grid of the other streets, is generated by the two
major axes he projected from the Capitol building, one
leading along the Mall to the Washington Monument and
the other along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White
House. The East Building is situated just at the point
where the angle between these two axes from the Capitol
begins to create trapezoidal city blocks, and the building is
itself a trapezoid bisected into two triangles whose angles
observe those of the avenues outside. Moreover, Pei has
used these angles as his governing principle not only in
the shapes of the building's two halves but also at many
other levels of detail, from the space-frame over the vast
and airy central court down to the very shape of the
blocks in the floors. Thus should one's eye ever drop to
one's feet it would encounter, there too, in the very cut of
the marble, an homage to the design commissioned by our
own founding father for the city to be named after him.
In all these details of execution, then, there is manifested on the part of patron and architect alike a desire
that the new should take its place beside the old in a tension whose vibrancy only enhances the harmony that underlies it. This desire reaches its most dramatic realization
in the contrast between the actual way the two galleries
are intended to be used. The function of the reposeful
West Building is, now as always, to house the permanent
collection of the National Gallery, while one of the principal functions of the energetic East Building is to provide
space for temporary exhibitions, the new genre of internationally organized blockbusters that has emerged in the
last few decades. The central court of the East Building
gives a view of all levels of the building in the manner of
an opera-house, and the ('performances" for which this
Figure 2: An elaboration of the two·triangle plan of the East Building. The larger
triangle {divided by the arrow) contains public spaces-the central court and the
galleries, for example. The smaller (lower part of the sketch) is devoted to secondary
uses such as the study center. (The small figure in the upper right shows a preliminary sketch of a triangular building on the existing trapezoidal plot of ground.)
of course,
the name of Nietzsche has vanished altogether. I
should ·like to think, however, that far from implying
his irrelevance I have been paying him the right kind of
tribute. It may be that his greatness is less that of a philosopher, if by that word we mean one who offers us an account of the world and a guide to life through examination
of universals, and more that of a critic, if by that word we
mean one who leads us to make exacting perceptions and
valuations of the particular. By his sustained refusal to
slander the body, the senses, and the moment in all its
transience, Nietzsche gave us a fresh sense of what is at
stake when we submit ourselves to the power of a work of
art in the plenitude of its presence. But to consider what
is necessary for that plenitude means to consider the nature of the immortal, the monumental, the classic. And it
F
ROM MY ACCOUNT OF RECENT WORK,
means, finally, to be strong enough to sustain an irresolu-
court provides ''intermissions" are in fact going on around
ble paradoxical desire-the desire to be witness to a "new
the building's sides in the various galleries and towers,
where space has been left open by the architect, so that it
can be shaped anew by the curators through use of temporary walls designed for each specific exhibit. The East
Building is, in other words, a place for festivals, whose brilliance is inseparable from their transience 18 Patron and
architect have incorporated into the function of the new
building an element of festival brilliance which will stand
in perpetual tension with the marmoreal achievement of
its fundamental design. I should, therefore, like to offer
the two buildings together, with their complementary
styles and complementary functions, as my final image of
the interplay between the new and the old, and the durable and the transient, which a healthy civilization has the
sense and the will to sustain. Here too, as with dance repertory, the ceremony of the classical is, in Pindar's phrase,
classic" as it comes into being.
at perpetual ((holiday on its own pedestal."
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
l. See "Homers Wettkampf' in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl
Schlechta, Munich 1966, III, 291-299. Hereafter all references will give
the title and section number of the work and then the volume and page
number in Schlechta. Unless otherwise stated all translations are my
own.
2. "Der Griechische Staat," Werke, III, 285-286.
3. The essential text in Arendt is The Human Condition (Anchor Books
Edition 1959), Chap. 31, "The Traditional Substitution of Making for
Acting," 197-206.
4. Der Wille zur Macht, no. 975, Werke, III, 850. Though Schlechta
abandons the section numbers of earlier editions of Nietzsche's Nachlass collected under the title Der Wille zur Macht, he provides in his fifth
volume (609ff.) a concordance by which a given section can be found in
his own edition.
5. Nor will it do to maintain that these notebook jottings remained unpublished by Nietzsche because he could not bring himself to recommend in public the adoption of such a stance of hardness. Consider the
quotation from Zarathustra with which he concludes Gotzen-Dam-
31
�merung: "All creators are hard. And you' must think it blessedness to
press your hand on millenia as on wax,-/-Blessedness, to write on the
will of millenia as on bronze,-harder than bronze, nobler than bronze.
Only the noblest are completely hard." (Werke, II, 1033) Compare this
with the laudatory remarks on Caesar and Napoleon in the same book,
"Streifzuge eines Unzeitgemassen" nos. 38, 44, 45, 49, Werke, II, 1015,
1019-1022, 1025. To be fair, however, it must be added that the connection between the artist's hardness on his material and the statesman/
general's hardness on human beings is not made explicit anywhere in
Gotzen-Dammerung but rather left as a hint, a not-too-esoteric doctrine.
6. Nietzsche shows himself quite conscious of the distinction: "The
young women who march solemnly to the temple of Apollo, laurel in
hand, and sing as they go a processional song, remain who they are and
maintain the names they possess as citizens; the dithyrambic chorus is a
chorus of transformed beings for whom their past as citizens and their
social position has become oblivious." Die Geburt der TragOdie no. 8,
Werke, I, 52. The second half of his characterization, however, is incomplete, for in all the tragedies we possess (as opposed to hypothetical
original dithyrambs), the dancers who have doffed their own identities
have donned others which are equally precise: those of old men, women,
slaves, foreigners, sailors, etc.
7. Nietzsche's assumption is based on the much-disputed statement of
Artistotle (Poetics l449a9) that tragedy arose &1rO rCJv to'~apxOvrwv rOv
tneUpap,{3ov, "from those who led off the dithyramb." For a very nonDionysian critical discussion of this passage and of Nietzsche's use of it,
see Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, New
York 1965, 9-15.
8. Die Geburt der TragOdie no. l, Werke, I, 25.
9. "Notes for 'We Philologists,'" trans. William Arrowsmith, ARION
N.S. l/2, 1973-1974, 361.
10. Nos. 10 & II, Werke, II, 996-997.
11. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Pfullingen 1961, Vol. I, "Der Wille zur
Macht als Kunst," particularly the chapter entitled "Der Rausch als
asthetischer Zustand," 109-126.
12. Der Wille zur Macht no. 1067, Werke, III, 917.
13. Der Antichrist no. 58, Werke, II, 1229.
14. Der Antichrist no. 59, Werke, II, 1231. Cf. GOtzen-Dammerung,
"Streifzuge" no. 39, Werke, II, 1016. Nietzsche was also fond of alluding
to Horace's claim that in his three books of odes he had erected a monument more durable than bronze: exegi monumentum aere perennius
(Odes III, 30.1). Earlier in Antichrist no. 58 he uses the phrase aere perennius to characterize the whole Roman Empire, and in the last section of
Gotzen-Diimmerung, "Was lch den Alten Verdanke" no. l, he names
32
Figure 3: View of the East Building from the vicinity of the east entrance of the
original National Gallery, looking in approximately the same direction as the arrow
points in Figure 2. (Photo by Tom Farran.)
Horace and Sallust as his two great stylistic models and says that "Even
in my Zarathustra one can recognize a very serious ambition for Roman
style, for the 'aere perennius' in style." (Werke, II, 1027). See also MorgenrOte no. 71, Werke, I, 1059. In Zur Genealogie der Moral, '"Gut und
BOse,' 'Gut und Schlecht"' no. 16, he praises the nobility of Roman inscriptions, a category which combines architecture and writing (Werke,
II, 796).
15. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, "Der Wanderer und sein Schatten," no. 217, Werke, I, 965.
16. New York Times, "Arts and Leisure Section,'' Sunday, AprilS, 1979,
D 17.
17. Lincoln KirStein, Movement and Metaphor, New York 1970, 10.
18. Compare Lincoln Kirsteip's remarks on the lobby of the State
Theater of New York: "Philip Johnson built a festival ambiance in lobby
and promenade. Performances commence when audiences first enter
the houses which frame them; large theaters are more than shelter. Intermissions which link units of repertory are happy times for appreciation, disagreement, sharings of what has just been seen and heard."
New York City Ballet Souvenir Book, 1975.
WINTER 1982
�The Trivialization of the Holocaust as an
Aspect of Modern Idolatry
Robert Loewenberg
1
The Holocaust, the murdering of the Jews on Hitler's
principle that a "thorough eradication of even the last
representative and destruction of the last tradition"
should be realized, is the most mysterious event of modern
times, and perhaps the most characteristic. 1 Mysterious
and characteristic as well is the subsequent trivialization
of the Holocaust in Western discourse by those, especially
Jews, who profess detestation of Hitler and Nazism. The
trivialization of the Holocaust, and not its denial, for ex·
ample, by the Right, is the most significant post-Holocaust
phenomenon at our disposal for the purpose of understanding the Holocaust.
The charge of trivialization supposes certainly a justification of the view that the Holocaust is not trivial. One
must establish that Hitler's choice to eradicate the Jews
and Judaism instead of Armenians or Biafrans is what
makes for the Holocaust's particularity. The mystery of
the Holocaust, in other words, is not the murdering of innocents, or the number and manner of their killing. The
description of Hitler's murdering of the Jews as a holocaust constitutes a claim, a narrowly tribal one in some
minds, that the gassing of Jews was not solely a murdering
of innocents demonstrating man's inhumanity to man.
Rather the Holocaust was a murdering of another kind
that demonstrates profound truths. This claim is explored
in this essay in connection with the suggestion of Emil
Fackenheim that the Holocaust was the result of idol worship.'
Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Robert
Lo~wenberg has written Equality on the Oregon Frontier (University of
Washington Press, 1976) and articles on the history of the American
Northwest and on values in writing history.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The purpose of this essay is to locate the sources of trivialization and not to detail it-the latter a task that has
been undertaken by others 3 The best evidences of trivialization are found in the most likely places, in common
speech and in academic discourse. In both instances the
quite prominent involvement of the Jews in the trivializa·
tion of the Holocaust underscores the several points to be
developed in this study.
At the first level, that of common speech, trivialization of
the Holocaust is especially visible in the rights movements.
Here the language of the Holocaust and of European
Jewry is readily affixed to circumstances of victimization.
Civil rights proponents are inclined to refer to a Negro
ghetto as an "Auschwitz" or to the denial of a lunch program as "genocide." The denial of civil rights is fascist
while support of civil rights is in some ultimate sense Jewish. This perception of the rights movement and of Judaism is commonplace among liberal Jews today. Judaism,
1
once self-understood as chosenness or ' particularism," is
now to be conceived as universalist. Judaism's universalism has suggested to some advanced or Reform rabbis
that traditional or orthodox Judaism may itself be Nazi.
Accordingly, there has been a growing tendency in pro·
gressive circles to disavow the holiday of Chanukah,
which marks the defeat of Hellenists by a band of religious
zealots, as fascism.
Developments of this type at the popular level are informed by academic conventions regarding what is
thought to be praiseworthy about Judaism. At the aca·
demic level the trivialization of the Holocaust is, in fact, a
function or product of the insistence that Judaism is es·
sentially antireligious, actually a forerunner of secular and
atheistic humanism. The real Jew is the non-Jewish Jew.
This view, deriving from the distinction between universalism and particularism, is part of a larger vision of his-
33
�tory and human affairs in which the Holocaust is, above
all, an attack upon mankind. In this view of things, Nazism
and Hitler are perceived as reactionary, the enemies of
progress, secularism, and democracy. Thus Hitler was
among those "demonic enemies," as two Jewish writers
have recently and typically said, "of modernity."' As for
Mein Kampf, it is considered "deeply barbarous," a book
"to end books. "5 The Third Reich demonstrated once and
for all the evil of nationalism or particularism, of hierarchy
and authority. Nazism vindicated an opposite set of prin·
ciples: egalitarianism, universalism, internationalism, and
tolerance.
Scholars in fields other than German history, especially
if they are Jewish, are not hesitant to use the Holocaust as
in some respects a model and metaphor. A famous exam·
pie is Stanley Elkins' astonishing comparison of death
camp inmates with American slaves. Interestingly, the
comparison was offensive to some historians on the
ground that slaves did not behave as the Jews were alleged
to have done by Elkins. In other words, the comparison as
between murder and enslavement was not faulted, only
the suggestion that slaves behaved like death camp inmates. Uses of this type explain in part the popularity of
so-called Holocaust studies, a new academic subfield.
It is the burden of this essay to suggest that trivialization of the Holocaust partakes of the same philosophical
sources that informed the actual Holocaust itself. The hatred of Judaism (not equivalent to hatred of Jewish
people), whether in destroying Jews or in trivializing their
destruction, reflects neither prejudice nor fascist militarism, but a disordering of the terms of being, a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. This disordering and its consequences we call idolatry. Perhaps no
Jewish writer has done more to explore this question than
Emil Fackenheim.
Fackenheim's study of the Holocaust is notable for its
daring. He dismisses certain sanctified cliches of Holocaust literature, and ignores the taboos of normal political
theory. For example, Fackenheim does not suppose that
religion is an end equal to all others, but, on the contrary,
that it is "the most serious question facing a serious man."6
In this, Fackenheim offends behaviorists and secular humanists at once. But having done so, Fackenheim is free
to disregard as unhistorical and reductionist those accounts of the Holocaust which limit our apprehension of
Hitler or of Mein Kampf either to the influences upon
them or to behavioral inferences from them. Similarly, he
does not engage in a certain type of theologizing which,
by proposing that the Holocaust demonstrates the non-existence and irrelevance of God, suggests rather the nonexistence and irrelevance of any serious Jewish theology.
Fackenheim takes Nazism at its word and considers its
deeds in light of its word. In this he adopts the commonsense approach of Werner Maser, the outstanding historian of Mein Kampf. "To explain Hitler and to understand
the period of history over which he exerted so decisive an
34
influence," Maser has written, "nothing can be so impor~
tant or informative as Mein Kampf . ... Hitler clung faithfully to the ghastly doctrine set out in Mein Kampf."'
But the ghastly aspects of Mein Kampf are not always
the obvious ones. Hitler was an idealist, or one who is devoted to what modern liberal scholarship considers the
highest goal, freedom. Fackenheim takes note of Hitler's
idealism. The idealistic element in Mein Kampf is not outwardly ghastly. For example, Hitler writes of his wish to
replace one "spiritual" doctrine with another. He does not
idolize force in this matter. "Every attempt at fighting a
view of life by means of force will finally fail," he observed, "unless the fight against it represents the form of
an attack for the sake of a new spiritual direction." 8 This
new spiritual direction is what necessitates the "thorough
eradication" of Jews. Hitler seeks a "new . .. view of 1ife." 9
Hitler's ghastly doctrine aside, he was a moralist. Conversions and mere persecutions ofjews he regarded as destructive of idealism and immoral in other respects. 10 As
for persecutions, "every [one] ... that takes place without
being based on a spiritual presupposition does not seem
justified from the moral point of view." 11 Traditional Judeophobia failed to express "the character of an inner and
higher consecration, and thus it appeared to many, and
not the worst, as immoral and objectionable. The conviction was lacking that this was a question of vital importance to the whole of mankind and that on its solution the
fate of all non-Jewish people depended." 12
The eradication of Jews and of all Jewish things Fackenheim rightly considers to derive from a worshipping of
false gods or idolatry. Nazism sought to make the trinity of
Yolk, Reich, and Fuehrer into one. Hitler's purpose was to
replace the people, who are representative of the principle that God is One, with "eternal Germanity" as one. In
order to establish the significance of idolatry, Fackenheim
has recourse to Jewish sources. Idolatry is "false 'freedom,'" in particular, idolatry is the "literal and hence total
identification of finiteness with infinitude." 13 What relation exists between ancient idolatry and modern idolators?
The ancients were preoccupied with the problems of false
worship and false gods. Moderns are secular and do not
believe in gods. Fackenheim does not forfeit his fundamental discovery that Nazism is idolatrous by suggesting
the Nazis were antimodern pagans. He does not dilute or
caricature the rabbinic teaching on idolatry, but insists
that Nazism is the "most horrendous idolatry of modern,
perhaps of all time." 14 In making this his starting point,
Fackenheim assures us that he intends to show that
Nazism and its objectives were not trivial. Of course idolatry is not trivial in Jewish terms where it serves as a
counter to Judaism itself. But idolatry is also not trivial in
absolute terms. Rather it reflects a disordering of the relationship of man to nature and to the "divine Infinity."IS
Fackenheim points out that the ancient rabbis regarded
"one who repudiates idolatry is as though he were faithful
to the whole Torah. By this standard," says Fackenheim,
WINTER 1982
�"any modern Jew would be wholly faithful." 16 But it goes
without saying that modern Jews are not wholly fmthful
even though they do repudiate the w'orship of idols or
images. Does this not indicate the irrelevance of the rab·
binic teaching, and by implication the irrelevance of Juda·
ism? Fackenheim refers to the following talmudic passage,
a characteristic utterance regarding idolatry, to suggest
why such questions are not well-founded.
When someone in his anger tears his clothes, breaks utensils,
throws away money, this should be viewed as though he worshipped idols. For this is the cunning of the evil inclination:
today it says 'do this,' tomorrow, 'do that,' until it finall~ says
'go and worship idols' and he goes and does it. ... What 1s the
alien god that dwells in a man's body? The evil inclinationP
The danger of idol worship is not the "ludicrous anti·
climax" moderns suppose it to be. 18 Instead moderns who
suspect they are not subject to idol worship because they
are indifferent to the gods have fallen prey to idolatry
without even knowing it was a temptation. In the case of
Nazism, Fackenheim explains, idol worship is based in the
same feelings of ancient idol worship, that is, in "infinite
fear, hope, pleasure or pain." But the object of worship in
Nazism, namely the unity of Hitler, Yolk, and Reich, is
not recognized as an ido].I 9 On the contrary this object is
understood to bring about the liberation from "idolatrous
thralldom." In other words, modern idolatry understands
itself to be liberation or "demythologization." As Facken·
heim puts it, "the truth in this new false 'freedom' is that,
negating all worship, it negates all idolatry in the form of
worship. This new idolator takes himself for an enlight·
ened modern."20 Moreover, because the modern idolator
is enlightened, he scorns idols as mere sticks and stones at
the same time that he condemns all worship as superflu·
ous. But the idolatrous essence, the identification of finiteness and infinitude, survives like the duck inside the
wolf in the tale of Peter. "Because [the infinite feeling of
the modern idolator] is infinite, it does not vanish ... It
thus acquires the power of generating what may be called
internalized idolatry."21
Fackenheim recognizes two forms of modern "internalized" idolatry and distinguishes "internalized religion"
from both. Hitler's idolatry Fackenheim calls "idealistic."
It identifies finiteness with infinitude in making the finite
infinite. Nazism is "absolute whim ... the extreme in fini·
tude." 22 Naturalistic or empiricist idolatry is marked by
positivist and relativistic "anti-absolutism." It identifies fi.
niteness with infinitude in making the infinite finite; the
"degradation of the infinite aspect of selfhood to a false fi.
nitude."2' The so-called value-free perverters of Dewey
and Freud, but not Dewey or Freud themselves, are naturalist idolators according to Fackenheim because they
deny all goals, including even those of Dewey and Freud
that "man should make himself into the natural being he
is." 24
Internalized religion is carefully distinguished from idola·
THE ST, JOHNS REVIEW
try, whether of the idealistic or naturalistic sort. It would
be "a fatal error to confuse" internalized religion and inter~
nalized idolatry, says Fackenheim. 25 The knowing denial
of the divine Infinity, that is, the "raising [of an individual
or a collective self] to infinity in ... [the] very act of demal,"
is "internalized religion," not "internalized idolatry," when
this denial "issues, not in an atheistic rejection of the Divine but rather in its internalization. " 26 This situation, al~
tho~gh it "raises the specter of a modern, internalized
idolatry," is kept from becoming idolatry in the "modern
... philosophies ... [of] Fichte, Schelling, Hegel," because
"finiteness and infinitude are ... kept firmly apart." And,
what is true of these "idealist" philosophers is also true of
the "humanistic atheists ... Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche." The identification of finiteness and infinitude is
here "as firmly (if not as obviously) rejected ... by the fact
that Divinity vanishes in the process of internalization, to
be replaced by a humanity potentially infinite in its modern 'freedom' ... The potentiality never seems to become
quite actual." In sum, internalized religion is an ~~authen
tic challenge" to the divine Infinity which should be respected by Jewish and Christian thinkers. Internalized
idolatry, on the other hand, is "demonic perversion."27
Above all this distinction is rooted in the "honest rationality" of' the philosophers. Unlike idolatrous parodies of
thought which are "the product, not of reason, but of passion," the philosophers are not idolatrous.28 Naz1sm, mternalized idolatry, is a denial of the divine Infinity. At the
same time it is a literal and hence total identification of
finiteness with infinitude. Although Hitler was "no emperor-god ... and the Yolk, no worshipping community,"
yet the "will of a Fuehrer" and the will of the Yolk was the
sole reality. The object of idol worship is the will, internalized in Yolk and Fuehrer who are one. Nazism is a "bastard-child of ... the Enlightenment." 29
Fackenheim has undoubtedly pointed us in the direction of uncovering the source of the Holocaust's mystery.
The ground of idolatry or the identification of finitude
and infinity is false freedom. But Fackenheim's further
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is not sound.
.
The philosopher's impulse, which does not deny the divine Infinity but which seeks only to bring the divine, "as
it were ... in[to] the same inner space as the human self,"
is surely an idolatrous aspiration 30 More important, .this
impulse participates in the same aspiration which informs
such demonic perversions as Nazism. The remainder of
this essay is devoted to exploring this suggestion and its
implications for the question of the trivialization of the
Holocaust.
2
Fackenheim's distinction between internalized religion
and internalized idolatry is outwardly commonsensical in
that thought is always different from action. But this dif.
35
�ference is especially inappropriate' as a distinction in the
case of the great philosophies, all of which sought to identify thought and act at some level. Commonsensical as
wen is the unmistakable difference between any of the
great philosophies and the comparatively low level theorizing of Hitler. But differences of this type have no philosophical relevance. Moreover, Fackenheim is himself
compelled to recognize the, to him, quite troubling compatibility of Heidegger and Nazism.
Heidegger's was "one of the profoundest philosophies
of this century," Fackenheim observes, and surely he was
an exponent of internalized religion. As late as 1946, however, Heidegger failed to recognize "radical evil" in the
Holocaust. Fackenheim considers this failure a "philosophical" one, not a challenge to the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry. 31 But Fackenheim does not explain how Heidegger's "philosophical
failure" differs from idolatry. One wonders if perhaps
there is no distinction between this philosophical failure
and idolatry or, put another way, if there really is a distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized religion.
Let it be noted here, before we consider this possibility,
that historically at least, there is no reason to suppose any
such distinction ever existed. Karl Liiwith has observed
that "nihilism as the disavowal of existing civilization,"
and not internalized religion, "was the only belief of all
truly educated people at the beginning of the twentieth
century." 32
Whether Heidegger is a nihilist or if nihilism is idolatry
are matters outside the present concern. But that Hitler
explicitly disavowed existing civilization and identified it
with judaism will not be doubted. Certainly it is this disavowal that Heidegger found "great" in Nazism. As for
Heidegger' s own statements against anti-Semitism, they
cannot be given much weight as evidence of a philosophic
intention as against an idolatrous one. The tradition of
modern philosophy is, of course, marked by hostility to Judaism1 as Fackenheim's study, among others, shows, even
as this hostility is almost always hedged about with the liberal's disdain for all "prejudice," especially for anti-Semitism.
A final observation about the great philosophies considered from the standpoint of Fackenheim's defense of the
distinction between internalized idolatry and internalized
religion is the supposed "authenticity" of the great philosophies. Consider that Fackenheim exempts Hegel from
an idolatrous identification of finitude and infinity, saying
he "reaches the Fichtean goal [of a divinized moral self],
but does so in the realm of thought only." Marx too is no
idolator, according to Fackenheim. Insofar as the theorist
of world communism realized that "society [is] as yet far
from classless," he did not identify the finite and the infinite.33 But one may question if these are plausible distinctions or authentic ones. Can Hegel or Marx, of all thinkers,
be defended on the ground that the idolatrous tendency of
an identification of finitude and infinity was not idolatrous
because it was limited to the realm of thought? Precisely
36
the identification of thought and act was their objective.
Hegel did not doubt the realm of thought would succeed
to action, in particular to the Prussian state. Certainly
Marx did not scorn the prospect of a classless society. The
distinction Fackenheim insists upon is here again not a
theoretical but a circumstantial and historical one. One
must look rather far to find a more pertinent example of
internalized idolatry, a knowing identification of the divine Infinity dwelling in a man, than Hegel's Wissenschaft
der Logik:
[The] logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason,
as the realm of pure thought. This realm is the truth as it is
without veil and [for itself]. It can be said, therefore, that this
is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence, before
the creation of nature and a finite mind. 34
We may not say of Hegel that he has taken "care [that] ...
the possibility of idolatry is ... recognized and avoided." 35
But the distinction Fackenheim would have us credit
between the great philosophies and demonic perversions
of them rests on what is itself a fatal error. Honest rationality, said to separate products of reason from those of
passion, in fact confoupd~ reason and passion.
Concerning the distinction between reason and passion,
it must at least be noted that the tide of modern political
philosophy, in which Leo Strauss noted three waves, is
dominated by philosophies of passion. 36 Beginning with
Machiavelli, who substituted glory for virtue, and Hobbes,
who replaced glory with power, the great philosophies
have been notable for their rejections of reason, whether
in hallowing folk minds as expressions of a general will or
in the sanctification of history as an expression of nature
or idea. In the third and present wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche, the West has been inclined to think
"that all human life and human thought ultimately rests
on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible of
rationa1legitimization."37
This historical consideration regarding passion and reason is not irrelevant to the distinction Fackenheim would
have us accept between the philosophies and Hitler. We
live at a time when it is the nearly universal presumption
of political thinkers that man is not a political being but is
instead an amorphous or "free" being, to be shaped by
history, by labor or by change. This presumption, a reversal of the understanding of Aristotle, is related to another
Aristotelian principle which modern political thinkers
have also reversed. This principle is that "the mind is
moved by the mover." 38 Reason, in other words, the an~
cients regarded as "revelation," not as a thing man-made. 39
These two related reversals of classical thought by moderns bear directly on our subject. They are the bases for
modern idolatry and for the too easy supposition that idolatry is not a modern possibility, or that honest rationality
is a hedge against such a possibility. The identification of
finitude and infinity in Nietzsche, one of Fackenheim's
great philosophers, is complete because the identification
of making and thinking is complete.
WINTER 1982
�In Nietzsche, thought is action, in particular it is vitalisrq. When Nietzsche internalizes the divine infinity (or
the One), his idolatry is not simply in the realm of thought.
It is palpable idolatry because thought is act in Nietzsche:
The greatest events-they are not our loudest but our stillest
hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the
inventors of new values, does the world revolve; it revolves inaudibly40
And Zarathustra counsels:
'Will to truth' .... A will to the thinkability of all beings; this I
call your will. You want to make all being thinkable.4 1
Nietzsche's method is rational insofar as it is autonomous
and free, but it is openly passionate as well. What is art in
Nietzsche is system in Max Weber. Weber is the formulator of the principle of honest rationality as the basis for
the distinction between morality or idealism and immorality, the distinction informing Fackenheim's defense of
the great philosophies.
Weber's distinction between idealism and immorality
derives in part, as will be clear shortly, from his conviction
that facts and values are heterogeneous. It is not irrelevant
to add that Weber's teaching that only facts are knowable
while all judgments regarding values are relative continues
to inform both a naturalistic social science in which "value
judgments" are impermissible, and neo-Kantian secular
humanism in which the facts are said to be value-laden.
Academic social studies, in other words, must also be affected by the critique of honest rationality.
The context of Fackenheim's invocation of honest rationality is Weberian. But in a critique of Weber of the
profoundest kind, Strauss has shown the falsity of the distinction between products of reason and of passion fashioned by honest rationality.42 Honest rationality, or the
principle of freedom according to which one is free in the
degree that he is "guided by rational consideration of
means and ends," is said to be nihilistic.43 Strauss's critique
of Weber bears directly and with great force upon the subject of this essay and upon the question of idolatry.
According to Weber, reason, particularly in the determining of moral imperatives which appeal to intellect (unlike merely cultural or personal values and wants to which
our feelings are subject), is the glory and dignity of man.
Not choosing and not valuing is the equivalent of appetitiveness and passion. "Man's dignity, his being exalted far
above all brutes, consists in his setting up autonomously
his ultimate values, in making these values his constant
ends, and in rationally choosing the means to these ends.
The dignity of man consists in his ... freely choosing his
own values or his own ideals."44 Commitment to a value
which appeals to our reason Weber counted idealism.
But Strauss reminds us that the justification for this
view of idealism is a scientific understanding of values,
that is, an understanding that facts are possessed of transhistorical or universal character while values are relative
THE ST. JOHNS REVJEW
and discrete. Because the truth about values is said to be
inaccessible, a scientific and rational, as well as an honest
approach to values must be neutrality toward values. And
yet indifference to all values is precisely what Weber
counts as baseness. Freedom and rationality suggest a rational hostility toward theory. But this suggests an espousal
of unfreedom or passion. It is no accident that this hostility
to values and to theory is embodied in naturalistic social
science (behaviorism), and in the value-laden humanism
which frequently opposes it, that is, in those two forms of
academic social studies that grew out of Weber's distinction between facts and values. Thus, the positivist regards
theory as unempirical. He makes indifference to all causes
or Hopenness" a cause. At the opposite extreme stands
the humanist who dignifies all causes in the name of freedom and dignity regardless of whether a cause appeals to
our mind or to our passion. HA cause that appeals no further than 'the sphere of one's own individuality,' " the vitalism of Nietzsche, counts as a cause.45 The first position
is formalistic and self-canceling, and the second is simply a
doctrine of power. Weber, in sum, having undertaken the
defense of idealism as freedom and commitment to a value,
ultimately dignifies mere personal preferences and willing
as idealistic.
The distinction between idealism and appetitiveness
fades into freedom as such, as the distinction between values and facts, ought and is, collapses into an identity of
ought and is. The final formulation of Weber's ethical
principle would then be " 'Thou shalt have preferences'an Ought whose fulfillment is fully guaranteed by the Is."46
Honest rationality, the choosing of values as called for by
intellect as against acceptance of values which appeal to
our feelings, is obviously arbitrary. Why be honest or rational? Reason and passion, idealism and appetitiveness
are morally equal on the principle of honest rationality, or
rather there is no such principle.
Fackenheim's distinction between the great philosophies
and Hitler is subject to the same nihilistic consequence attaching to the distinction between idealism and immorality
in Weber. This would suggest that the distinction between
internalized religion and internalized idolatry is also inadequate. In fact, Fackenheim has not done full justice to
the rabbinic teaching, perhaps because he has done more
than full justice to the great philosophies.
Fackenheim's critique of the rabbinic teaching does not
do full justice to judaism. Certainly the rabbis would not
have supposed that the false freedom of the great philosophers in bringing the divine Infinity into the same space
with a human being was an "authentic challenge" to be
taken seriously as religious and not idolatrous. The rabbis
were not liberals for whom challenges to the divine Infinity counted as authentic. One cannot maintain that Nazism is idolatrous while consenting to an Hellenic gloss on
the rabbinic teaching. That "the Hellenic spirit of free inquiry ... is not rooted in judaism," as Husik has correctly
observed, is a fact that moderns find difficult to accept.47
37
�Concerning the subject of idolatry, one might even say
that this spirit of free inquiry is the essence of the yetzer
hara, the evil inclination. The divine Infinity which occupies the same inner space with the philosopher cannot be
God. Such an occupant, the rabbis say, is precisely "the
alien god." This is the god that says, "do anything," i.e.,
be free. Freedom, or the evil inclination, is the alien god.
In a word, freedom, understood as "false freedom," is
idol~
atry, even though we know it is today "a mark of intelligence and progress ... [to praise] serious consideration of
alien gods."48 Evidently the matter of "internalization"
has been the rabbinic interpretation from the start.
3
The Jewish teaching on false freedom is not ambiguous.
False freedom is false Exodus from Egypt. It is the making
of the golden calf while Moses is at Sinai preparing to deliver the Torah, or true freedom, to Israel. The remainder
of this essay is devoted to modern idolatry in two embodiments. First is the idolatry associated with the consideration of man as an animal lacking reason and a soul. Here
man exits from or escapes his condition as a being of more
than animal elements. Let us call this form of idolatry the
Mehan exodus, following Eric Voegelin, who locates the
contraction of man's being into a "power-self" as the
means of "concupiscental exodus" in the Melian dialogue
detailed by Thucydides.49 There is, in addition to the
Mehan exodus, a second embodiment of idolatry, or gnostic exodus. In gnosticism, men renounce the trappings of
their mortality, including history and culture, as if to bring
about, at God's expense, the conditions of perfection
symbolized in the garden of Eden. At the level of popular
and of academic discourse, these embodiments of idolatry
are understood in the language of political jargon as Left
and Right. This language does not intend religious meanings. Nonetheless, the present purpose is to suggest that
conventional political discourse misunderstands the difference of Right and Left, which it considers only political. The division, and opposition, of Right and Left, rather
than the content of either Right (Melian) or Left (gnostic),
is idolatry in its modern form.
It goes without saying that a judgment that Right and
Left touch religious aspects is offensive to much political
science. 50 But not all scholars are content that religious
questions should be divorced from political theory. Allan
Bloom has observed that "what is perhaps the most serious question facing a serious man-the religious question
-is almost a matter of indifference-" to political writers
in our time. This indifference is found in John Rawls, for
example, whose study of equality is considered by many
to be a significant contribution. But Rawls considers religion "just another one of the many ends that can be pursued in a liberal society."'!
Again it is Bloom who has pointed out that modern political writing which evades the serious questions also
38
evades the easy historical ones, inviting sloppiness and errors of fact. One may say, however, that what is most consistently mistaken by modern writers such as Rawls is the
involvement of political writing in idolatry. Rawls's equation of all ends is precisely idolatry of the gnostic type.
Knowledge that all ends or values are equal is not a human possibility, but a divine one. Must not metaphysics
and religion, dealing with questions about ends, be more
serious than other pursuits in a liberal society or in any society? If Nazism is idolatry, a political science such as
evinced in the work of Rawls is precluded from studying
it. One cannot undertake a study of Nazism as idolatry in
the context of modern political science because this science is implicated in idolatry. The following survey of Nazism as idolatrous suggests the nature of this implication.
The idolatry in Nazism is found in connection with the
Biblical teaching on freedom. The story of the Exodus is
an explication of true and false freedom. True freedom is
the recognition of God, and the recognition that follows
from the recognition of God, that man is radically distinct
from animals as well as from God. Man is neither raw desire nor spirit, man is
in~between
or in the metaxy, to use
the pertinent Platonic term. False freedom, in contrast, is
the freedom or exodus from the metaxy, symbolized in
the making of the golden calf, by which men simultaneously attempt to be gods themselves and to sanctify raw
desire.
The Exodus of the Jewish people is plainly not one
from Egypt but to Israel. Exodus from Egypt is marked
above all by wandering and by a desert. Moreover, the Exodus from Egypt and the opening of the Red Sea are not
effected by the Jews but by God. The Exodus is no war of
national liberation. Most important, to consider the Exodus as though it were a mere war of liberation from Egyptian bondage is idolatry. Thus, when the Israelites make
the golden calf they proclaim: "These are your Gods, 0 Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt." 52
But this is a lie; the golden calf was newly made by the
Jews. But then who split the Red Sea if not God or the
golden calf? Naturally, it must have been the Jews: God is
a projection or superstition; freedom is man's work and
man is the maker. Exodus is then freedom or the exercise
of human will: absolute whim. It is the liberation to do as
one lists, to wander. Exodus is the freedom not to wait for
Moses: to go to Israel or not. But of course the Bible
teaches that this is all false.
The calf makers are idol worshippers; they are slain.
They have forfeited reason by equating their whim or freedom with rationality. They made the same error that
Strauss detected in Weberian idealism or honest rationality. And, as in the Weberian instance, the mistaking of
whim for rationality is equivalent to animality or mere desiring. The calf makers are considered as animals. In one
of the most famous expositions of idolatry in the Bible,
Nebuchadnezzar is punished with the loss of his reason
and sent to forage in the manner of oxen for his failure,
WJNTER 1982
�demonstrated in his making of a gold,en idol, to recognize
that "the most High rules in the Kingdom of man." 53
Only reason, by which I mean the revelation that God
and not man is the maker of all things, can distinguish be·
tween exodus as false and as true freedom. A calf is a thing.
All things perish. Things come into being and go out of
being. The bush that burns but is not consumed is a sign
of divinity because it does not perish. Being remains,
namely, the process of coming into being and going out of
being remains. This process is known only to man who
alone among things possesses reason or soul. This permits
him to see the sign of the burning bush and to understand
it. This recognition indicates that aspect of man's being,
spirit or soul, which is not a thing. We call this aspect of
perception immortality.
Freedom is false when men pretend they are animals or
gods. The literal and hence total identification of finiteness and infinitude is a form of idolatry because such
identification is a willful disordering of reality. Idolatry is
the knowing denial of the doctrine which founds Judaism,
or monotheism: "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord is your God, the
Lord is One." The Biblical exposition of this principle, set
in the Exodus or Passover story, specifies idolatry as false
freedom or exodus from the metaxy. There are two modes
of exodus or false freedom.
Men may escape the metaxy or the conditions of human being in the direction Fackenheim calls naturalism
by identifying as finite those aspects of being which are
infinite. 54 The insistence that man is an animal who invents God for the sake of satisfying behavioral imperatives
is idolatrous in this sense. The value-free principle is a
doctrine of raw power, as are its derivatives, for example,
the "open society," and certain versions of equality and
free speech. Justice, which regards all value claims as equal,
is achievable only by enforcement of absolute toleration
and permissiveness or by enforcement of sameness and
intolerance in the name of humanity. 55 Force is inevitable
in either case to insure absolute permissiveness or absolute
conformity, since it cannot be the case that values will not
clash, or that self-control will be considered a value superior
to others.
In fact, the sole means of avoiding the arbitrary dilemma
of tolerance is to undertake a transformation of the self,
that is, to undertake the elimination of the self or amour
propre. In other words, this doctrine of freedom entails a
reordering of the relationship of the One and the many
whether in the reformation of selves into a general will or
into Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer. As we shall see in
Hitler's case, work makes free because it destroys egotism.
In particular, freedom as work eliminates rewards based
upon skill. The individual is thus merged into the collective self. Freedom from values as the meaning of freedom
is simply power or will. We have already called this freedom from values the Melian exodus, after Thucydides:
"Men . .. rule wherever they can."56
Hitler's conception of right was certainly Melian. Alan
Bullock, who has called this aspect of Hitler's thought
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
<(crude Darwinism," notes that "no word occurs more fre-
quently in Hitler's speeches than 'struggle.' "57 "The
whole work of Nature," according to Hitler, is "a mighty
struggle.'' Again: "The first fundamental of any rational
Weltanschauung is the fact that on earth and in the universe, force alone is decisive."58
Voegelin explains that the "fictitious identity of conquest with reality can be achieved by identifying reality
with a humanity contracted to its libidinous self."" The
modern forms of this aspect of false freedom, according to
which values, and thus judgments concerning them, are
historical and ultimately identical to personal desire, is
embodied in historicisms of mind or spirit. In other words,
Melian exodus denies to philosophy all but historical and
pragmatic aptitudes. The difference between the ancient
and modern expressions of this exodus is the hint of tragic
fatality in the ancient and the absence of this hint in its
modern forms. The Athenian conquerors retain, "in the
background ... the tragic consciousness of the process."
They too will be massacred in time. Modern movements,
on the other hand, sink "to the untragic vileness of the
ideologist who cannot commit the murder he wants to
commit in order to gain an 'identity' in place of the self he
has lost, without moralistically appealing to a dogma of ultimate truth." 60
The dogma to which Hitler appealed was the Thousandyear Reich, eternal Germanity. This vision he conceived
as freedom and the elimination of Judaism. Freedom and
the replacement of Judaism with Germanity would prepare the way for a reconciliation of mankind. These objectives were exactly dogmas of ultimate truth for the sake of
committing murders. Moreover, these dogmas were the
instruments for the formation of selves.
We need not doubt Hitler used the word "struggle"
many times or that he identified morality with power. But
his object was not solely power. His murderous intention
was not arbitrary or irrational. Hitler's doctrine of the
blood is the key to the other side of Nazism and simultaneously to the idolatrous aspect of the great philosophies.
Hitler's notorious sacrifice of military goals so as to destroy the million Jews of Hungary reflects his commitment
to the doctrine of the blood. The doctrine of the blood is
an inversion of the doctrine of the soul. 61 Speaking often
of uour people" and "eternal Germanity," Hitler's purpose was to effect the "reconciliation of mankind/' or "all
non-Jewish peoples.''62 Nazism emerges as a counterJudaism at this point. The "purity of the blood ... [will]
enable our people to mature for the fulfillment of the mission which the Creator of the universe has allotted also to
them.''6l This, the "higher motive of national policy and
never narrow particularism" explains why the "State has
nothing whatsoever to do with a definite conception of
economics or development of economics."64 Nazism was a
moral doctrine of freedom for which race was the form.
As persecution of the Jews was immoral in Hitler's thinking, so the purity of German blood was not a medical or
39
�an anthropological doctrine, even though it had import at
such levels. One suspects we hear neither the hypocrite
nor the psychopath say, as Hitler did in 1932, "Let them
call us unhuman. If we save Germany, we shall have done
the greatest deed in the world .... Let them say that we
are without morality. If our people is saved, we shall have
paved the way for morality."65 The doctrine of the blood
introduces the gnostic aspect of Nazism.
Hitler's identification of right with power included the
second mode of exodus from the metaxy, or gnosticism.66
But the liberation of the spirit from the body in modern
gnosticism is not for rare men or for the elite as among an-
cient gnostics. The modern way of liberation is release
from the ego and egotism. The spirit, in other words, is no
private vision, it is a shared thing, for example, blood.
Modern gnosticism is distinguished from its ancient
forms in the same way that modern power politics differs
from Melian exodus of the ancients. For the ancient gnostic who strove to separate the soul from things, the instrument of liberation was the individuaL The soul with its
source in the divine was not thus denied. Liberation of
the souls of modern gnostics is altogether a thing of groups
which replaces the divine as the soul's source. Accordingly
modern gnosticism calls for the losing of the self as spirit.
The soul of modern man is liberated from the prison of
spirit, as well as the prison of the body, in becoming a thing
that does not perish, i.e., in submerging the ego in an immortalizing thing such as blood, sex, or excrement.
Consider Hitler's doctrine in connection with the tradition regarding the self extending from Rousseau. Since
Rousseau's description. of the self as formed by society, in
particular by the division of labor and the advent of property, there has evolved the idea that one's authentic self is
beneath the roles imposed by social life. Liberation is then
a release from property and its social and other derivatives.
Because this conception takes its rise in the doctrine of
the state of nature, or the doctrine that man has no nature
or telos, true personality or selfhood is freedom as such, or
becoming. At the same time, this vision of freedom imposes a conception of the self as selfless. Selflessness or
true selfhood is tantamount to compassion, and this is
how Rousseau defined it. The good self is not selfish in a
literal and a moral sense. The true self is not an I, but we.
This reversal of the classical and Jewish concept of the
self is part of everyday speech in which a self is virtuous if
it is selfless.
The tradition of this mode of thinking is long and considered honorable. It stretches, for example in American
letters, from john Humphrey Noyes who hoped to "extinguish the pronoun I," and replace it with "the we spirit,"
to Norman 0. Brown." Brown suggests that the "boundary
line between self and the external world bears no relation
to reality." Liberation for Brown is release from self by
means of return to the pre-socialized conditions of polymorphous perversity. The Hhuman consciousness can be
liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only by be-
40
ing liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic
state and the patriarchal God."68
This conception of self, including the role of man as
maker of God, is the one we have detected in Nazism. The
liberation from God, thus the liberation of the self, establishes the idea of freedom, of exodus from the metaxy.
The power to free the soul from the body is brought about
by freeing the self from an L The I perishes. What remains
is a thing possessed of the characteristics of God, that is,
of oneness. Those basic and selfless elements which outlast
the individual have become the instruments of immortality. What perishes excessively-excrement, sexuality,
blood-are now the bases for oneness and everlasting life.
Donatien de Sade uncovered these principles two centures before Hitler put them into practice. "What we call
the end of the living," said de Sa de (in praise of the motto
that "the freest of people are they who are most friendly
to murder''), "is no longer a true finis, but a simple trans-
formation ... of matter ... [D]eath is hence no more than
a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one
existence into another."69 Here in palpable form is the
identification of finitude with the infinite exposed by
Fackenheim. But Hitler is not a "parody" of the great philosophers. In assuming a material and communal replacement of the divine as the source of man's freedom,
Hitler's attack upon Judaism substitutes German blood
for the souL Hitler would, in this way, immortalize or
make infinite a finite thing. Hitler insists that judaism is
the negation of German blood-judaism is a race, not a
religion-exactly as Marx insists that judaism is the negation of communism-the god of judaism, he says, is
money. But if we consider, in Hitler's case, the actual doctrine of blood in judaism where it serves as a symbol of
the soul, Hitler's gnostic intention stands out boldly.
The Nazi's blood was his souL As a Jewish symbol that
had become an object of worship, the Nazi doctrine of the
blood is in truth "an absolute falsehood." 70 The blood as a
substitute for the soul of man is false. In judaism the blood
is typically considered to be in the soul only when the
body is alive. "The flesh whose blood is still in its soul,
shall ye not eat. ... Blood ... belongs to your souls." 71
This is plainly because the soul is not a thing. Preservation
of the blood of generations, what Hitler believed to be the
jews' purpose, and what he hoped to make the German
purpose, was to create oneness and immortality, as it
were, the salvation of souls. Jewish pollution of the racial
stock of others, imperiling the survival of non-jewish humanity, robbed souls by interruption of the transmission
of blood. In Nazism the soul is in the blood. The soul is
preserved after the ego dies, and because it is, the race is
preserved.
The doctrine of blood is false because it is wholly a distortion of the order of being. The source of human freedom is not the absence of the divine and its replace. men! by a Nazi or a communist community. It is hardly a
coincidence that both Hitler and Marx considered the
elimination of jews and judaism to be a condition for the
WINTER 1982
�establishment of their projects. 72 In both cases the extinguishment of the divine in the name of a man-made creation of freedom and of human being is critical. As for the
racist aspect of Nazism (and for the scientific and class
aspects of communism), they are perhaps best described
as opiates for the proletariat and the intelligentsia respectively.
The blood is then the soul made matter, an absurd idea.
The characteristic of the soul is immortality. What can it
mean to proclaim that the soul is not spiritual or that
some thing, perishable by definition, is immortal? What
aspect of a person does not perish? The answer, embodied
in the doctrine of the blood is: that aspect of a person
which is neither an ego nor a soul. Of course there is no
such thing. But what did Hitler think this thing was? Of
course he supposed it was freedom. The masses shall enter into the service of freedom once they understand that
the Jew intends the "enslavement, and with it the destruc·
tion, of all non-Jewish peoples."73 Blood is the oneness of
soul of the German people. Oneness will come about by
the destruction of vanity or egotism, the opposite of
oneness.
Egotism must be destroyed. But how is this possible?
By destroying the people of egotism. This is the people
that hides behind a false, unenlightened doctrine of elec·
tion and the divine as One. This people, the representa·
tive of the false God of spirit, and therefore the enemy of
oneness or the German people, is the Jews. "The Jew is
the mortal enemy of our people," said Hitler, because
"the Jew is ... nothing but pure egoism."74 And thus this
destruction of Jews is part of the means for liberation,
namely work. The people become one as they give over
their egos to the community. The doctrine that man is
one is egalitarianism.
"Egalitarianism," said Erich Fromm, uis not sameness
but oneness."75 Hitler's doctrine is egalitarian in the deep-
est and purest modern sense. As such, Nazism is the purest distillation of modernity. When Hitler proclaims that
"the Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan" because only the Aryan is willing to give his "life for the exis·
tence of the community," he intends to be taken at his
word. 76 Giving up one's life for the community calls for
the relinquishment of ego. The means of doing so is of
course not prayer. Everyone knows, Hitler said, "a nation
cannot be freed by prayer." 77 Rather the way to freedom
is work. Work creates oneness in the process of effacing
egos. Work "establish[es] the equality of all in the moment
when every individual endeavors to do the best in his field
.... It is on this that the evaluation of man must rest, and
not on the reward." 78 Work makes free. Hitler promises
freedom from the ego, that is, from death, from anxiety,
by promising immortality in this world. This is the mean·
ing of Hitler's doctrine of the blood. It is the foundation of
the "everlasting [German] people." 79
It is correct to say, with Fackenheim, that Hitler is no
emperor-god; nor are the Yolk a worshipping community.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
It is Germanity in its immortalizing sacrifice of egos that
is God or one. This is the everlasting German people in
whose name Hitler professed to speak. The Jews, who are
said to live on behalf of an everlasting God, the God who
is one because man and all things are many, are the obvi·
ous spiritual power to be destroyed.
Hitler's idolatry is unmistakable. It reflects a disordering
of the relationship of the One and the many. Man is en·
joined, in the name of salvation, to leave his place in the
metaxy that he may assume full freedom. In the language
of political science Hitler's Melian exodus is fascist or
right-wing. Here, only power counts because all values are
equal, making law the rule of the stronger. Man is an animal. To this, Hitler's obvious or familiar side, is added the
other more subtle and as it were saintlier side. This is the
idolatry of gnosticism whereby men singly or together
take God into themselves or into their ideals.
Hitler's case suggests that modern idolatry cannot fail
to be both Melian and gnostic. We do not often, however,
credit Hitler's gnosticism or realize the Melian aspects of
gnostic or liberal idealism when it is expressed in the seductive language of opposition to Melian realism. The position of Judaism is obviously not the only representative
of the principles idolatry must oppose. It has long, however, been symbolic of all the enemies of idolatry. The hatred of Judaism is an aspect of modern if not all Western
idolatry, that is, of the impulse arising from the horror of
existence and the desire to leave the condition of the
metaxy. Consider the case of Jean Sartre, whose philosophy is the most recent great philosophy considered by
Fackenheim.
Sartre is the outstanding figure of left-wing humanistic
atheism. His insensitivity for Judaism, together with his
well-known sympathy for persecuted Jews, troubles Fack·
enheim. It may well be the case, Fackenheim thinks, that
Sartre's position is the product of his view that "an individual's freedom is ... destroyed by a divine Other," i.e.,
by God.BD But Fackenheim does not sufficiently consider
the effect the doctrine of freedom works upon Judaism.
Sartre' s view of freedom is idolatrous. It depends on the
replacement of the One with freedom. But this freedom,
gnostic in form, is not theoretically stagnant. It leads
somewhere. It leads to Melian exodus, that is, it permits
Sartre to say that he does not know if anti-Semitism is
"wrong or right" in socialist countries. 81 But Sartre would
know if racism is wrong or right. Is this another "philosophical failure" as in Heidegger's case?
The process we find in Hitler-from self-conscious Melian exodus to an unintended gnostic exodus imposed upon
him by the core of his project or the replacement of the
divine with the human-we also find in Sartre. In Sartre,
however, the order of exodus is reversed. Sartre's replacement of God with freedom is ultimately an assault upon
theory or reason; it is the idolatry we have discovered in
Hitler which does not distinguish reality from history or
the struggle for power. Accordingly Sartre must ultimately
41
�look to history, as had Hegel and Marx, as the source of
human reason. The individual's freedom then becomes a
matter of struggle against history in the manner of neo·
Kantians or Emersonians who look to the vanishing of
swine and madhouses brought about by an impulse of
spirit or will. But this is the same gnostic denouement into
which a crude reasoner such as Hitler evidently stumbled.
Hitler is not a bastard-child of the Enlightenment, only a
relatively childish enlightener. His erstwhile opponents,
those who have trivialized his deeds, are less childish but
not less idolatrous.
Trivialization of the Holocaust is the failure to consider
Nazism idolatrous. This failure is due to the implication
of the trivialization of the Holocaust in the sources of idolatry. Trivialization of the Holocaust accords what Fackenheim suggests is a posthumous victory to Nazism. 82
The Holocaust, according to two Jewish students of the
subject, is an example, unique in its excess, of how men
mistakenly put obedience above other, better traits. Seeking a model or prototype of this human failing in Western
civilization the authors hit upon the Akedah, the binding
of Isaac by Abraham, his father. Their reasoning is as
follows:
[In] the Judea-Christian tradition ... wrongdoing is utterly
clear . .. [It] is unauthorized pleasure. It is also very clear that
hardly anywhere in this tradition is there any story or statement to the effect that 'Thou shalt not obey legal orders from
superiors if they seem [sic?] atrocious to you.' Abraham, who
was prepared to obey the directive to murder his son Isaac as
a demonstration of his faith in the superior being Jaweh, is
not condemned for his blind obedience, but rather held up as
exemplary. 83
It is Abraham, the first Jew and the man who defied all
other men on earth in proclaiming God as the measure of
all things, who is here said to be the cause of the Holocaust. In other words, the cause of the Holocaust is
Judaism. Here, to be sure, is a literal trivialization of the
Holocaust. Obedience to Hitler by German Nazis is
counted the equivalent of obedience to God by Abraham
(and Isaac). It is clear the authors, Kren and Rappoport,
consider obedience to God or to Hitler the same because
honest rationality calls upon social scientists to regard all
objects of valuation as equal. The authors, as we say, do
not believe in God. But we have already suggested the
source of this atheism is not a theological investigation. It
is an opinion regarding theory, or rather the supposed
necessary limit upon theory imposed by the effort to insure man's freedom.
Harry Neumann has called social science of this type
modern Epicureanism because it seeks tranquility of mind
on the principle that Hfreedom from pain is man's summum bonum." If all ends are equal, if "no favoritism would
be shown to any particular claim," any suggestion of superiority or of divine election constitutes an impertinence, a
threat to science and peace. The equation of obedience to
God and to Hitler presupposes the equality of ends. But is
42
not knowledge of the "superhuman vantage point" reserved to God? This is the vantage point assumed by modern Epicureans who insist that "philosophy's quest to the
answer of the question of the good life is over." The good
life is freedom from pain and the good is pleasure. For this
reason modern Epicureans consider religion evil and
threatening. Religion cannot promise freedom from pain
as the equivalent of the good. Religion does not claim that
all ends are equal. In this religion and philosophy are together the enemies of "modern Epicureanism's final solution. " 84
In saying that Abraham was a model of "blind obedience" that should be despised, Kren and Rappoport wish
plainly to indict Judea-Christian civilization as the source
of the Holocaust. Above all, Judaism is the source of the
Holocaust.
The case of Abraham, the first Jew and the father of
Judaism, is undoubtedly pertinent to the subjects of obedience and idolatry. Abraham was the son of Terach, an
idol maker. Obedient to God, he cast his father's idols into
the fire. But Abraham was not a rebellious or whimsical
son. Hitler and Rimmler were obedient only to whim, to
themselves, and they cast people into furnaces. In other
words, the Nazis proceeded on the principle that Kren
and Rappoport believe to be the great truth after the
Holocaust, that "there is no morality per se, because there
is no immutable religious or legal standard for human behavior."85 Precisely the Nazis confounded pleasure, authorized or not, with the good. Abraham understood the
good to be distinct from pleasure, from his whim, because
he did not suppose he possessed divine knowledge to
regard all claims as equal. In recognizing reason he recognized its source. For this reason he rejected his father's
unreason or idolatry.
Abraham's obedience to God was disobedience to the
atrocious rule of men. More important, Abraham defied
Nimrod, the first "mighty man upon the earth ... a crafty
hero before God."86 The significance of Abraham's defiance of Nimrod could not be greater for an understanding
of idolatry. Nimrod is the founder of political idolatry, the
first to suppress men lefneh hashem, in God's name. Nimrod claimed the superhuman vantage point as his own.
Terach brought the idol-hating Abraham to Nimrod, but
Abraham did not recant. Nimrod, indulging an impulse
evidently natural to political idolators-it was of course to
become Hitler's trademark-cast Abraham into the fiery
furnace. But Abraham survived. Abraham is the founding
symbol, also in fire, that God and not man is the measure
of all things. Like the burning bush, Abraham becomes a
sign of the One that does not perish. But Abraham's
brother, Haran, supposing Abraham's survival demonstrated Abraham was now the new king, followed him into
the fire and, of course, he died.
Naturally, Judaism survived the burning of Jews by Hitler. Hitler, like Nimrod, was mistaken in thinking the soul
is a thing. Hitler was also mistaken in thinking man is a
god who can defy the order of being and assume the suWINTER 1982
�perhuman vantage point. As for the, trivialization of the
Holocaust, its source is the incapacity to distinguish the
blind obedience of Haran from Abraham's obedience.
Haran, unlike Abraham, obeyed any authority indiscrim·
inately, because he held that there is no morality per se.
l. Adolf Hi tie<, Mein Kampf, New York, Houghton Mifflin [1925, 1927],
1939, 221.
2. Emil Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought, New York 1973.
3. See, for example, Edward Alexander, "Stealing the Holocaust," Midstream, November, 1980, 46-50.
4. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Yehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the
Modern World: A Documentary History, New York 1980, vii.
5. Dorothy Thompson, "A Review of Mein Kampf' in Hitler, Mein
Kampf, ii.
6. Allan Bloom, "The Study of Texts," in Melvin Richter, ed., Political
Theory and Political Education, Princeton 1980, 122.
7. Werner Maser, Hitler's Mein Kampf: an Analysis, London 1970, 11.
8. Mein Kampf, 223.
9. Mein Kampf, 221.
10. Mein Kampf, 155.
11. Mein Kampf, 221.
12. Mein Kampf, 155-56.
13. Fackenheim, Encounters, 189.
14. Fackenheim, Encounters, 175.
15. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
16. Fackenheim, Encounters, 173.
17. Quoted in Fackenheim, Encounters, 178.
18. Fackenheim, Encounters, 179.
19. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217.
20. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
21. Fackenheim, Encounters, 187.
22. Fackenheim, Encounters, 194.
23. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
24. Fackenheirn, Encounters, 196.
25. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
26. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190-91.
27. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
28. Fackenheim, Encounters, 192.
29. Fackenheim, Encounters, 197, 187.
30. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191, 194.
31. Fackenheim, Encounters, 217, 223.
32. Karl LOwith, Nature, History, and Existentialism, Evanston, Illinois
1966, 10.
33. Fackenheim, Encounters, 191.
34. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, New York 1969, 50.
35. Fackenheim, Encounters, 190.
36. Leo Strauss, "What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political
Philosophy and Other Studies, Glencoe, Illinois 1959,9-55.
37. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 54.
38. Aristotle, Metd.physics l072a30.
39. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Baton Rouge 1974, 188-190.
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Walter Kaufman,
ed., The Portable Nietzsche New York 1960, 243.
41. Kaufman, Nietzsche, 225.
42. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago 1953, 35-80.
43. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
44. Strauss, Natural Right, 44.
45. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
46. Strauss, Natural Right, 46.
47. I. Husik, "Hellenism and Judaism," Philosophical Essays, Oxford
1952, 13.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
48. Harry Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy? Jewish Alternatives to
Modern Epicureanism," The Journal of Value Inquiry, 1977, 23.
49. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182, 181.
50. Eugene Miller, ''Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry," The
American Political Science Review, 66 1972, 796-817.
51. Bloom, "The Study of Texts," 122.
52. Exodus, 32:4.
53. Daniel, 4:25.
54. Fackenheim, Encounters, 196.
55. Neumann, "Torah or Philosophy?" 23.
56. Quoted in Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182. "Of the gods we be·
lieve, and of men we know, that by a necessity of nature they rule wher·
ever they can. We neither made this law nor were the first to act on it;
we found it to exist before us _and we shall leave it to exist forever after
us; we only make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, if you
were as strong as we are, would act as we do."
57. Alan Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," in Howard Fertig
ed., The Third Reich, New York 1975, 352.
58. Adolf Hitler, Speech, 13 April 1923; Adolf Hitler, Speech, 2 April
1928, quoted in Bullock, "The Political Ideas of Adolf Hitler," 352.
59. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
60. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 182.
61. Mein Kampf, 221.
62. Mein Kampf, 442, 217.
63. Mein Kampf, 288-89.
64. Mein Kampf, 841, 195.
65. Adolf Hitler, Speech 1932, cited in Mein Kampf, 402n6.
66. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago 1952, 107ff.
67. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, Philadelphia
1870. Reprint edition titled, Strange Cults and Utopias of Nineteenth
Century America, New York 1966, vii, 626.
68. Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death, New York 1961, 155.
69. Donatien A. F. de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom, Paris 1795, in
Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, eds., The Marquis de Sade, the
Complete Justine Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, New
York 1965, 330-1, 333.
70. Fackenheim, Encounters, 188.
71. Genesis, 9:4, 5.
72. "[T]he emancipation of society from Judaism" is equivalent to the
emancipation of man from exchange, "the bill of exchange [being] ...
the real god of the Jew." Because "Judaism attains its apogee [and its
"universal dominance"] with the perfection of civil society," the destruction of Judaism is equivalent to and necessary for the realm of free·
dam or the abolition of civil society. Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Ques·
tion" in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx Early Writings, New York 1964,
40, 37, 38. Note the remarks of Erich Fromm on this topic in the forward
to this volume, iv-v.
73. Mein Kampf, 442.
74. Mein Kampf, 416, 487.
75. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, New York 1956, 15.
76. Mein Kampf, 410,412.
77. Mein Kampf, 988.
78. Mein Kampf, 647.
79. AdOlf Hitler, Speech 26 March 1936 in N. H. Baynes, ed., The
Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April, 1922-August, 1939, 2 vo1s. New York
1969, II, 1317.
80. Fackenhdm, Encounters, 209.
81. Fackenheim, Encounters, 211.
82. Fackenheim, Encounters, 207.
83. George M. K:ren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis
of Human Behavior, New York 1980, 141.
84. Neumann, "Toiah or Philosophy?" 17, 20.
85. Kren and Rappoport, The Holocaust, 142.
86. Genesis, 10:8-9.
43
�·Proof and Pascal
Brother Robert Smith
To F. H. and to my friends just off Bambury Road
In his lecture, "Power and Grace," Douglas Allanbrook
said of Pascal:
One final question: what does Pascal's attitude toward
proof have to do with him personally, with Pascal as a
man?
For both Thrasymachus and Pascal, however, the voices of
power and persuasion are the only thinkable ways of talking
about politics. Reasoning about politics with any purity of discourse is foolishness. In reading over this pensee [103], most of
you have probably been struck by the lack of anything that
could be called . .. dialectic . .. the complete absence of premises . .. Pascal seldom argues: he states persuasively what is to
him the case. 1
Allanbrook may have been flattering us. When we hear
Pascal speak we may often be so dazzled by his epigrams,
his examples, and his similes that we do not think to ask
whether he is talking reasonably. It might not occur to us
that one example does not necessarily prove a general
statement or that his lack of dialectic is consciously antiphilosophical.
.
.
In his lecture, Allanbrook made good hts charges agamst
Pascal: that Pascal says we have no power to discover justice that according to Pascal we cannot know the differenc~ between a just and an unjust action, and that justice
has no power in this world.
These are shocking charges. They ought to make us ask
questions about Pascal himself. Did he reject argument
on all matters? Not only about politics, but about all that
is important in our lives? Why? What substitute for reasoning, for dialectical inquiry and proof dtd he propose?
How does Pascal proceed in a typical section of the Pensees? Does he argue? What is his attitude toward dialectics, toward philosophical inquiry in the tradition of Plato
and Aristotle, or theology, as practiced by St. Augustine
and St. Thomas? Does Pascal argue about philosophy and
theology or does he "state persuasively what is to him the
case" and. no more?
A second consideration. Aside from his practice in the
Pensees, what does Pascal think of proof itself? Does he
think it impossible? If it is possible, when is it so?
A tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis, Brother Robert Smith professed membership in the Order of Christian Brothers in 1939.
A lecture read at Annapolis on October 30, 1981.
44
1 Happiness
How can Pascal set out to defend the Christian religion
without resort to argument? He says he intends to show
that religion is not contrary to reason, to make it attractive, to make good men wish it were true, and, fmally, to
show that it is true. Wh at d o " sh ow, " " rnake, " an d "' "
ts
mean to him?
First a few remarks on the order, or lack of it, in Pascal's
text. Until forty years ago, when the work of a man named
Lafuma appeared, editors had arranged Pascal's thoughts
at their discretion. Lafuma showed that Pascal had tentatively chosen some thoughts for a work, an Apology for the
Christian Religion, for which the Pensees are only the
working notes. Pascal decided on twenty-seven numbered
headings like Order, Beginning, Conclusion. Not quite
chapters, they appear to be divisions of a whole work.
With his thoughts written out helter-skelter on large foho
sheets, he selected those that related to his division headings, strung them together with needle and thread, and
placed them in packets, each packet with a headmg. Lafuma was the first to realize the significance of these arrangements, especially the titles and needlework. Oth~r
arguments have since been advanced to conflfm Lafum~ s
view that Pascal selected about one th!rd of the matenal
included in what we know as the Pensees for his projected
work.
I have chosen to examine Section Ten of those thoughts
selected from the Pensees. It is called The Soverign Good. I
have picked it because it provides a good ~xample of Pascal's last, provisional arrangement, and gives a clear picture of his procedure:
The sovereign good. Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you.
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics) finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague! (147)
WINTIR 1982
�Second part. Man without faith can know neither true good
nor justice.
'
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is
the same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Yet for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming. All men
complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old, young,
strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts. But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not
some subtle difference, and that is what makes us expect that
our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they
were last time. So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
dence Pascal would have preferred this order. Number 148
should perhaps precede 147 because 148 begins with a
general statement of Pascal's point in this section: "Man
without faith can know neither true good nor justice."
This expression, "without faith," reminds us of the place
of Section Ten in the Apology. In saying, "Man without
faith," so absolutely, so uncompromisingly, without any
nuance or admission, Pascal runs head-long against a philosophical and theological tradition that he knows and refuses to follow. He does not turn to Aristotle, who was
known to the men around him, or to St. Thomas, whom
he had read selectively, or even to St. Augustine, who says
that the philosophical writings of the ancients, especially
those of Cicero, helped him on the way to his conversion
in the garden. (St. Augustine, for example, thanks Cicero's
lost work, Hortensius, for his turn to the search for wisdom
instead of the pursuit of political and financial success.)
Unlike Aristotle, who had a great deal to say about happi·
ness in the Ethics, and even defined it, Pascal does not
refer to human experience for his understanding of happiness. Instead, he says, "Man without faith can know
neither true good nor justice."
Pascal expects his reader first to despair of finding guidance by his reason. He hopes then he will be receptive to
the religious alternative.
The first sentence in the development of Section Ten
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim
but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all
that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries
in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things
that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are,
though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled
only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words,
by God himself.
reads:
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction,
although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to
nature.
How do we react when we hear this sentence? Pascal
expects us to agree. Very likely he is not mistaken, for the
contrary is too unlikely.
Pascal, however, does not even offer the weak argument that the contrary is too unlikely. He expects us to
agree without question, and he is willing to proceed with
that unexamined assent.
Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.
has not been discussed. We think we know well enough
Others again, who have indeed come closer to it, have found
it impossible that this universal good, desired by all men,
should lie in any of the particular objects which can only be
possessed by one individual and which, once shared, cause
their possessors more grief over the part they lack than satisfaction over the part they enjoy as their own. They have realized that the true good must be such that it may be possessed
by all men at once without diminution or envy, and that no
one should be able to lose it against his will. Their reason is
that this desire is natural to man, since all men inevitably feel
it, and man cannot be without it, and they therefore conclude ... (148f
A word on the numbering of the thoughts within the
sections. In Section Ten, Lafuma, relying only on his
judgement, put pensee 147 before 148. There is no eviTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
All men seek happiness.
We are not aware that the crucial term, "happiness,"
what the sentence, "All men seek happiness," means, and
that is all Pascal needs. In contrast, Aristotle, who began
his discussion of happiness in the Ethics with just such an
unexamined use of the word, devotes the whole of Ethics
I and most of X to clarifying what the word means.
Section Ten continues:
All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However
different the means they may employ, they all strive towards
this goal. The reason some go to war and some do not is the
same desire in both, but interpreted in two different ways.
The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is
the motive of every act of every man, including those who go
and hang themselves.
Something extraordinary is happening in these sentences. Pascal has got us to agree that "happiness" applies
indiscriminately to anything that man seeks. We have
45
�agreed that, to use his example, there is no difference between leading a charge and leading a peace march.
Had we realized how Pascal was using the term, most of
us would have questioned whether happiness in that
vague sense is the goal of all man's efforts. Most of us
think "happiness" is a term with many complex meanings. We think that what we are doing now is better or
worse, more or less conducive to happiness, than what we
were doing, say, two years ago. We think there are kinds
and degrees of happiness.
Pascal has made us accept uncritically an apparently obvious statement containing a term whose meaning seems
equally obvious. With the acceptance of that statement,
we have been led to agree that all the things we strive for
are the same. Am I characterizing Pascal fairly?
Already wary of the consequences of our uncritical acceptance of the obvious, we will be even more suspicious
of what follows:
Yet, for very many years no one without faith has ever reached
the goal at which everyone is continually aiming.
Once more, we have a general statement. This statement is not, however, offered without discussion. We are
asked to accept it because there are indications in our experience that it is true:
All men complain: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old,
young, strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every
country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.
The opening sentence seems plausible because we know
that we all complain, and so we cannot imagine anyone
else not complaining. In that case, he would be, well, odd.
No, everyone complains. A parade of characters passes
through our imagination-all complaining as we imagine
them. So we agree.
Without protest, we are accepting a new definition of
happiness. Happiness now means "something that satisfies
us completely." Only when happiness means complete
satisfaction does our complaining show that no one has
reached happiness without faith. Because all men, including ourselves, complain, they cannot be. completely satisfied, i.e. happy. Everything comes out so clearly and with
such assurance that we agree. No one, including ourselves,
is happy. But, you will agree, Pascal's procedure does not
amount to an argument.
Tacitly and guardedly, Pascal admits that his conclusion
is open to question:
A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change,
really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining
the good by our own efforts.
By saying, "really ought to convince us," Pascal protests
too much. He raises the possibility that we have not been
convinced that we are incapable of attaining the good by
our own efforts. Why do we all keep scurrying about so
46
much when we really ought to know that all our efforts
are doomed to failure?
But example teaches us very little. No two examples are so exactly alike that there is not some subtle difference, and that is
what makes us expect that our expectations will not be disappointed this time as they were last time.
Pascal says we keep scurrying about because we think
that the future will be different. We think that we will be
happy next time because then, everything will turn our
way, to our complete satisfaction. We think this because
we want to, not because we are convinced by proof.
Pascal's argument that mere reason leads to despair
would be conclusive if our failure to be completely satisfied was the same thing as complete misery. Then we
would not get out of bed in the morning. In fact, though,
we do get some satisfaction out of writing our essays, such
as they are, and hope to write better ones. There is more
than a "subtle difference" between failing to be completely satisfied and suffering complete misery. We are
not fools to keep on hoping to improve our situation. A
more modest definition of happiness might make us accept some complaint. Even the chance to complain may
occasion a certain happiness.
I know this may sound unfair to Pascal. I am not without question granting him his definition, and so I lead you
to doubt his word. Pascal would not be at all surprised by
what we have done, nor would he think us guilty of bad
manners. I am pointing out that Pascal has, without saying so, substituted a definition of happiness derived from
faith for one derived from ordinary experience. A definition from faith, which restricts happiness to the complete
and unqualified happiness that comes from seeing God
face to face, supports his argument and will find acceptance among his readers if they are believing, though nonpracticing, Christians. The Apology was, in fact, addressed
to such Christians.
So, while the present never satisfies us, experience deceives
us, and leads us on from one misfortune to another until death
comes as the ultimate and eternal climax.
A man without a conventional religious upbringing
would be unprepared for Pascal's assertions that "the
present never satisifies us" and "experience deceives us"
or Hleads us on from one misfortune to another." He would
be even more unprepared for the assertion that death is
the "ultimate and eternal climax." This is the language of
sermons heard in childhood. It is useful for evoking sentiments felt then. Someone who has these sentiments to recall will follow the whole resounding periodic sentence in
the way Pascal intends. Someone who has not been exposed to religious oratory is not so likely to follow it
unhesitatingly.
I am saying that this enthusiastic tone will seem sincere
and justified to a reader who can bring to the text religious
WINTER 1982
�associations from childhood. Those qf us who have a deep
religious background, strengthened by childhood memories, will be carried along by Pascal's prose to his conclu-
do the things we did when we believed, the responses will
follow, revived by the automatism of habit:
sion: the present never satisfies us, experience deceives us
For we must make no mistake about ourselves: we are as
much automaton as mind . .. habit provides the strongest
proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the autom-
with its endless variety and promise of something better,
we are led from failure to failure until lastly, our life ends
in a crash-the last resounding crash-death.
The text we have been studying is a powerful piece of
rhetoric, worthy of a sermon in the grand tradition, be·
cause, like all successful oratory, it ties the speaker's mes·
sage to sympathies dormant in the hearer's memory. Like
a speech in a dramatic production that makes a character
come to life, Pascar s prose succeeds in evoking our own
experience. Racine realized this when, smarting under
Pascal's boutade that a good playwright was as bad as a
public poisoner, he told the authorities at Port-Royal that
their darling Pascal was himself a dramatist in the Provin·
cia! Letters.
Pascal, in fact, has been practicing oratorical art. He be·
gan with something that any reader could accept without
reflection. He went on to talk about our futile search for
happiness. Those readers whose experience confirms
what they read, believe him because they find the truth of
his words in themselves, just as Pascal claimed to find the
truth of Montaigne' s words in his own, not Montaigne' s,
experience.
Pascal's discourse is, then, limited to those who have
had a conventional religious upbringing in childhood. His
discourse is like a discussion among a closed circle of
friends who agree on what is desirable but differ as to how
to achieve it.
To get his hearers to turn towards God, Pascal relies on
reviving deeply ingrained beliefs dormant in their memo·
ries. When he began the Pensees, he must have thought of
making the Apology a series of letters like the Provincial
Letters:
A letter of exhortation to a friend, to induce him to seek. He
will reply: 'But what good will it do me? Nothing comes of it.'
... The answer to that is 'the Machine.' (5)
After the letter urging men to seek God, write the letter about
removing obstacles, that is the argument about the Machine
... (11)
What does he mean by the "Machine?" It is the response
that arises in us when we see something that once moved
us deeply, in a new context:
The fact that kings are habitually seen in the company of
guards, drums, officers, and all the things which prompt automatic responses of respect and fear has the result that, when
they are sometimes alone . .. their features are enough to strike
respect and fear into their subjects ... (25)
The "Machine" also helps to recall dormant religious
sentiments. We who once actively believed can again experience the responses we made when we believed. If we
TilE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
aton which leads the mind unconsciously along with it. (821)
In addressing this audience of those who once strongly
believed, Pascal defines happiness as the result of a direct
vision of a personal God, whom we know even as we are
known:
What else does this craving for happiness . .. proclaim but
that there was once in man a true happiness . .. an infinite
abyss which can be filled only ... by God himself. (148)
Does Pascal believe this reliance on faith is our only
hope for knowing anything about happiness? Cannot we,
with our reason, our good sense, explore experience and
discover something worthwhile? Does Pascal go so far as
to reject the possibility that man can acquire for himself a
high .and noble happiness? He does.
Debate about the sovereign good.
That you may be content with yourself and the good things innate in you. (147)3
The quotation is from Seneca and it is given so that
Pascal can immediately reject it:
There is some contradiction, because they [the Stoics] finally
advise suicide. Oh, how happy is a life we throw off like the
plague!
With this sarcastic comment, Pascal dismisses Seneca
and all others who find in man's nature a genuine good
capable of being the basis for a moral life. Man, in his fallen nature, cannot find any of the good things that Seneca
attributes to him.
God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him
it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to
take his place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages,
leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war,
famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man
is capable of seeing it in anything . ..
Pascal does not think that we can ever come to know
what is best by reasoning about our own nature or the
things around us. We have not succeeded in rising to that
knowledge and we never will.
2 Proof
From Section Ten, a single, though typical, section of
the Pensees, we have gotten some idea of the Pascal's conception of the limitations of philosophical inquiry. We will
be more confident we know his mind if we look at another
47
�work where he discusses proof and qur ability to produce
it. In a short essay called, On the Geometrical Art, he says:
To show how to make unbeatable proofs . .. all we have to do
is to explain the method that geometry uses, for geometry
teaches it perfectly by example.4
[Attempts to clarify these truths] confuse everything, and de-
A few lines further he says:
What goes beyond geometry, is beyond
ness because such knowledge cannot come to the level of
speech. Geometry falls short of the highest method of
proof.
.
We should not try to clarify these first truths, known
from the heart. Attempts to clarify these truths bring obscurity and disagreement. We are better off without them:
us.5
stroying all order and light, destroy themselves and get lost in
inextricable difficulty.8
We know the truth not only through our reason but also
[Geometry] does not define any of these things: space, time,
movement, number, equality, nor large numbers of similar
thirigs, because these terms naturally designate the things
which they signify for anyone who knows the language . .. and
any clarification which one might wish to bring to them will
bring more obscurity than instruction.9
through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first
principles ... like space, time, motion, number .. it is on such
knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason
The passage immediately following shows the limits of
philosophical discourse, in Pascal's conception:
Reason cannot go beyond geometry, the model of perfect reasoning. How does geometry serve as a model for
reasoning? In the Pensees we read:
has to depend and base all its argument The heart feels that
there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite
series of numbers, and reason goes on to demonstrate that
there are no two square numbers of which one is double the
other. Principles are felt, propositions proved, and both with
For there is nothing weaker than the discourse of those who
wish to define these primitive words. What necessity is there
for explaining the word "man?" What advantage did Plato
think he was offering us in saying that man is a featherless
certainty though by different means. (110)
biped? As if the idea which I have naturally and which I can-
Pascal speaks of knowledge we have through the heart
as sentiment (751), from sentir, "to feel," "to sense." The
connection is more than verbal. Through the heart we
have knowledge that is certain and cannot be doubted
but, like our knowledge of "green" or "soft," cannot be
expressed.
Geometrical reasoning is perfect because it begins in
the knowledge of the heart:
Geometry only sustains things that are clear and unchanging
through natural reason. That is why geometry is perfectly
true, since nature supports it where reasoning fails. This
order, the most perfect on the human level, consists not in defining everything or demonstrating nothing, but in remaining
on the middle ground of not defining things that are clear and
understood by all men, and of not defining all others, of not
proving what is known by all men, of demonstrating all
others.
Like Pascal's favorite theologian, St. Augustine, we
know what time is as long as we do not try to say what it is.
We know what time is because our heart tells us what it is.
When we try to clarify what is already clear in its own way,
we only add confusion. Nothing that we know is clearer to
us than time or number. Time and number are examples
of first known truths, which cannot be clarified:
Geometry, when it has arrived at the first known truths, stops
there and asks that they be granted, since it has nothing more
clear from which to prove them.?
The first known truths are geometry's strength and its
weakness. They are its strength because they give geometry a universally agreed starting point. They are its weak-
48
not express were not more exact and more sure than the one
he has given me in his useless and even ridiculous example,
since a man does not lose his humanity by losing his two legs
and a capon does not gain humanity by having its feathers
removed. 10
In a moment of euphoria, Pascal said that to be a
geometer is the most beautiful profession in the world.
Geometry, however, cannot define its starting points. Pascal exalts geometry at the same time that he casts doubt
on other inquiries that attempt to define their starting
points. Geometry is the best thing man can do on his own.
In contrast, Plato believed that philosophy should begin
with the study of "primitive words" such as space, time,
and equality. He urged apprentice philosophers to start by
inquiring into the greatness, the smallness, and the equality of their fingers.
Just as when he held that the true good could only be
found in faith, Pascal by refusing to inquire into the nature of space, time, and equality rejects much of the work
of philosophers before and after him.
But there is a more serious obstacle to achieving a full
grasp of the world through geometry. In its three branches
~movement, number, and space-geometry lies between
the infinitely great and the infinitely small:
Consequently . .. [the three branches] are all contained between nothingness and the infinitely great . .. and they are infinitely removed from either of these extremes. 11
Man is not to conceive of these two infinities but to admire them. Their contemplation will keep man from making any rash statements about the whole of the universe
or the combination of its parts. The world is a sphere
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
WINTER 1982
�nowhere. Our discourse can start with the inexpressible
data of the heart, but these do not correspond to any starting point in the universe. Worrying ab,aut whether Copernicus is right makes no sense. We will never have a sense
of the whole, we can have no hope of reaching an end, a
limit. We must remain in an unpretentious middleness. At
no stage of our intellectual journey are we any further
along than when we started.
Descartes is right in thinking that things are put together out of matter and motion, but when he hopes to
construct in thought a world so like the one God made
that one cannot tell the difference between the two, the
two infinites will mock him.
Descartes useless and uncertain. (887)
Because they failed to contemplate these two infinities, men
have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were
some proportion between themselves and her. (199)
We have no starting point, no fulcrum for the lever that
is supposed to move the world: the infinities " ... meet in
God and in God alone."
Geometry, the best of the sciences, cannot help us say
where we are. Even if it could:
... we do not think the whole of . .. [geometry} is worth one
hour of trouble. (84)
Remember, though, that geometry, despite these limitations, " ... alone observes the true method, while all
other discourses are by natural necessity in some sort of
confusion. 12
3 Morality and Politics
What does Pascal think about other forms of discourse,
discourse which, because it is beyond geometry, is also beyond us?
Pascal thinks there are only two domains in which men
aspire to excellence: science, on the one hand, and moral~
ity and politics on the other. He thinks we cannot succeed
in either domain because each demands that we obtain
the unattainable, namely, a comprehensive grasp of the
world.
We have, in a preliminary way, seen how little Pascal
thinks of our ability to see what is good. Because of this inability, we cannot establish moral order in our lives. Without faith, we have no reason to say that incest is inferior to
anything else that attracts men. Without grace, selfishness
is our ultimate guide.
In Allanbrook's lecture, we meditated on our inability
to discover what justice is and our consequent inability to
establish any political order. We are living in an insane
asylum, Pascal says. How could Plato or Aristotle, in the
Laws or the Politics, pretend to show us just ways of living
in society? They had no such intention. They were not serious when they wrote those books. They knew enough of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
the world to see that laughing with friends is our only serious occupation:
... When [Plato and Aristotle] amused themselves by composing their Laws and Politics, they did it for fun. It was the
least philosophical and least serious part of their lives: the
most philosophical part was living simply and without fuss.
If they wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a
madhouse. (533)
Since we live in an insane asylum, it might be useful to
ask our fellow inmates to treat one another less cruelly:
One cannot ask the insane to discover justice.
If we leave the matter there, you may wish to dismiss
Pascal as a misanthrope. It is fairer to try once more to see
things as he sees them before we bid him farewell. Let us
look at a passage where he describes the real difficulties of
any talk about human authority. A present-day writer on
Pascal says that the following passage is a paradigm of the
insuperable difficulties that Pascal thought stand in the
way of not only political, but of all discourseY
... Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the
half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of
chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them,
not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper
motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise
them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor
them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but
perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a
still higher light.
So opinions swing back and forth, from pro to con, according
to one's lights. (90)
Pascal's statement here is anti-Cartesian. Descartes
held that if we could not persuade others of our meaning,
we did not know what we were talking about. Pascal says
we cannot persuade others unless they share our starting
point in discourse. Not normally transmitted by one
speaker to another, the starting point is given from nature, as in geometry, or by custom, or by private experi~
ence, or by faith.
Anybody who does not see the wider bearing of the passage we are about to study, might dismiss it as a piece of
baroque rhetoric, an example of Jansenist obsession with
the Fall of Man. But Pascal means what he says, in this instance, to apply to all human discourse.
For Pascal, the pattern of all knowledge about matters
moral or religious is illumination from above, and no dis~
course can be successful without it. With illumination
from above, lesser truths are made valid. Without it, they
are misleading.
Pascal has listed five successive opinions:
l. Ordinary people honor those who are highly born.
In an earlier pensee, he tells us the dark grounds for this
honor:
49
�I am supposed not to honor a man dressed in brocade and at-
tended by seven or eight lackeys. Why! He will have me
thrashed if I do not bow to him. (89)
Our ordinary man thinks as he does because he fears
the strong arms and stout sticks of the lackeys who follow
their expensively dressed master. Don Giovanni frightens
Leporello into submission by reminding him that stout
thugs ready to use their whips will punish his failure to
obey.
2.... the half-clever ones despise them [the highly born], say·
ing that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit.
Pascal himself takes this view when he asks whether
sailors would allow someone to direct a ship at sea merely
because he was the first-born son of some nobleman.
Birth is not enough to determine the command of a ship.
Why should it be accepted for the rule of a country?
3. Really clever people honor them, not for the same reason
as ordinary people, but for deeper motives.
Pascal tells us their motives. Reason cannot discover
any universally accepted sign of legitimacy apart from custom or bring forth any laws that all men will think are just.
As soon as people begin to dispute about who should rule
them or whether the commands of the rulers are just,
there will be the greatest political evil-civil war. A really
clever man will know that we can never be sure about
right or wrong and that convention only determines who
rules us, president, king, parliament. The clever man will
say we should leave well enough alone because things will
only get worse through civil war. Protest against injustice
arouses passion-and passion may lead to rioting in the
streets, repression, or anarchy.
4. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them
[the highly born] regardless of the reason which makes clever
men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of
piety.
Here Pascal seems to be thinking of people who, in the
enthusiasm of new converts to religion, think that one
need not care about political matters or even fear civil disorder. They may be well-advised to place their hopes in
heaven, but they are short-sighted in not realizing what a
great evil civil war is in this life, a life that they and others
must share.
We should pause here to note how "opinions swing
Dack and forth, from pro to con" among the four groups.
Two groups say we should honor those highly born, two
say we should not. The two groups who say we should
honor them do not say we should do so for the same reasons. Neither do the two groups who say we should
despite the high-born.
Most important in all this is the extreme, perhaps insurmountable difficulty that those who hold one set of opin-
50
ions have in persuading those who hold other opinions. In
abject fear of the whip, an ordinary man like Leporello
does not need to be convinced to obey because of the
evils of civil war. He probably will never be detached
enough to think about the matter. Leporello does think
for a moment how unjust it is that he should remain outside as a sentinel while his master disports indoors, but
the mention of the whip makes him forget that thought.
Those who fear civil war will probably riot want -fo give
their reasons for enduring present evils to men like Leporello. They will also find it discouraging to argue with halfclever men who hope in the future and do not fear civil
war because they have not experienced it.
The new converts, who believe they have nothing to
learn from others, are similarly isolated and unlikely to be
able to talk to any of the others.
What of the fifth opinion?
5.... but perfect Christians honor them [the high-born] because they [the perfect Christians] are guided by a still higher
light.
Perfect Christians share Pascal's belief that we should
submit to those who hold power over us because we are
thereby submitting to God. God has ordained that the unjust power of rulers should weigh upon us in punishment
for original sin.
The first four explanations are all consistent with the
last one. If it is true, they all can be partially true as well,
even if they do contradict one another. Rulers do have the
power to frighten and punish us. We are in this slavish
state because an angry God has left us prey to the passions of the strong because we rebelled against him. Fear
belongs to a fallen nature. So does the cruelty of the
powerful toward the weak. The doctrine of the Fall accounts for Leporello's fear of Don Giovanni.
The doctrine of the Fall also accounts for the second
explanation, which holds the highly born in contempt.
Men are all equal in the state of innocence. None are by
nature superior. All are subject only to God and because
of him are well-disposed toward one another. Because of
the Fall, however, the restraints on human behavior have
been removed and the strong unfairly try to dominate the
weak. Their domination is unjust in itself, but that injustice is our reward for having rebelled against the only naturally superior ruler. The second explanation is both true
and incomplete. The fifth explanation confirms and completes its truth.
The third explanation, that of the really clever, who
fear civil war and on that account respect authority, is
based on experience. It is consistent with the fifth reason,
that of the perfect Christians.
The fourth explanation, that of the zealous convert,
though religious, is insufficient because it does not consider the crucial religious truth-that only the redeemer
can redress the Fall.
WINTER 1982
�The Fall and Redemption are the ~ey that resolves the
conflicting opinions about authority. That key opens the
understanding to whatever truth is contained in any hu·
man opinions. Pascal is calling all valid discourse about
moral matters-matters other than geometry-"ciphered
language." The doctrine of the Fall and Redemption
breaks that code. Supplied by faith, it illumines our
searching just as our instinctive knowledge of number illumines our geometrical quest. This key is given by God.
Those to whom he does not give it wander in the incompleteness of one of the first four partial truths. Only with
the fifth explanation, that of the perfect Christians, can
we preserve what validity lies in each of those explanations while avoiding their limitations, their semi-falsity.
Pascal would consider this account of the incompleteness of our knowledge of a prime political matter a paradigm of our knowledge in general. All knowledge of what
is important, of what is true for man and for the world, is
fragmentary.
_ Like the two infinities, all knowledge meets and is comprehended in and by God. Only those who see him face to
face will see clearly the general truths. Goodness, justice,
and happiness are revealed only dimly and in faith to
those who have the key of the Fall and Redemption.
Pascal uses the language of seduction when he wants to
make us feel as he does about these matters. God overcomes our resistance, he says, by an overpowering delight,
not by argument or proof. Pascal thinks God gives us the
ability to accept enlightenment, the will to surrender, because of Christ's death for us. Not only does he not think
we should look for arguments, he believes that to hope to
achieve enlightenment by them is blasphemous. To obtain moral knowledge by human means would make the
Cross useless. (808).
To know what Pascal thinks is true, we would have to
see within ourselves what he sees. By his own principles,
he can only hope to point us in a direction that leads us
on. He can remind us of the advantages of accepting
Christian doctrine. But Pascal also thinks that God must
move us to accept in order for us to yield. Short of that experience and lacking an interpretation of it that would be
identical with Pascal's own, all that we can do is look at
Pascal himself.
Before we leave him, let me read one passage where he
tells us how alone he felt in the world. Let us hear Pascal
describe what must have been his state of mind before the
religious experience on the night of Monday, November
23, 1654, that made him turn to God.
When . .. I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and
man left to himself with no light, as though lost in a corner of
the universe . .. incapable of knowing anything, I am moved
to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying
desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of
escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive
people to despair. I see other people around me . .. I ask them
if they are better informed than I, and they say they are not.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find
some attractive objects to which they become addicted and
attached. For my part, I have never been able to form such
attachments ... (198)
How consistent his language is with what must have
been his feelings! Never having been able to form any attachment to people or things around him, Pascal speaks of
those who have as "wretched and lost." We can see how
much religious reassurance and enlightenment must have
meant to him.
It need not be true that Pascal always felt the way he
did in this passage. "Never" may be a hyperbole justified
by the depth of his revulsion for things or people he no
longer admired. "Never" shows how unimportant they
were to him when he wrote those words.
Another sign of this solitariness is the harshness with
which he speaks about love, the passion of love:
A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I
pass by, can I say that he went there to see me? No, for he is
not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person
who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love
her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her.
And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory,
do they love me? me, myself? Where then is this self, if it is
neither in the body nor the soul? . .. we never love anyone ex-
cept for borrowed qualities. (688)
How much must it have meant to such a man to have
felt that he knew that God cared for him, and that Christ
had died for his sake. We who remain outside this experience will remain unaffected by his account. Some of us
may even want to say that he is describing a delusion.
There is no need to argue about the matter. Nothing
could have been more important for Pascal than a revelation which, in his own words, brought him "certainty, cer-
tainty, peace." From the high point of that experience he
henceforth judged all else.
It will be no surprise to us that he could not prove what
he said, or, indeed, successfully point to it.
1. Douglas Allanbrook, ''Power and Grace," The College, January 1977.
2. All quotations from the Pensies are from the translation of A. J.
Krailsheimer, New York 1966.
3. Seneca, Ep. 20.8.
4. Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, Louis Lafuma, ed., Paris 1963,348.
Translations by Brother Robert Smith.
5. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
6. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
7. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
8. Pascal, Oeuvres, 351.
9. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
10. Pascal, Oeuvres, 350.
11. Pascal, Oeuvres, 352.
12. Pascal, Oeuvres, 349.
13. Louis Marin, La critique du discours, Paris 1975, 372~374.
51
�Five Translations
Charles G. Bell
By Victor Hugo, past eighty years old
Ave, Dea: Moriturus te salutatA judith Gautier
La mort et Ia beaute sont deux choses profondes
Qui contiennent tant d'ombres et d'azur qu'on dirait
Deux soeurs egalement terribles et fecondes
Ayant Ia meme enigme et le meme secret.
0 femmes, voix, regards, cheveux noirs, tresses blondes,
Brillez, je meurs! Ayez !'eclat, !'amour, l'attrait,
0 perles que Ia mer mele a ses grandes ondes,
0 lumineux oiseaux de Ia sombre foret!
Judith, nos deux destins sont plus pres l'un de !'autre
Qu'on ne croirait, a voir mon visage et le votre;
Tout le divin ab!me appara!t dans vos yeux,
Et moi, je sens le gouffre etoile dans mon arne;
Nous sommes tousles deux voisins du ciel, madame,
Puisque vous etes belle et puisque je suis vieux.
Death and beauty are two somber loves,
As deep in blue and shade as if to say:
Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive,
Bearing the burden of one mystery.
Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair,
Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solaceyou pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore,
You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest.
Judith, our destinies are nearer kin
Than one might think to see your face and mine.
The abyss of all opens in your eyesThe same starred gulf I harbor in my soul.
We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause,
That you are beautiful and I am old.
Charles Bell is a tutor at St.John's College, Santa Fe. These translations are a sequence from a forthcoming collection of poems, The Five-Chambered Heart.
52
WINTER 1982
�. Goethe: Se/ige Sehnsucht (1814)
Sagt es niemand, nur den Weisen,
Wei! die Menge gleich verhonet:
Das Lebendige will ich preisen,
Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.
In der Liebesnachte Kiihlung,
Die dich zeugte, wo du zeugtest,
Dberfallt dich fremde Fiihlung,
Wenn die stille Kerze leuchtet.
Nicht mehr bleibest du umfangen
In der Finsternis Beschattung,
Und dich reisset neu Verlangen
Auf zu hoherer Begattung.
Keine Ferne macht dich schwierig,
Kommst geflogen und gebannt,
Und zuletzt, des Lichts begierig,
Bist du, Schmetterling, verbrannt.
Und solang du das nicht hast,
Dieses: Stirb und werde!
Bist do nur ein triiber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.
Sacred Lust
Tell the wise; the many lour,
And make ignorance their shame;
Say I praise the living power
That hungers for a death of flame.
Love-nights breed us as we breed:
In the candlelighted cool,
Feel the gates of dark go wide
For the moulting of the soul.
From its woven bed of shadows
Mere enclosure falls away:
Love spreads new wings to the meadows
Of another mating play.
Tireless, upward; spaces dwindle;
Nothing hems declared desire;
God is light and light will kindle,
And the moth wings leap in fire.
Know, until you learn to weave
Each flame-dying into breath,
Everywhere you haunt the grave
Of the shadowed earth.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
53
�Petrarch (1304-74): Sonnet XI,
After Laura's Death
Se lamentar augelli, o verdi fronde
mover soavemente a !'aura estiva,
o roco mormorar di lucide onde
s'ode d'una fiorita e fresca riva,
Ia 'v' io seggia d' amor pensoso e scriva;
lei che '1 ciel ne mostro, terra n'asconde,
veggio et odo et intendo, ch' ancor viva
di sl lontano a' sospir miei risponde:
"Deh perche innanzi '1 tempo ti consume?"
mi dice con pietate: "a che pur versi
degli occhi tristi un doloroso fiume?
Di me non pianger tu, che' miei dl fersi
morendo eterni, e nell' eterno lume,
quando mostrai di chiuder, gli occhi apersi."
If birds' lament, green leaves' or tendrils' stir
To the soft sighing of the air of summer,
Or through the wave-wash at the petalled shore
Of a clear stream, crystal's liquid murmur
Sound, where I sit bowed to the forest floorHer, whom heaven showed and earth now covers,
I see and hear and know, as if the power
Of her live voice responded from afar:
"Why do you spend yourself before your years?"
She asks in pity. "Or wherefore and for whom
Pour the wasting river of your tears?
You must not weep for me. My life became,
Dying, eternal; and to eternal light,
The dark, that seemed its closure, cleared my sight."
54
WINTER 1982
�Catullus, 55-54 BC: Attack on Caesar
for his favorite Mamurra (#29)
Quis hoc potest uidere, quis potest pati,
Nisi impudicus et uorax et aleo,
Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia
Habebat ante et ultima Britannia?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Et ille nunc superbus et superfluens
Perambulabit omnium cubilia
Vt albulus columbus aut Adoneus?
Cinaede Romule, haec uidebis et feres?
Es impudicus et uorax et aleo.
Eone nomine, imperator unice,
Fuisti in ultima occidentis insula,
Vt ista uestra diffututa mentula
Ducenties comesset aut trecenties?
Quid est alid sinistra liberalitas?
Parum expatrauit an parum elluatus est?
Paterna prima lancinata sunt bona;
Secunda praeda Pontica; inde tertia
Hibera, quam scit amnis aurifer Tagus.
Nunc Galliae timetur et Britanniae.
Quid hunc malum fouetis? aut quid hie potest
Nisi uncta deuorare patrimonia?
Eone nomine urbis opulentissime
Socer generque, perdidistis omnia?
The man who can face this, the man who can take it,
Is whored himself, a drunk, a swindler. Mamurra
Laps the fat of crested Gaul and farthest Britain.
Pansied Romulus, you see this thing, you take it?
How he struts his way through everybody's bedroom,
Like a white dove, a white-skinned soft AdonisPansied little Roman, you take it in, you bear it?
You are like him then, as drunk, as whored a swindler.
And was it for this, Rome's only great general,
You conquered the remotest island of the West,
To feed this screwed-out tool of yours, Mamurra?
See him spend, twenty or thirty million? First were
His own estates, then the loot of Pontus, then of SpainHear Tagus, the gold-bearing river. They say the Gauls
And Britains fear him? And you love the mongrel? Both
Of you, Caesar, Pompey? While he swills oil of patrimony?
For this, like in-laws, father and son,
You have sluiced wealth and all of the world-city.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
55
�SanJuan de la Cruz (1549-1591)
Cancion de Ia subida del Monte CarmelaThe Ascent of Mount Carmel
En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
oh dichosa ventura!
sali sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.
In the dark of night
With love inflamed
By luck, by chance
I rose unseen
From the house hushed in sleep.
A escuras y segura
por Ia secreta escala, disfrazada,
o dichosa ventura!
a escuras, en celada
estando ja mi casa sosegada.
Safe in the dark
By a secret stair
My luck, my chance
And night for a veil
I stole from the house of sleep.
En Ia noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veia,
ni yo miraba cosa,
sin otra luz ni gu1a,
sino Ia que en el corazon ard1a.
By chance of night
By secret ways
Unseeing and unseen
No light, no guide
But the flames that my heart gave-
Aquesta me guiaba
mas cierto que Ia luz de mediod1a,
adonde me esperaba
quien yo bien me sab1a,
en parte donde nadie pareda.
Led by those rays
Surer than day
I came where one waits
Who is known to me
In a place where none seemed to be.
Oh noche, que guiaste,
oh noche amable mas que el alborada,
oh noche, que juntaste
Amado con amada,
amada en el Amado trasformada!
Night that guides
Purer than dawn
Night that joins
Lover and loved
And the loved into Lover changed.
En mi pecho florido,
que entero para el solo se guardaba,
all! qued6 dormido,
yo le regalaba,
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
In my flowered heart
That is only his
He lay in sleep
Lulled by the breeze
The fanning of my cedars gave.
El aire del almena,
cuando ya sus cabellos esparda,
en mi cuello her1a
y todos mis sendidos suspend1a.
Down turrets that air
With hand serene
As it stirred in his hair
Gave my throat a wound
That took all sense away.
Quedeme y olvideme,
el rostro recline sobre el Amado,
ces6 todo, y dejeme,
dejando mi cuidado
entre las azucenas olvidado.
I ceased, I was gone
My face to his own
All passed away
Care and all thrown down
There among the lillies where I lay.
con su mano serena,
56
WINTER 1982
�The Federal Republic of Germany:
Finlandization and Germanization?
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec
Is the Federal Republic of Germany headed for "finlandization"? Since Zbigniew Brzezinski detected neutralist leanings in West Germany nearly three years ago, the
charge has often been made. On both sides of the Atlantic, analysts and politicians and West German opposition
parties have followed the former National Security Adviser
in asking themselves about the Federal Republic's eastward slip. The most polemical have pointed to supposed
neutralization plans (the famous "Bahr Plan") and Bonn's
deplorable "Atlantic coolness" as something unusual, even
shocking, in a government that had supported American
policy with few reservations, even in the seventies. Others,
more prudent and at first loath to adopt conclusions they
regarded as hasty, have nevertheless discerned the first
signs of "finlandization" in the policies followed since the
winter of 1979. Rather, of "self-finlandization" or "voluntary finlandization." For we are dealing in this instance
not so much with neutrality imposed by the Soviet Union
as with a policy deliberately chosen by Bonn to soothe an
unduly touchy neighbor.
Richard Lowenthal, who is thought to have conceived
confuse the views of what the Christian Democratic-Socialist opposition calls the "Moscow wing" of the Social
Democratic Party with those of the governing Social Democratic-Free Democratic coalition. For instance, despite
his moral authority, Herbert Wehner did not speak for the
SPD majority-and even less so for the governing coalition
-when he called the Warsaw Pact's arms build-up defensible in the winter of 1979-80, and when even more recently
he did what he could to take the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan for the reaction of a power on its guard. Wehner's
controversial remarks in any case provoked opposition that
reached the center of his party. Moreover, the inclinations
of Helmut Schmidt's character, the makeup of the coalition, and the differences natural between party leaders
and men-in-office see to it that not even the SPD itself inspires government policy.
Even though the opinions of Social Democrats, snipers
or not, cannot be attributed to the government wholesale,
the government itself is not beyond suspicion. There is
plenty of evidence in relations between Moscow, Bonn,
and Washington: the West Germans' irritation with Ameri-
the term ufinlandization," calls "self-finlandization" ab-
can ((human rights" policy; their initial evasion of, then
surd. And in any case the Berlin political scientist holds
that neither term does justice to West German political
reality. The Federal Republic of Germany itself denies
that it wants to steer "a course between the blocs." In the
spring of 1980, it should not be forgotten, Chancellor
Schmidt did not succeed in hiding his annoyance at some
analyses (in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) that at-
hesitant and limited support for, President Carter's counter
reprisals after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan;
their cautiousness at plans for the neutron bomb, and later
in regard to deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles; their lack of enthusiasm for the consolidation and expansion of the Atlantic alliance. Until recently, all signs
seemed to indicate that in loosening its Atlantic ties, Bonn
sought to forestall Soviet suspicions and objections, and
tacked the readiness "to appease" and the inconsistencies
of the government 1
In the past few years West German politics undeniably
betrays a number of ambiguities. One must not, however,
Anne-Marie Le Gloannec is on the staff of the Centre d'Etudes et de
Relations internationales de la Fondation nationale des Sciences Politiques in France. This article first appeared in Commentaire 14, Summer
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
that in its wish to please Moscow, it reserved its criticisms
for its American ally. The new administration in the United
States does not appear about to win over Bonn completely
to its views on East-West policy.
We must not forget that German-American tensions
have a specifically Western dimension that comes of profound differences over economic policy and the export of
nuclear technology. In these two areas, pressures from
57
�Washington have caused bitterness, even exasperation,
on the other side of the Atlantic. Also, German-American
relations have always been susceptible to the conflicts
that exist in any alliance. In our examination of present
tensions and "slipping," we should avoid yielding to the il·
lusion of an over-idyllic past. In the fifties and sixties the
two partners entertained suspicions of each other. When
Washington sought agreement with Moscow, West Ger·
many feared Washington would drop it. And the American
administration feared Bonn's too-close understanding with
its Soviet neighbor.
Are the present transatlantic misunderstandings the
same as in the past-or have they changed with the change
in the relative strengths of the United States and West
Germany? In any event, are they great enough to justify
Bonn's apparent weakmindedness towards Moscow? Does
the loosening of transatlantic ties necessarily tempt West
Germany to "appease" the USSR? In other words, are
German-American relations and German-Soviet relations
a zero-sum game? Finally, is it really a question of pusillan·
imity and appeasement? Perhaps Bonn desires to play an
independent role, neither too pro-American nor too antiSoviet? As Raymond Aron asked:
Do the Europeans shrink from American leadership because
they have come to have confidence in themselves or because
the power of the Soviet Union frightens them? Or is there a
third reason that subsumes the other two: the decline of
America?2
Beyond Electoral Turmoil
With detente in danger, the disagreements between the
United States and West Germany have never appeared
deeper. What might have passed a few years ago as simple
disagreements over particular policies-over human rights,
or the arms build-up-have now spread over the whole
range of economic, military, and political relations between East and West, and after the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan have come to bear on fundamental questions:
the nature of East-West relations, and more specifically
the assessment of Soviet ambitions and the development
of a suitable Western policy. Does the Soviet Union seek
to take advantage of local instability when the occasion
arises? Or does it pursue a policy of systematic expansion?
Should the West pursue detente, or return to containment?
Despite various shades of opinion, the Carter administration was pretty much united in its perception of a will
to expand in Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. In West
Germany, however, the various party leaders expressed
widely differing opinions that ranged from one extreme to
the other. The opposition leaders, Hans Kohl and FranzJosef Strauss, as well as the CDU's military affairs specialist
Manfred Woerner, reached conclusions similar to Washington's. Herbert Wehner, as already mentioned, saw the
move as a defensive measure; Willy Brandt minimized the
importance of the intervention. These reactions were
hardly surprising, for they came from the opposite sides of
58
the political chess board. The same cannot be said of the
attitude of Chancellor Schmidt, who did not see fit to interrupt his vacation, and who in his New Year's address
showed little of his usual vigor in his condemnation of the
Soviet operation. A few days before had he not declared
that Soviet leaders, far from being adventurers, desired
peace?
The nature of the Soviet intervention-surgical operation or act in a drama of expansion-raised the question:
what would become of Europe? Those who adopted the
hypothesis of expansion could not escape the fear that
sooner rather than later Berlin, Hamburg, or Paris would
suffer the fate of Kabul. A groundless fear, according to
Schmidt and his minister of foreign affairs-who considered the intervention "reversible" and thereby reduced it
to an anomalous case, limited in time and place. From
there it needed just a step to invoke the "divisibility" of
detente-a step some took, even though the FrenchGerman communique of February 1980 condemned the
concept.
There should be no exaggeration of the differences in
understanding between Chancellor Schmidt and Strauss.
Strauss denounced the Soviets' global ambitions, but
nonetheless still agreed with his political rival that Moscow did not want to unleash a Third World War. Schmidt
wanted detente to be divisible, but still claimed the dangers of the new balance of power in Asia or the Persian
Gulf region, and, consequently, for Europe. In the chancellor's perspective, the divisibility of detente did not
excuse West Germany or Europe from all action. He considered it of importance, however, not to react too harshly,
especially in the resort to sanctions. The Afghan crisis,
Schmidt would say in the course of 1980, did not recall
Europe in 1938-39 and Hitler's expansion-but 1914 and
the incapacity to master international difficulties. Such is
the explanation of Germany's silence in regard to American sanctions-a policy Germany judged inappropriate
and even dangerous.
It was actually as if almost in regret that Chancellor
Schmidt declared himself in favor of the Olympic boycott
that President Carter demanded, and he contented himself
with an embargo on strategic products and with symbolic
declarations at the same time that he refused sanctions
against the Soviet Union for its military intervention. This
was a compromise between the political necessity of supporting the American protector and the fear that America
would unleash the crisis. It was also a compromise between the Social Democratic Party that followed Willy
Brandt in his opposition to retaliatory measures and Foreign Minister Genscher, who favored a demonstration of
Atlantic solidarity. Ever ready to demonstrate its proAmericanism and to demand usacrifices," the opposition
had a field day denouncing the governing coalition's recantations and ((neutralist" leanings.
If one may trust certain public opinion polls, however,
~~neutralism" may respond to the wishes of a significant
minority, and in some cases, a majority, of the West GerWINTER 1982
�man population. Asked whether they wished for "greater
independence of the Federal Republic of Germany from
the United States" or "unconditional support of American foreign policy," 49 percent of those polled answered
"yes" to the first question (with 29 percent "no"), and 52
percent said "no" to the second (with 26 percent "yes").
Forty-five percent of the respondents believed that the
military neutrality of both Germanies "would make a fit
contribution to the maintenance of peace. " 3
The significance of these results should not be overestimated, quite apart from the debate over the reliability
of the methods used by different West German polling organizations. Since the beginning of the Federal Republic,
West Germans have favored a policy of neutrality. Sometimes a minority, sometimes, notably in the second half of
the fifties and during the seventies, a majority. When
questioned, however, not simply about the policy they
would like to see Bonn follow, but about the military position they prefer for the Federal Republic, only a few declare themselves for neutrality. The most that can be said
is that Social Democratic sympathizers, people under
twenty, and people with advanced education, are more
likely to favour neutral status than the rest of the population. 4 In the majority, West German public opinion remains as much attached to NATO as to the American
military "umbrella" that it expects will protect it in the
event of a Soviet threat.' To be sure, in 1980 public opinion
continued to believe in the possibility of war (58%). Most
Germans, however, did not believe that Moscow's resort
to force in Afghanistan called into question the detente it
damaged. And in 1981, most Germans favored a policy of
conciliation.' All in all, the coalition's attitude seems to
answer public expectations better than the opposition's.
The legitimate distinction between the Social Democratic-Liberal line and the Christian Socialist opposition
does not mean that lines are clearly drawn and policies
consistent. Despite their disagreements over the nature of
the crisis and the immediate measures to take, the government and the opposition were closer than they would
have liked people to think. In contrast to Washington, no
German political party, much less German public opinion,
was eager to question detente. The pace of official East·
West contacts slowed down in the early spring of 1980,
but it soon picked up again. Strauss was not the last politician to make his appearance in Communist capitals. (Unlike the government, however, the opposition says it is
ready to risk detente the better to preserve it.) Moreover,
in favor, in various degrees, of resumption or pursuit of
disarmament negotiations, both the governing coalition
and the opposition recognize the need for strengthening
NATO to restore the East-West military balance,' and for
providing economic, political, and military aid to countries close to the Soviet Union (Pakistan, Turkey, and
Greece; the cultivation of ties with the Islamic countries).
Lastly, except for those Social Democrats who, like Willy
Brandt, seem to give European solidarity first priority,
both sides emphasize the importance of the GermanTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
American alliance (even though the opposition appears to
consider it more important than the government).
The old divisions between the left and right wings of
the Social Democratic Party have reappeared with greater
force than ever in the last few months, really in the last
two years, to shake the Social Democratic consensus on issues of external security. This was especially evident when
Karsten Voigt, among others, appeared to question the
delicate compromise that emerged from the party conference on December 1979 (the Doppelbeschluss, or double
resolution). Voigt, the Social Democratic spokesman for
the parliamentary commission on foreign affairs, judged
early in 1980 that the lack of progress or results in the arms
limitations talks mortgaged the deployment of American
missiles in Europe. Social Democratic deputies also undermined the foundations of Bonn's policy towards the
Atlantic alliance by opposing arms sales to Saudi Arabia
and by proposing reductions in military spending. The
joining of this leftist opposition with groups as diverse as
the German Peace Union (DFU), close to the Communists, the churches, and the ecologists; the coordination of
pacifist movements, opponents of nuclear power, and the
extra-parliamentary opposition (APO) around the same
issue, a sometimes violent coordination whose capacity to
make a sensation does not necessarily mean it enioys a
wide following-all this disturbs the balance at the heart
of the SPD, without, incidentally, sparing the Liberals,
(FDP), and forces the governing coalition into a weak or
rigid position. Witness Helmut Schmidt's recent remarks
on Soviet policy, or on the pacifism of young Germans.
Much of the leadership and of public opinion, undeniably, would like, in one way or another, to see Europe as
an island of peace precisely because it wishes it were one.
There would then be no more worry about sanctions or rearmament; more costly decisions could be avoided. To
calm oneself with the attribution of reassuring intentions
to the Soviets-is that not already "finlandization" of a
sort? 8
The Ostpolitik and its Fragile Gains
People have outdone themselves in repeating that
detente brought tangible benefits to the Germans-and
until recently one could believe that the Ostpolitik bore
fruit in every area. The status of West Berlin, guaranteed
by the four powers in September 1971, assured that city
some military and political security and, in theory, reduced
the risks of a sudden Soviet seizure. With the fundamental treaty signed in October 1972, the two Germanies
resumed relations pretty much broken off since the beginning of the sixties. During the seventies, several million
West Germans visited East Germany each year, and several
hundred thousand East Germans went to West Germany.
Over fifty thousand East Germans have settled permanently in the Federal Republic. Thanks to a significant
audience for West German television and the development of trade, West Germany makes its presence felt be-
59
�yond the Elbe. In negotiating the, treaty of 1972, the
Social Democratic-Liberal coalition meant to maintain
and strengthen the ties between the .two Germanies and
thereby keep alive the idea of German nationhood. If we,
however, may believe West German public opinion, that
holds that the two states are growing further and further
apart, and if we believe certain analysts who report the
development of two distinct national consciousnesses, we
are led to ask whether the coalition has really reached its
goal.
These measures have, in any case, improved the lot of a
good many people and permitted a relative "normalization" of relations between the two Germanies. Bonn also
normalized relations with other Socialist capitals. In recent
years, over half a million Soviet, Rumanian, and Polish citizens of German origin have been allowed to settle in the
Federal Republic; the volume of West German trade with
these countries has quintupled since 1970. Chancellor
Schmidt figured along with Valery Giscard d'Estaing
among the preferred partners of Edward Gierek.
This relative ((normalization" of relations with Eastern
Europe, rather than any immediate gains, give the Ostpolitik its historical significance. By abandoning its revisionist claims and by no longer making German unity a
prerequisite for detente, West Germany ceased troubling
its Eastern neighbors and importuning its Western all-ies:
it made itself ordinary, and thereby undid the mortgage
that up to then had weighed on its foreign policy. With
this added maneuvering room and with a measure of prestige won for it by its skill in negotiation-not to mention
its considerable economic strength-the West German
government could now make its voice heard in international councils. German participation in the Guadeloupe
summit in January 1979 surprised some observers. But her
presence represented the logical outcome of previous diplomatic activity. This growth in West Germany's power
could not, however, obscure the fact that the gains of the
Ostpolitik depended, at least in part, on the goodwill of
the Soviets and their East German allies. The border incidents, the harrassment, the pin-pricks in West Berlin, during the sixties, were there to remind everybody. In spite of
everything, West Germany was not a state like any other.
Even without considering the 17 million East German
"hostages" of the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic remains extremely vulnerable: on the front line of battle, it
would be devastated in both a conventional and a nuclear
war-but with all that it remains powerless to assure its
own security by itself.
This special characteristic and its liabilities give the Soviets a political bargaining advantage that they have not
failed to exploit, when international tensions or the internal
weaknesses of the Socialist camp have provoked a more
rigid attitude in the Kremlin, or when Moscow hoped to
divide NATO by isolating West Germany. NATO's decision of December 1979 to strengthen its theater nuclear
forces in Europe, the deterioration of East-West relations
after Afghanistan, and the threat of destabilization in Po-
60
land, have revivified Soviet and East German pressures
and threats. The Soviets reminded the West Germans in
the summer of 1980 that their territory would be the first
and worst casualty in a nuclear exchange-and that American protection was not certain. Following that, the East
German authorities decided to restrict severely all travel
between the two countries. They also let it be known that
West Berlin could suffer the consequences if Bonn changed
the conditions of inter-German trade (in the event of Soviet intervention in Poland).
It is hardly surprising then, that the West German leaders attempt to keep detente alive, to continue to enjoy its
benefits, that they wish to slow further worsening of the
international climate, since they would be among the first
to suffer, or even that they censor their words or actions
in anticipation of Soviet objections. Bonn, for instance,
refused to respond with reprisals to East Berlin's affront
after the elections. It has since, it is true, contemplated
not renewing the "swing" accords-credits without interest granted to East Germany-if East Germany did not
rescind its decision. Such a display of deliberate firmness
was successful in 1973, when East Berlin also had decided
to increase the amount of obligatory currency exchange
for travellers entering East Germany. But circumstances
are now different. There are grounds for fearing that, unwilling to risk detente, Bonn finds herself without recourse. In such an event, powerlessness would succeed to
deliberate firmness.
Everything, including the vulnerability of her economy,
glaringly evident for a year now, has contributed to make
West Germany either directly or indirectly susceptible to
international tensions and pressures. Extremely dependent on world trade for her raw materials and energy, and
for the export of her finished goods, West Germany seeks
to diversify her raw material sources and her new markets.
Her trade with Eastern Europe and the USSR represents
a little less than 6 percent of her total foreign trade, but
certain sectors and industries export a larger proportion of
their production to the East: the exports of Mannesmann,
and Hoescht made up almost 9 percent of their output in
1979. By 1985, 30 percent of West German imports of natural gas will come from the Soviet Union.
Is there not a danger that in allowing this dependence
West Germany is granting the Soviets the means to exercise pressure and influence over her? Without entering
into the broader debate on the advantages of East-West
trade (structural advantages for the East, sectorial advantages for the West), we should note the disagreement
among experts on the threshold of independence. At the
Soviet Union's and West Germany's announcement of an
agreement on natural gas (whose conception had been
made public at the moment Chancellor Schmidt in Moscow condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the
Americans warned West Germany against dependence on
more than 30 percent of any product from any one country. In contrast, German experts set the critical threshold
at 40 percent. The political dimensions of this labyrinWINTER 1982
�thine quarrel need to be remembe,ed: American objections and West German defiance.
In my opinion, the danger, if there is one, lies else·
where. The fear is not of Soviet pressures or threats of an
embargo. Nor is it deplorable that Bonn is reluctant to enact strict economic sanctions that the business community
would not hear of, and which the Christian-Democrats
might not have applied with any greater vigour had they
been in power. Sanctions, it turns out in retrospect, are of~
ten evaded.
What is questionable is "Arms-of-Peace" thinking itself,
the kind of thinking that impelled Egan Bahr' s remark
that it is "necessary to institutionalize the interest in the
maintenance of peace through large-scale economic projects beneficial to both parties."' Chancellor Schmidt
apparently shares the same perspective, for he favors the
establishment of long-term contractual economic relations between West Germany and the Soviet Union. In
1977 he even tried (in vain) to have the Bundestag solemnly ratify the Soviet-German twenty-five year commer·
cia! accord. The desire to bind the Soviet Union with a
network of contracts is like trying to tie Gulliver down.
This is the policy of the West German government, specifically, of the Social Democratic-Liberal coalition. Instead of resorting to sanctions it prefers to take advantage
of the commercial and financial ebb and flow to buy concessions and guarantees. But mutual economic ties do not
necessarily guarantee the partners' political goodwill, especially the goodwill of a centralized and authoritarian regime
-when Bonn risks excessive conciliatoriness because of
its anxiety to protect investments or because of its respect
for treaties (its rationale in the question of sanctions).
West German government and business circles showed
the political and economic powerlessness of this attitude
during the Polish crisis. Poland's creditors felt obliged to
lend her more money to save her from bankruptcy. At the
same time Bonn, haunted by the memory of 1968, refrained from gestures or statements that might give the
Soviets an excuse to intervene. For these two reasons
Bonn found itself even less desirous and able to attach political conditions to its loans to Warsaw. 10
As in the early sixties, West Germany's Eastern policy
shows no innovation. In the sixties, however, she had
nothing to lose. Now, any revision might endanger the
Ostpolitik's accomplishments, both the more immediate
(increased human contact) and the less tangible (security
and relative independence). To preserve these benefits,
Bonn no longer gives priority in her dealings to peoples in·
stead of governments, to "change" instead of "reconciliation." It is undoubtedly time in West Germany for a fresh
debate on the ultimate goals and means of the Ostpolitik,
a debate the coalition in power has up to now appeared to
wish to avoid.
An Actor in Search of a Role
The Soviet leadership that in 1980 raised some doubts
about the effectiveness of America's military umbrella,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
knowingly touched a raw nerve in Bonn. More than once
in the past Europeans have questioned American ability
and willingness to deter or repel a Soviet attack-doubts
more than ever justified by the progressive change in the
Soviet-American military balance since the beginning of
the seventies. The mutual "neutralization," to use Helmut Schmidt's word, 11 of Soviet and American strategic
forces, along with Soviet conventional and nuclear superi·
ority in Europe, separates the United States from Euro·
pean territory more than ever before, for it is not certain
that the U.S. would be willing to engage its strategic forces
in the case of a limited Soviet attack on the old world.
Western Europe and especially the Federal Republic of
Germany, a "state on the front line" without her own nuclear capacity-and subject not only to Soviet pressures
but also to Washington's goodwill-finds herself singularly exposed as long as war remains a textbook hypothesis. The decision of the NATO Council in December 1979
to deploy medium-range missiles in Europe starting in
1983 and at the same time to begin negotiations with the
Soviet Union on the reduction of theater nuclear forces,
will make up for Europe's military inferiority without,
however, undoing her political powerlessness: the mere
presence of Pershing and cruise missiles under American
control will not reassure further the Europeans against
the risk of American indifference; and the propaganda
campaign the Soviets unleashed from the fall of 1979 to
the summer of 1980 shows that they will hardly forgo the
crudest sorts of intimidation.
The uncertainties of the American commitment, and
Washington's demonstrated relative indifference to the
military balance in Europe, have led Bonn to its own initiatives to protect its interests: the call for the strengthening of European middle-range nuclear capacity, and, at
the same time, for negotiations for the reduction and re·
balancing of Soviet and NATO theater nuclear forces.
Bonn counts on both reinforcement and negotiation, the
United States tends to stress reinforcement. Is the coali·
tion yielding to pacifist tendencies that hold sway inside
the Social-Democratic Party? Certainly. But realistic considerations also guide it: the stationing of middle-range
nuclear arms on her territory that spares West Germany
neither political pressures nor destruction in the event of
nuclear war, will serve as a bargaining chip for the West in
the negotiations-negotiations that, thanks to Helmut
Schmidt's diplomacy in Moscow in June 1980, will open
without preconditions.
Both the relative success of the chancellor's mission to
Moscow and President Carter's suspicion beforehand that
the chancellor might trade his commitments for the proposal or acceptance of a moratorium 12 served only to reinforce a sense of isolation in West Germany, a sense that it
could hardly count on its American ally (not to mention
the disturbing effect of the failure of the raid in April1980
to save the hostages in Tehran).
Even more serious, the West Germany that doubted
the authority and efficacy of American leadership, also
61
�was losing faith in American values~at least in its conception of American values. The United States no longer
held a fascination for West German elites. 13 With the
United States itself in the throes of self-doubt how was it
to escape such disillusion? Such circumstances make it
easier to understand the government's and public opinion's tardy and lukewarm show of solidarity with Washington during the winter of 1979-1980. In their criticisms of
American policy and sometimes of the bases of Atlantic
solidarity, the West Germans seem unobtrusively to give
way to indifference to the Atlantic Alliance and to retreat
upon themselves 14 Those under twenty, significantly,
tend more to neutralism than their seniors.
This indifference and withdrawal is no easier to reverse
because concealed. Even if the new U.S. administration
succeeds in the restoration of America's political and
moral authority, and, at the same time, in respecting the
wishes of her allies, West Germany will no longer be the
model ally, Washington's right arm. As we have seen, the
Ostpolitik and the changes in the international system in
the seventies have combined to fashion a stronger, more
independent, and more self-confident Federal Republic of
Germany.
Until very recently, Bonn still refused a role consonant
with her power. In May 1978, Helmut Schmidt declared
at the U.N., "I speak in the name of a country that is neither able nor desires to assume the role of a Great Power."
Under a constant barrage of criticism for almost thirty
years, called too Atlanticist or not enough, too revanchist
or too accommodating toward the East, Bonn steered a
middle course without making waves. Barely two years
ago, however, the chancellor took to different words: he
demanded heavier responsibilities and a greater role for
his country. Even public opinion in West Germany conceives a powerful Federal Republic, more readily than in
the past-20 percent for enormous, 47 percent for great,
influence on the international scene15 All this has not
kept the government, nor in all likelihood public opinion,
from recognition of the limits of this influence, particularly in its relations with Eastern Europe, and of the political and moral constraints that still weigh upon its actions
-limitations that Bonn and the people sometimes find irritating. In contrast to the fifties and sixties, West German leaders dare assert themselves among their allies at
the same time that they exercise the greatest discretion in
t!Jeir dealings with the countries of Socialist Europe-all
in all a curious reversal.
The contrast between confidence toward the West and
timidity toward the East, the distortions that come of the
combination of economic might and military weakness,
the ambiguities of the Federal Republic's international
role, drive the Germans to question themselves. Once the
first enthusiasms faded-the enthusiasm for reconstruction under the auspices of the pax americana and the enthusiasm for a certain conception of Europe-the erosion
of the myth of economic invulnerability and a certain disenchantment with Social Democracy opened the way to
62
the uncertainty and insecurity that, according to Richard
Lowenthal, springs of cultural and political rootlessness. 16
The search for identity, with certain intellectuals as selfappointed scouts, compounds in Germany the malaise
general in Western democracies. My analysis, if correct,
should hardly occasion retrospective surprise-at least insofar as in the last ten years the Ostpolitik has encouraged
inter-German contacts and rekindled the concern of West
Germans for the Germans in the East. That the East German United Socialist Party's (SED) policy of ideological
demarcation-Abgrenzung-with its transplantation of
undesirable East German intellectuals to West Germany
has revived the awareness of German identity and the
search for it-that would be an irony of history. The
search for identity does not, however, necessarily amount
to the desire for national unity-as the declarations of
Guenther Gaus, former permanent representative to East
Berlin, and the public debate that followed tend to show.
Strong but vulnerable, faced with equally unsatisfactory
alternatives when it comes to political and military security, still afflicted with a "deficit in legitimacy" and with a
loss of cultural identity, West Germany is in some sense
an actor in search of a role. There is no certainty that she
will find this role either in a political union of Europe that
Walter Scheel and Hans-Dietrich Genscher recently did
what they could to revive or in the Franco-German dimension. Based on real but limited complementarities,
the Franco-German marriage rests on a double misunderstanding. West Germany, without doubt, relies more than
France on the Atlantic Alliance and on the continuation
of American protection. The defense of her national interests, however, which lie in Central Europe, will drive her
to greater Gaullism than France. It is a paradox that a
greater consciousness of her own interests and of her distinctive particularity could very well lead the Federal Republic to a certain kind of "finlandization." 17
Translated by Lisa Simeone, Philip Holt and
Preston Niblack
1. See especially Fritz Ullrich Fack, "Der Nebellichtet sich," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 23, 1980, and "1st das Friedenspolitik?"
FAZ, May 23, 1980.
2. Raymond Aron, "L'hegemonism sovietique: An I," Commentaire 11,
Autumn 1980, 358. (translation in The St. John's Review, Summer 1981,
20).
3. Poll said to have been made in March 1980 at the request of the
Chancellor. Cited with no further reference by the weekly Der Spiegel,
18, 1980, "Mit den Amerikanern nicht in den Tod."
4. I rely here on polls conducted by Emnid (especially those reported in
Informationen, Emnid-Institut, 5, 1980) and by the lnstitut fur
Demoskopie Allensbach (files).
5. See especially Werner Kaltefleiter, "Germans, Friendlier but Apprehensive," Public Opinion, March-May 1979, 10-12. See also Gebhard
Schweigler, "Spannung und Entspannung: Reaktionen im Westen," in
the excellent collection of Josef Fullenbach and Eberhard Schulz (eds.\
Entspannung am Ende (Munich 1980). Schweigler gives the following
characterization of German pUblic opinion: "Because of the complexity
of West German security policy, public opinion in the Federal Republic
appears to hide its head in the sand in blind reliance on NATO's deterence."
WINTER 1982
�6. See the Emnid poll in Der Spiegel, March 2, 1981, and the poll in Le
Point 442, March 9, 1981; The International Herald Tribune, April14,
1980.
7. Even if the government, despite earlier commitments, is not prepared to devote 3 percent of its gross national p[oduct to military spending.
8. Pierre Hassner, "Western European Perceptions of the USSR,"
Daeddlus, Winter 1979, 114.
9. The first assessment of the Ostpolitik in Die Zeit, December 14, 1973.
10. In the winter of 1980-81 the government-more particularly, the
Minister of Foreign Affairs-showed some firmness (at the heart of the
common market) in dissuading the Soviet Union from intervening.
11. Cf. the lecture Helmut Schmidt gave on October 28, 1977, at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
12. President Carter suspected that Chancellor Schmidt, who declared
himself in favor of a three-year moratorium, actually wanted to put an
indefinite freeze on the deployment of tactical forces in Europe.
13. See Gunter Gillessen, "Defiziten im deutsch-amerikanischen Verhalltnis," FAZ, July 31, 1979, as well as Martin Hillenbrand, former U.S.
ambassador to West Germany; "The United States and Germany" in
West Gennan Foreign Policy, 1949-1979, Wolfram Hanreider ed., Boulder,
Colorado, 73. See also the recent article by the Vice-President of the
Bundestag, Annemarie Renger, "Das Buendnis an einer Wegmarke,"
FAZ, April4, 1981.
14. See the words of Guenter Grass, Sarah Kirsch, Thomas Brasch, and
Peter Schneider to the Social-Democrats of Schleswig-Holstein: "Don't
let the American government that since the war in Vietnam, has lost
the right to launch moralizing appeals, draw you into (a policy that could
lead to the destruction of all life on this planet)." Quoted in "mit den
Amerikanern nicht in den Tod," Der Spiegel, 18, April 28, 1980.
15. R. Wildenmann poll, cited by Martin and Silvia Greiffenhagen, Ein
schwieriges Vaterland: Zur politschen Kultur Deutschlands, Munich 1979,
315. See also Dieter Bossmann, Schueler ueber die Einheit der Nation,
Frankfurt-am-Main 1978, 249.
16. Richard Lowenthal, "Incertitudes allemandes," Commentaire, 6, 979.
17. As Fritz Stern has aptly observed, "Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980. For a plea to anchor West Germany
in the Franco-German community within a united Europe and in the
Atlantic Alliance, Joseph Rovan, "De !'Ostpolitik a l'auto-neutralisation?," Politique Internationale, 10, Winter 1980-81, 85-100.
Io
Under a cloud, milky she stood,
Garlanded, surprised by her cow
Voice after love, and by his wife
In a fine rage planning revenge,
Skillful as Maupassant. The gadFly stung her beauty lumbering
Inside bovine embarrassment
To lurch through a sea she hardly
Noticed, though it was named for her.
A long time galloping, her flowers
Withered as an old joke, she came
To seed on Egypt, so arid.
That good girl, transformed by the careLessly human god-his quick loveLay in the hot desert, panting
Slow birth on monumental sand
Where every grain seemed in the heat
An eye watching her terrible
And unprivate delivering.
lAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
63
�Kekkonen, the "Finlandizer"
Indro Montanelli
One of the few voices that rose in protest on March 12,
1940, when the government in Helsinki announced that
Finland, bled dry after four months of heroic resistance,
had sued Russia for armistice, was the voice of a deputy of
the agrarian party. Urho Kekkonen said that Finland's sur·
render turned the blood split up to then into a "useless
sacrifice.''
I was not surprised. I knew him. A man of the people,
son of a game warden, Kekkonen had fought as a boy un·
der the flag of Mannerheim in the war of liberation from
Russia in 1919. His nationalism even drove him to a bit of
sympathy for fascism. He wanted war to the death, "heroic
suicide." I thought that such ideas would not get him very
far in the politics of a country that, abandoned by the West
and overwhelmed, had to resign itself to the role of satellite of the U.S.S.R.
I was much surprised, therefore, at the news in 1956 that
he had succeeded Paasikivi to the presidency of the Re·
public. With some worry-for I am a great friend and admirer of Finland-I asked myself how the Russians would
take it. As it turned out the Russians took it so well that
for twenty-five years they not only put up with the presidency of Kekkonen but urged his reelection-and now are
doing all they can to delay his retirement.
I do not know how Kekkonen, with his political past,
won their confidence. But I cannot conceive he resorted
to duplicity, because he did not have it in his character.
For he had not only the shrewdness, but also the abrupt
straightforwardness of a peasant. And perhaps it was just
this abrupt straightforwardness that won him the respect
of the arrogant victor. In 1950 Paasikivi, who knew men,
entrusted him with negotiations on which the survival of
Finland depended-negotiations that had failed two years
before. The story goes that Stalin took to him among other
reasons because of his capacity to hold his liquor, which
even the Finns considered phenomenal. In any case, for
the agreement he brought home, Kekkonen received the
reward of the office of prime minister. From that moment
Paasikivi of his own accord arranged to leave him his own
office, the presidency of the Republic.
Kekkonen assumed the presidency in 1956 at an espe·
cially dramatic moment. The government of Finland had
One of the great journalists of Europe, Indro Montanelli is editor and
founder, nine years ago, of the important newspaper, Il Giornale Nuovo.
This article first appeared in II Giornale Nuovo on October 16, 1981.
64
refused to allow the Soviet government to station troops
in Finland, and Moscow had broken diplomatic relations
with Helsinki, a move taken for a prologue to invasion. At
the Kremlin Kekkonen succeeded in fixing things up. But
four years later the crisis broke out again. Kekkonen
showed up alone in Novosibirsk for a stormy, nine~hour
exchange with Khrushchev. In Moscow there were ru·
mours that they had also let loose with slaps. Questioned,
Kekkonen replied only: "I was not slapped." Even if the
story is not true, the fact that it was told tells quite a bit
about Kekkonen's diplomacy in the face of the Russians.
In the last twenty-five years Kekkonen has done his best
to "finlandize" Finland. He had no other choice-and he
succeeded. Finland is the only satellite of the Soviet Union
where fundamental democratic liberties are respected and
whose door is open to the West.* I do not think that this
miracle is all Kekkonen's doing. Above all it is Finland's
doing and the doing of what even Kekkonen in his youth·
ful nationalistic extremism had called "the useless sacrifice." In fact nothing was more useful than that sacrifice.
Because of it Finland was not erased from the political
map of Europe like the three other Baltic countries, Esto·
nia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In those four months of hellish
winter war on the isthmus of Karelia, the Russians learned
at their own expense of what stuff the Finns were made
and that they could not take their subjection for granted.
Just this always escapes the promoters of the "finlandiza·
tion" of Europe. They forget that to finlandize themselves
the Finns in twenty-five years have dared look Russian
might three times in the face-in 1919, in 1939, and in
1941; that they have inflicted unforgettable defeats and
losses on those unspeakable battlefields; that they sacri·
ficed the best of the best of two generations. And defeated,
they did not bow their heads. The victors demanded trials
11
of War criminals." Instead of suffering a Nuremberg trial,
the marshall who led them against the Russians three times
became president of the Republic. The Finns found only
one "war criminal," Tanner, a former Social Democratic
minister whom they sentenced to ten years. Upon his re·
lease they reelected him deputy and president of the party.
*On February 5, 1982, in the General Assembly at the United Nations,
Finland along with all the free nations of Europe (except for Austria,
Spain, and Turkey, who abstained, and Greece, who voted in favour)
and the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Australia, New Zealand,
and Fiji-twenty-one in all-voted against a resolution punishing Israel
for the extension of jurisdiction to the Golan Heights.-LR
WINTER 1982
�As for the Communists, they were and remain a minorityand outside the government. Even' the Russians trust
Kekkonen more than the Communists.
There is no finlandization without Finns. In other
hands-for love of my country I shall not name names-it
does not take much to imagine what would become of
"finlandization": the rush to servileness, zeal outdoing
zeal, bulgarization.
According to news from Helsinki coming through Stockholm, Kekkonen, eighty years old and suffering from a
stroke, is now providing-with deliberation-for his succession. I do not think there is much to worry about. For
even if the finlandizer goes, Finland remains.
Translated by Leo Raditsa
HEPHAESTUS
Thrown away, damaged, thrown down, falling
Broken, limited except the hands, eyes;
Only the will intact, the need braced against
Those wrong legs, ugly and mechanically bad.
Still godlike, inventive craftsman holding
Metals in the indestructible brazier, that flame
Tempering what could be tempered-not his legsBut unchangeable beauty; and seeing it,
Praising it in the armor of the beautiful doomed!
Of Achilles who wept for love in the pursuit of glory.
Hephaestus the gifted dwarf, the talented lover
Of the garb of beauty, striking gold shell
To curve with his skill, grown warm
Over the breast of the more fortunate hero
In whose fame, in whose sulking annointment
The sound of the hammer rang like bells in a dream.
LAURENCE JOSEPHS
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
65
�Mozart's Cherubino
Wye Jamison Allanbrook
Cherubino makes his first entrance in Le nozze di
Figaro midway through the first act, as Susanna is angrily
reflecting on the pretensions of her old enemy Marcellina,
the Countess's blue-stocking governess, after an angry encounter with her:
Va' Ia, vecchia pedante,
Dottoressa arrogante!
Perche hai /etta due libri,
E seccato Madama in
gioventu .. . '
Cherubino brings with him a literary aura of a gentler sort:
while Marcellina clings to pedantry as the emblem of her
superiority, lovestruck Cherubino is not learned, but a
natural poet. He hands Susanna a love song which he has
written, either to one woman or to all (when she asks him
what to do with it, he gives her leave, "with transports of
joy" as the stage directions have it, to read it to every
woman in the palace 2). When she chides him for his impetuousness,3 he answers her in song. Unlike ''Voi che
sapete" -Cherubino's rendition, in Act II, of his own
composition, accompanied by Susanna on the Countess's
guitar-the lovely "Non so pili" is not intended as a real
performance. Yet it has much in common with the later
aria-staged-as-love-song.
Obvious similarities are their closely related key signatures C'Non so pill" in Eb major, ''Voi che sapete" in Bb),
their duple meters, and the prominence in them both of
winds and horns. But, more significantly, in an opera
whose arias are dominated by dance rhythms both pieces
are clearly meant to be apprehended as sung poems, "Non
so pill" as well as HVoi che sapete," even though in the
first case the plot does not suggest an actual performance.
Not measured gestures, but measured words seem to be
the native element of Cherubino's song.
This article comes from a book, The Motion of Character: Rhythmic
Gesture in "Le noz:ze di Figaro" and "Don Giovanni," that the University
of Chicago Press will publish in the fall of 1983.
66
Cherubino's nature unfolds gradually in the course of
the first two acts. A page in Almaviva's castle and probably the Countess's godchild,' at first he seems just a minor character, a member of a detachable subplot. Yet he
ultimately acquires transcendent importance as a touchstone for all the other characters in the opera.
The three principle occasions one has for observing
him in the first two acts are these two solo arias and,
strangely enough, a scene in which he himself is entirely
mute-his romp with Figaro at the end of Act I, "Non
pili andrai," where Figaro playfully initiates the boy into
the joys of war. When Cherubino's "second nature" is
made explicit, it becomes clear that this brilliant march
aria is actually a hymn to the young page, to his figure and
to his powers. But it is necessary first to examine Cherubino's literary idiom: to establish that it is indeed literary,
in HNon so pill" especially, and to discover what its
precise resonances are.
"Non so pili" is divided into two sections. The text of
the first half of the aria consists of two stanzas each containing three ten-syllable lines, and a fourth with nine
syllables:
Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio . . .
Or di fuoco, ora sono di ghiaccio . . .
Ogni donna cangiar di colore,
Ogni donna mi fa palpitar.
Solo ai nomi d'amor, di diletto
Mi si turba, mi s'altera if petto,
E a par/are mi sforza d'amore
Un desio ch 'io non posso spiegar/5
In rhyme scheme the two stanzas are united by end
rhyme-aabc, ddbc. The first three lines of each stanza
have f~minine rhymes, but the c rhyme (palpitar, spiegar)
is masculine. Mozart sets the poem in a quick alia breve
(2/2) with a single bass note "plucked" on every beat
while the other strings 11 Strum" an accompaniment-the
WINTER 1982
�orchestra is a stand-in for the performer's guitar. Traditionally in popular musical settings pf Italian poetry the
metrical foot (anapests here) established the basic rhythm
of each member, while the number of syllables dictated
the primary and secondary stresses and the cadence;6 the
same principle seems to be in operation here. A rhythmic
germ with an anapestic shape
is repeated three times in each line, with a secondary
stress on the third syllable and a primary stress and cadence on the ninth. Each of the first three lines closes
with a feminine ending
JJ/JDJOjJJ
but the anapest is preserved in the fourth for a masculine
ending and thus a full stop. In order to direct attention to
its integrity as a unit line of a poem, each line is carefully
set off from the next by a quarter note rest: 7
/
'~:p
f
f
Example l
Furthermore, all repetitions are of)"hole lines, and not of
single words or phrases abstracted from their lines, as
would frequently occur in most arias.
All these elements work together toward the apprehension of the regular poetic rhythms of the aria. But there is
a musical problem with a series of lines or a series of stanzas:
"one thing after another" militates against the dramatic
curve of a piece which gives it conviction of a beginning,
middle, and end. In a poem read aloud, meaning, and to a
lesser extent rhythmic variations, provide a sense of crisis
and resolution where it is wanted (as it is not always in a
lyric poem). But in an operatic aria, particularly in Classic
music where climax always has to do with the dramatization of a departure from and return to a certain harmonic
place, a series of lines does not make a period, nor a series
of stanzas a fully shaped whole.; Mpzart always has to alter
the line and verse forms slightly to provide the contractions in .the material, the critical imbalance which creates
the demand for balance-regularity- to return. To shape
the first stanza into a period, Mozart works an augmentation, with syncopation, on the anapes_tic line:
original phrase:
in augmentation:
with syncopation:
n IJ n
J Jl IJ
J J IJ J J ]J J J IJ
J J ]JJ J fJ J..l']J
This transmutation of the regular anapests permits a
sense of closure at stanza's end while still carrying a suggestion of the poetic meter of the verse.
The second stanza raises the problem of the shaping of
the larger-scale formal elements of the aria. The usual
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
plan of an aria in Classic music begins with a statement of
the home key and then modulates to the key a fifth above
it, the dominant (this corresponds to the conventional
term ((exposition" of a "sonata form"). It then moves back
to the home key, or tonic, either directly or after a motion
through a few other keys in order to diffuse the power of
the dominant. This motion through foreign keys (the "development" of a sonata form) I call the X-section.8 Mozart
decides to locate the rhythmic crisis of "Non so piu" early,
in the move to the dominant, and creates it by first exaggerating regularity, then breaching it. He sets the first two
lines of the new stanza carefully as lines of poetry, but in a
somewhat different manner than before: the short syllables of the head anapest are lengthened to occupy an entire measure, a metrical adjustment which doubles the
breathing space between unit lines (two beats instead of
one), and results in leisurely-musically uncompellingphrases of 3 + 3:
IJ. Jli n J n !J J 3 ~IJ.JIJ JJJ OIJJ 3>1
These relaxed phrases, however, create a launching pad
for the motion to the second key area, a motion which is
paralleled by a transformation of the poetic diction which
is charming and dramatically apt. His words about the
movements of his own passion move Cherubino out of
the measured artifice of his verse to sing in a more direct
and passionate style. The three-measure phrases quicken
to urgent and breathless two-measure units,9 the harmony, also quickening, darkens to a diminished seventh
chord on the word desio ("desire"), 10 and desio is itself repeated a fourth higher as the Eli slips down to an Eb and
the beginning of a strong Bb cadential formula:
'"
]f,
r'
x•
Example 2
The repetition of the word desio is governed by an exclusively musical necessity: for the first time in the aria a single word is repeated, lifted from its unit length of poetry,
and it weakens the illusion that the singer is performing a
canzona. But it brings a passionate intensity to this important cadence which would be lacking if the strumming
metrical regularity were retained. Thus in retrospect the
introduction of the leisurely three-measure line length at
the beginning of this period serves to intensify the effect
of the contractions of desire at its final cadence. The great
wit in this manipulation lies in Mozart's realization that
after the lulling regularity of the poetic lines phrases measured purely musically-"aria-style" -would appear as
the accents of true passion, rendering the final cadence
on the dominant "heartfelt" and thus structurally strong. II
67
�"Non so pill" has no formal X~section, moving immedi~
ately back to Eb and a repetition of the opening period. (A
detail in the bass line of that repetition is further confirmation that Mozart intended the aria to be apprehended
as sung verse, as opposed to dance or declamation. At the
opening the bass played only roots of chords, as if to stress
the affinity of the orchestra with a "giant guitar" playing a
simple chordal accompaniment. Since by the return of
the tonic the poetic form is firmly established, the bass
can be put to a different use; compare the following measures with the bass line of example number 1:
1'1·
51
W.'bt• 1 "I p ra II $J ~lh p
jt' J sIr '-
Example 3
In the return the bass has been freed from its mimetic role
to add some contrapuntal interest, implying that it was
under some constraint before.) The fifty-one measures
ending with the repetition of the opening material represent the main body of the aria, a strophic song adapted by
clever modifications to the exigencies of the key area process. The forty-nine measures which remain, an extended
coda, introduce Cherubino the poet's special subject matter-the pastorale. Its text moves Jove out into the country:
Par!o d'amor veg!iando,
Parlo d'amor sognando:
A!l'acque, a!l'ombre, ai manti,
Ai /ion; al!'erbe, ai fonti,
A!l'eco, a!l'arta, ai venti
Che if suon de' vani accenti
Portano via con se."
The second time through, the text is set to a musette with
tonic pedal point, Cherubino and the violins taking the
skirl (ms. 72-80):
Example 4
The pastoral affect, which comes to dominate the opera
in its last two acts, makes a modest entrance here. Cherubino, the young court page, would surely have read or
heard some pastoral poetry. Here he mimics his models,
naively imitating Tasso, perhaps, or another Italian poet
of the pastoral mode. Yet the literary reference, and its
support in Mozart's canzona-like setting of the text, are
not merely for the sake of a convincing characterization of
the youthful poet. In "Voi che sapete" the literary frame
broadens to include Dante, and Cherubino's donne, by
then no longer the vague generality "Women" but clearly
68
Susanna and the Countess, will receive from him homage
of a more profound sort. In "Non so piu" the tremulous
youth who, if no one else will listen, tells his love to himself," becomes a creature in his own pastoral landscape;
the poet is rightly not quite at home within the narrow
bounds of Almaviva's castle.
Cherubino sings the canzona of his own composition
early in Act II, at the behest of Susanna, who is anxious
to comfort the Countess after some tactless words of
Figaro's have left her sad and distracted. Furious at the
Count, Figaro speaks with cruel banter to the Countess
about the Count's attempts to seduce Susanna. He exits
after having enjoined the two women to help him in a plot
to humiliate the Count which may involve new dangers
and humiliations for the Countess, for to set it in motion
the Count will receive an anonymous note about an assignation which the Countess has supposedly made with a
lover. To draw her mistress's attention away from her
troubles, Susanna suggests that Cherubino perform his
composition; the diversion is a welcome one, for Cheru~
bino wants to pay court to the Countess and the Countess
to put her unfaithful husband from her mind. Susanna indulges them both in a moment of loveplay, her indulgence in itself an act of Jove.
The loveplay must, however, be merely an innocent
tableau. It is crucial to da Ponte's and Mozart's conception of their story that the relationship between Cherubino and the Countess be treated less suggestively than it
was in Beaumarchais's original. They took pains to eliminate certain passages from Le mariage de Figaro which
suggested more than a delicate flirtation between the two.
Whereas in Le mariage the Countess often seems to be
hesitating between two lovers, in the opera Cherubino is a
pet, and never a real source of temptation. In Act II, scene
iii, of the play the Countess excitedly prepares herself for
Cherubino's arrival as one would for a lover. Da Ponte in
the corresponding scene (the recitative before this aria)
has her instead sadly lament the improprietous conversations Cherubino overheard when he hid in the chair in
Act I. He omits a scene from the Beaumarchais (IV, viii)
between the Countess and the Count in which the
Countess expresses surprising anguish over the departure
of Cherubino from the castle. The text of "Voi che
sapete" is another of da Ponte's interpolations. In Le
mariage Cherubino sings, to the tune "Malbroug s' en
va't'en guerre," a ballad-like poem about a particular lad's
intense devotion to his godmother. Da Ponte's text, on
the other hand, is conventional and impersonal, addressed
not to one donna, but to the collective donne:
Voi che sapete
Che cosa e amor,
Donne, vedete
S'io l'ho ne! cor. 14
WINTER 1982
�The change is a material one: it is important to Mozart's
conception of Cherubino's role in the opera that he be
more "in love with love" than with any particular object
of his desires.
Again, as in "Non so pili/' the text is plainly a poem,
consisting of seven four-line stanzas with abab rhyme
schemes:
2. Quello ch'io provo
f::i ridiro;
E per me nuovo,
Capir no! so.
5. Ricerco un bene
3. Sento un affetto
6. Sospiro e gemo
Pien di desir
Ch'ora e diletto,
Ch'ora e martir.
Senza vo!er,
Palpito e tremo
Senza saper,
4. Ge!o, e poi sen to
L'alma avvampar,
E in un momenta
Torno a gelar.
Fuori dime,
Non so chi'/ tiene,
Non so cos'e.
7. Non trovo pace
nario had a characteristic stress on the fourth syllable, and
was often set as a galliard: IJ J J IJ J I .16
Mozart's musical line reflects the same stress, although
not the galliard's triple rhythms:
These two measures constitute a unit length, corresponding to one line of poetry, which will be deployed in various
multiples as the aria progresses.
The first verbal stanza-and first period-consists of
four of these lengths (eight measures), brought to closure
by a four-measure cadential phrase (ms. 17-20). The first
two measures of this phrase are poetically anomalous,
smoothing over the quinario rhythms to provide a rhythmic and melodic climax which drives home the cadence,
and its second two measures are a rhythmic rhyme with
the second of the unit lengths:
Notte ne di:
Ma pur mi piace
Languir cos/. 15
Its sentiments are pure Cherubino. Again, as in "Non so
pili/' Mozart must set the poem as a convincing song, unw
derlining its literary origin. Furthermore, since in "Voi
che sapete" opera's great artifice and the reality are oneCherubino is actually meant to be singing-the stanzaic
nature of the piece must be more than just a suggestion.
Yet a straight strophic construction with the same music
repeated seven times will be monotonous, while the usual
key-area plan is too dramatic, obscuring by its spirited
curve the necessary poetic element of formal repetition.
Mozart solves the problem in much the same way as he
did in "Non so piil," combining the key-area plan with
outlines of stanzas asserted by attention to the configurations of Italian metrics. In "Voi che sapete," however, the
solution is even more of a triumph. Neither element is
submerged at the appearance of the other, and Mozart's
attention to the detail of the text is exquisite.
In 2/4 meter, Andante, "Voi che sapete" opens with a
gesture which could in theory be a slow contredanse:
But the stately harmonic rhythm of the opening, underlined by the plucking of Susanna's guitar (pizzicati in all
the strings), militates against the usual rhythmic excitement and compression of a key-area dance form. Cheru·
bino's music is ingenuous and leisurely, lacking the urgency
of dance. Clearly at the outset the principles of syllable
count and of the integrity of a unit line of poetry set the
limits. "Voi che sapete" uses the five-syllable line or quinario (the second and fourth lines of each stanza are quinarios with the fifth syllable verbally but not musically
mute-it is sounded in the orchestral introduction). QuiTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In the truncated orchestral introduction this cadential
phrase serves as a neat consequent member for two unit
lengths:
I~'"
~~:;-
,~~~ &1 1Ipr1IrIJI11 r 'I Q' f3 •Iiii' iJrl r jj1i It rt zj
,
anl.u.At..f
J t
c.tnJ'<!flt"'"f-
I
Example 5
Once one knows the aria, however, the consequent
sounds tacked on: it is clear that the introduction is a compression and that the proper mode of the aria is the expansive spinning-out of poetic stanzas rather than the
antecedent-consequent symmetries of dance. After the
first period the consequent will be withheld until the two
crucial moments of closure which remain-the end of the
"exposition" and the final cadence of the aria. All the
other stanzas will be left open-ended, "poetically," rather
than "musically" conceived.
The second poetic stanza (ms. 21-28) moves to the
dominant of the dominant, F major, preserving the rhythm
of the preceding stanza's first eight measures except for a
few small variations. The modulation introduces the first
dark harmony of the piece, a d-minor triad, aptly on the
word nuovo ("new") for a nice poetic touch. The third
poetic stanza opens in F major, the proper key of the sec·
ond key area. Once the dominant has been achieved, all
that is lacking is the characteristic confirmation of the
new harmonic place. This stanza, like the second consisting of eight measures modelled on measures 9-16, only
postpones confirmation. Each four-measure member
ends on the dominant of F major, and the interest of the
69
�stanza is in a madrigalistic touch-a pretty painting of the
contrast between diletto and martir ("pleasure" and "torment"): diletto receives an ornamental division, while
Cherubino's warblings turn dark ori the word martn (an
f-minor chord and an augmented sixth), as the pretty
youth sings prettily of the pangs of love:
~
~
"'
Cl.'o#I'JI. ~ .11- kf·fto
..1_1_
'F ;r'
:I-
!-Jl
~
~
j•,
J,l·-~-~
J .L
""t-
*·
\r
Example 6
The conventional pathos of the turn is delicately comic.
The next stanza constitutes one of the critical moments
in the juggling of musical and poetic priorities, the problem being how to bring the second key area to an emphatic
close while preserving a sense of the repetition natural to
a strophic song. At this moment in "Non so piu" Mozart
breached poetic regularities, having first rather exaggerated them. Here he takes the opposite tack, violating a
firmly established principle of the key-area plan by closing
the exposition in an alien key. At the outset of the new
stanza (m. 37) the bottom of the C-major triad (V of F)
drops out:
The X-section begins with a harmonic move toG minor
and a new stanza-the fifth one-in rhythm essentially
resembling the second and third:
In ''\nnlJ. \
• Jfl ffflh nn !D Jn
' J n n J, J n !H J lffl .fff'lll J
; J n Jm J J n J J n J ; J
n
n
J~
J>
ms. 21-28
ms. 29-36
ms. 45-52
Again the text is apt for the harmonic motion, speaking of
Cherubino's search for a good outside of himself, the nature and whereabouts of which he does not know. G
minor is conventionally "outside" the place just abandoned, and the modulation to it is open-ended,_ "searching" (passing through G as V of C ~nd then backmg up to
a G tonic through an augmented stxth to D). But the ftrm
harmonic cadence at the end of the stanza (stanzas 2 and
3 both ended on a dominant, not a tonic) gives the lie to
the charmingly melodramatic words of Cherubino's
quest, settling gently back in a harmonic place and reasserting by its sing-song rhythmic rhyme the frame of the
poem.
In "Non so piu" Mozart disturbed the regular poetic
rhythm during the move to the dominant, balancing that
gesture against the return and expansive pastoral coda.
The balance is different in "Voi che sapete:" the rhythmic crisis helps to weight the eighteen measures of thereturn against the forty-four measures of "exposition." Now
for the first time the repetitive trochees
IJnJJJI
- "I_.,
Example 7
The entire stanza is set in Ab major, a key with a remote
and cool relation to the tonality of the aria. The strange
modulation is suited to the text-Cherubino's description
of the fire and ice of infatuation-and rationalized by the
repetition of the four-measure consequent which closed
the first period: it makes here a solid rhythmic rhyme back
to that cadence in order to counterbalance the harmonic
aberration. Thus by a brilliant manipulation of the elements which he set up as "musical" and "poetic" premises at the beginning of the aria, Mozart has managed a
convincing close to the second key area without at all
abandoning metrics. The strange key (a side-slipping modulation instead of the usual drama of the move up to the
dominant) and the eight-measure rhythmic rhyme-yet
another stanza-are unconventionally undramatic. (Literal end rhyme between the first and second key areas is
unusual, since the dramatic point of the new key area is
the movement to the new harmonic place.) Yet the fourmeasure consequent-marked as having a umusical"
function because it diverges just enough from the regular
strophic rhythms to act as a closing gesture-can still signal forcefully the end of a major formal section. Thus the
second key area of the canzona is dramatic in asserting an
essentially undramatic gesture-the rhythmic repetitions
of verse.
70
and the constant four-measure units lose their hold. Urgent and breathless sixteenth notes with an iambic stress~ffliR J' 'ffllh• fflifl J' nfl'ljl'
... - I .. -1"' - I "'-/
begin a long-arched nine-measure phrase which culminates
on the dominant (m. 61). Five of these iambic phrases ornament a chromatic scale in the bass which overshoots
the dominant by one note. A four-measure trochaic unit
length emerges from the iambs and the phrase backs
down to F, the dominant of Bb, ending in a harmonic and
rhythmic rhyme with stanzas 2 and 3. The text is appropriately breathless; for the first time two stanzas constitute one sentence, and the antitheses pile up to a climax;
"I sigh and moan without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no peace night or day, and
yet it pleases me to languish this way." These two stanzas
of text are crammed into the nine measures of music. The
rhyme, which provides a mimetic pause on languir (vii' of
V, m. 60) restrains their breathy passion;
/
..
.....
~
/1""*""~ ..
:
"'
r· e* ,..f-k ~ J,:
Jo.'f
p«r ,.;
..
.. "
.,.
,,,_ .,-k
(1-
"
~
Example 8
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino seems for a moment to step outside his formal
song, overwhelmed with emotion. Yet his outburst does
not violate the studied dramatic effects of a charming !tal·
ian song, since the end rhyme once again asserts the
frame of the poem. The piece plays itself out in a return
to the tonic and to the first stanza of text -a final rhyme
both of key area and of canzona. The four·measure conse·
quent makes its third and fourth appearances to provide
the rhetoric of cadence.
Cherubino is indeed a strange invention; some specta·
tors find him repellent, others merely silly. Certainly da
Ponte and Mozart went out of their way to underline his
mixed nature. A young and blushing girl, dressed as a boy,
tremulously singing the cliches of passion with a cool and
vibrato.free voice-the creature before us must be very
special. One expects him to dance-the established rhyth·
mic idiom of the opera-and his dance turns to song. His
conventionally melodramatic gestures-the chromatic turn
on the word martir for example-suggest a moonstruck
adolescent, yet suddenly his song turns to a cool and sub·
tie Ab major, a strange and otherworldly place, laid out but
never explored. Early adolescence is a peculiarly amor·
phous time of life, when youth is androgynous and uncle·
limited-unsure of what it is or what to expect from the
people around it. Cherubino knows of himself only that
he does not know himself, and he is strikingly undiscrimi·
nating in his relationships. "I no longer know what I am,
what I do," he confesses; "every woman makes me blush,
makes me tremble." The decision to compose the role for
a young woman did more than simply ensure a convincing
portrait of adolescence, however. It kept Cherubino from
being particularized and "embodied," located in a real
place and time like the other characters in the opera. He is
the only character who is "placeless," not generated and
defined by the manners of a particular social world (which
is one reason for his failure, when left to himself, to dance,
for affecting a particular social dance gesture must mark
him as a member of a particular class). More precisely, he
off triumphantly, accompanied by an entire military band
which Figaro has summoned up from nowhere. "Non pili
andrai" is an exuberant romp for the trio (Susanna is on
stage, although she does not sing), and a coming·of·age for
a dreamy adolescent engineered by his affectionate but
realistic "older brother," Figaro.
The aria is cast in rondo form. In its main section and
first episode Figaro describes Cherubino as he is now and
in the other sections as he will be on the field of battle,
both in a comically exaggerated style. Of Cherubino now
Figaro says:
Non piu andrai, farfallone amoroso,
Notte e giomo d'intomo girando,
Delle belle turbando il riposo,
Narcisetto, Adoncino d'amor.
Non piu avrai questi bei pennacchini,
Que/ cappello leggero e galante,
Quella chioma, quell'aria brillante,
Que/ vermiglio, donnesco color."
The music to which the first stanza is set is a C·major
march in 4/4 time with a dotted upbeat. Its opening mo·
tive consists almost exclusively of C·major triads, with a
rousing military fanfare to the words "disturbing the
beauties' beauty·sleep," a musical mixed metaphor which
becomes a substantive trope both in the aria and in the
opera. Here the mixture is one of amorous language and
military music, whereas in the first episode of the rondo
(ms. l5ff.) two musical styles mingle: amorous music in·
sinuates itself into the martial ambiance. Describing
Cherubino's appearance in a gently mocking idiom, Fig·
aro alternates a gavotte rhythm with the orchestra's
march:
Viol,.,. II
/1'-..
is "out of place/' for he is not in his proper home and his
genealogy is left unclear. There is, however, one sympa·
thetic portrait of Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro which
may help to make sense of his changeling natureFigaro's description of the boy in his aria at the end of the
i>•'.ta.· .,. ...;1\Wii bo: }"'........~-
R,..,JJ
ltJJ
p
t~
d.;. ,.,.·,
I
I
T
Example 9
first act, his "battle song," "Non pill andrai."
Following the Count's announcement that Cherubino
must leave the castle, Figaro, fond of the page and amused
at-some would say jealous of-his adolescent love pangs,
wants to sweeten the bitterness of his banishment from
his amorous playground. He sings for Cherubino an aria
containing consolation, paternal advice, and encourage-
ment, interlarded with affectionate jibes at the boy's
youth and cynical comment on the nature of that glorious
endeavor, war. Since Figaro is always actor and illusionist,
Cherubino can't simply walk off to war; he must march
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
A little Adonis on his way to battle deserves a mixture of
erotic and military gestures; the march and the coy gavotte
with its pastoral and amorous connotations are a wholly
appropriate conjunction here, and Figaro revels in them.
The brief gavotte dissolves into a dominant pedal, which
calls back the original march theme (m. 31). Figaro's fancy
is afire: after repeating the march he launches an enor·
mously expanded episode (ms. 43ff.)-the description of
Cherubino at the front-returning to the same dominant
pedal and bedroom march (m. 78) and adding a coda. Orig·
71
�inally the march gesture, found p~incipally in the strings,
was merely the orchestral accompaniment; now it becomes
a presence on stage, brought to life as a real military
march. Mozart calls on the full colors of the orchestra:
strings alternate with winds and brass, including trumpets, and the tympani sound for the first time. Figaro, no
longer singing a human vocal line, imitates a trumpet
voicing battle calls:
Example lO
In measure 61 the strings drop out entirely and a full military band plays a new march, suitable for the field and not
at all singable. In the coda this field march returns, and
the stage directions read "Partono tutti alia militare;" 18 in
this playful aria about playing the imaginative has drawn
playfully near to the real, with the help of the "realistic"
rhythms and colors of music.
Figaro's description of Cherubino goes a long way toward explaining some of the paradoxes which surround
him. There is much about the "little Cherub" which
evokes another moonstruck child, an antique deity-the
figure of Eros-Cupid. The imagery of the libretto of Le
nozze di Figaro, thoroughly pastoral, is also frequently
classical. Much of this language centers around Cherubino himself; even Basilio calls him "Cherubino, Cherubin d'amore," hinting at the connection with Eros, and to
Figaro in this aria he is a "little Narcisetto, little Adonis of
love." The classical and the pastoral were for the eighteenth century two genres inextricably mixed. The shepherd-lovers of late eighteenth-century pastoral pieces are
inevitably given classical-sounding names, often drawn directly from the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil;
they are distant descendants of that tradition. At the end
of the opera Figaro is moved to draw the connection himself: just after Susanna sings her beautiful pastorale,
"Deh, vieni," musings on the theme of the correspondence between the twilight night and the state of a lover's
soul (and meant to tease Figaro for the absurdity of his distrust of her), he is drawn, coming to interrupt her purported rendezvous, ironically to style himself as Vulcan,
and Susanna and the unknown lover as Venus and Mars.
The pastoral diction and musette of "Non so pili" place
Cherubino squarely in the Arcadian tradition; as Eros he
presides over the couples in the opera-the indigenous
deity of pastoral love.
The pastoral Eros of Le nozze di Figaro is very different
from whatever Eros presides, for example, in Don Giovanni. There Eros wounds, and often disastrously; he
strikes Donna Elvira just as Virgil's Cupid cunningly
pierced the breast of Dido with a fatal love for Aeneas. In
Figaro, on the other hand, Eros is love through his very
vulnerability. In his openness to all love and love for all, he
72
touches Susanna, Figaro, and the Countess, and makes
the Count suspicious and edgy, although Almaviva is
plainly never quite sure why he should distrust the young
page. The Count ought to worry less about the possibility
of Cherubino seducing the Countess and more about the
efficacy of Cherubino's selfless brand of love, which Almaviva is incapable of comprehending. In the dogma of
Cherubino's eros, being moved by someone is equally as
important as one's own su<;cess in moving the other toward oneself. Cherubino celebrates passion in the strict
sense of the word-the joys and pains of suffering the object of one's affections to move one. When in the finale of
the second act the Count gasps out "Rosina" (II, 15, 229230), he is beginning to learn about this "being affected."
Cherubino's relationships with Susanna, the Countess,
and Figaro reveal the many facets of his special "affection." One erotic thread runs through them all: an aliveness to the physical qualities of the beloved-his walk, his
gestures, the sound of his voice-so that merely glancing
at the beloved gives one an involuntary start. Cherubino
presides over many relationships not explicitly erotic. He
is fond of Susanna, and calls her sorella ("sister"), she
dresses him up like a doll, and they banter and plot like
brother and sister. When in Act II they are caught in danger together they behave like two frightened children. Yet
Susanna affectionately appreciates Cherubino's beauty;
his physical presence moves her. "Che vezzo, che figura!/
Mirate il bricconcello,/Mirate quanta e bello!" 19 she cries.
Cherubino's affection for the Countess is more explicitly
erotic; he steals her ribbon for a magic talisman, and she is
obviously fluttered by his presence. When Susanna admires him the Countess turns away abruptly, snapping
"Quante buffonerie!"20 as though to remind herself to keep
her distance from the charming boy. Rosina is not a middleaged matron, but a young girl recently married and suffering from the inattention of a philandering husband. But, as
I have already pointed out, Mozart and da Ponte treat the
erotic side of their affection more delicately than did Beaumarchais, combining it with Cherubino's hero-worship of
his handsome and benevolent godmother; if anything,
Cherubino's stammering when he speaks to the Countess
makes her seem more matronly than she actually is.
Despite his awkwardness and naivete, his constant facility for annoying, all the characters in the opera find themselves moved in some way by this absurd child. The
Count's exasperation at Cherubino's ubiquity goes deeper
than he realizes. When he cries "E mi fara il destino/Ritrovar questa paggio in ogni loco!"21 he is only admitting to
the boy's disturbing influence on all the loves and friendships in the opera. The affection between Susanna and
the Countess also patterns itself on Cherubino's eros:
awakened by each other's admirable qualities, they move
toward each other and toward friendship. The opera is in
fact about the friendship between the two women and its
possibility-how trust and affection can exist between
two people who share nobility of character, but not of
rank. Now it can be seen more clearly why it is fitting that
WINTER 1982
�Cherubino be a poet. The androgynous Eros-Cupid, neither young nor old, male nor female, .human nor divine,
sings a song which celebrates the passions which Susanna
experiences gladly, the Countess perforce sadly, which
the Countess is too dignified, Susanna too matter-of-fact,
to express outright. The utterly conventional poetry of
"Voi che sapete" from its first line suggests another, less
conventional poet and a more serious intent: "Donne
ch'avete intelletto d'amore"22 is the first line of Dante's
sonnet sequence about the fine discipline of love, and the
abstract quality of its language is a reflection of the tradition in which erotic love sets the soul on the path to
higher things. Cherubino the poet is celebrating the two
women themselves; the opening words of his song sweep
them into his court. He identifies them as "donne che
sanno che cosa e amor, che hanna intelletto d'amore."2 3
He dubs them secular Beatrices, mediums for the workings of Eros. A special aura surrounds them; comprehend-
ing "che cosa e amor," they are gifted with a surpassing
vision of the way things are. (The Countess, it should be
pointed out, returns the compliment, in "Porgi, amor,"
her aria at the opening of Act II, addressing her petition
there to the god of love, Cherubino-Eros.) Furthermore,
by addressing the two women indiscriminately as donne,
Cherubino reveals the special bond between servant and
mistress; initiates, at least, can address them on equal
terms. This relation fittingly comes to light reflected in
the eyes of its catalyst, Cherubino d'a more.
We return in a roundabout way to Figaro and "Non pili
andrai." There exist various interpretations of what Figaro is up to in the aria. It may be perhaps just what it
seems~Figaro's attempt to divert Cherubino from the
sorrows of parting~or, as some have suggested, actually
an attack on Cherubino, teasing banter meant to rub salt
in the wounds, stemming from Figaro's jealousy of the
boy's appeal for the ladies or from a plebeian's resentment
of the aristocratic page 24 In the latter case an aside which
Figaro makes to Cherubino just before the aria~"Io vo'
parlati/Pria che tu parta"' 5 ~is taken as a bullying invitation to a later showdown, whispered so that Susanna can't
hear. That aside, however, has a further audience~the
Count and Basilio. Although many editions have them
leave the stage just before the aside, in the 1786 libretto
(and in the corresponding scene from Le mariage de Figaro) they do not leave, and indeed witness the whole of
Figaro's performance; the scene is rarely played this way,
and loses most of its significance as a result. A scrap of dialogue from the beginning of Act II, just before Cherubino
sings "Voi che sa pete," clarifies the intent of the aside immediately. Figaro is expounding to the Countess the plan
for the Count's humiliation, which involves dressing
Cherubino as Susanna and sending him to the rendezvous
with the Count. Then Figaro says to the Countess, "Il picciol Cherubino,/Per mio consiglio non ancor partito . .. " 26
He plainly wants words with the boy here in Act I not in
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
order to vent his jealousy or class resentment, but to keep
Cherubino from leaving the castle, so that they can lay
plans about the plot he mentions in Act II. Thus all
through "Non pili andrai" Figaro is foresworn to keep
Cherubino back from battle; he has no intention ofletting
the Count disturb the ornamental life of the "amorous
butterfly, flitting around night and day." In the course of
the plot the lad will have to be disguised as a maiden, but
the task takes almost no effort; already his checks have
"that blushing, womanly color." By celebrating the imminent departure as if in rueful assent to it, Figaro's affectionate romp with Cherubino is meant to keep the watching Count off the scent.
Yet the artful dodge has deeper overtones. If Cherubino is the presiding genius of the opera, offering a paradigm of the right way to love, the moment of romping joy
must be more than a sugar-coated pill for a charming
young rascal and a dodge to deceive the Count. "Non pili
andrai" establishes an important relationship between Figaro and Cherubino. Least of all is Figaro teaching Cherubino; he is describing Cherubino, celebrating CheruCherubino, and enlisting Cherubino.
In the first case, Cherubino's comportment on the
stage will not in itself spell out his "second nature." We
need the comments of another observer who will single
out details which consolidate the scattered impressions
generated by "Non so pili." We hear Cherubino called a
"little Narcissus, little Adonis of love," have our attention
drawn to his "little feathers," his "sparkling air," his
"blushing, womanly color," and our impressions are confirmed; it was right that the youth reminded us of that
other love child, the pagan cherub Eros.
Secondly, Figaro celebrates Cherubino. Susanna and
the Countess need not be embarrassed about being moved
by Cherubino, even in his guise as a page; for women to
amuse themselves decorously with the castle mascot is
perfectly proper. Figaro must also be touched by the
power of the strange youth, but to show it is for him a
more delicate matter. Both Figaro and Cherubino are
male, and while they are near the same age, Figaro has attained his manhood. On the other hand, Figaro may be a
little jealous of Cherubino's luscious youth. Circumstances
prevent their sharing the innocent playmate-friendship of
Susanna and Cherubino. Later, at the end of the opera,
Figaro turns away momentarily from the graces of the two
women, giving in to the darker passions of jealousy and
distrust. It is important that he show here that his primary
attachment is to the court of Cherubino, and not to the
selfish brotherhood of the Count and his satellites. Figaro
will rarely reveal how Cherubino moves him; a fraternal
romp in which all three join is one of the few occasions
where it is possible. Figaro shows his affection for Cherubino by exercising for the boy his imaginative talents;
"Non piu andrai" is a moment of uloveplay" between
Cherubino and Figaro.
Finally, Figaro enlists Cherubino. Figaro in his tribute
to the page admits the power of Cherubino's kind of pas-
73
�sian. Only this eros will unite all the conspirators, later on
even moving an unlikely ally like Marcellina over to their
side (when she sees Figaro as if for the first time, and is
genuinely moved by the person of her son). To arm Eros·
Cupid with arrows and shield was an ancient conceit.
Here in "Non pill andrai" Figaro is arming Cherubino,
girding him for the struggle to come. In fact the figure of
the "bedroom soldier," usually the matter of vulgar jokes,
becomes in Figaro an emblem for the righteous of the
opera and for the right kind of passion; the gentle Count·
ess moves to a mixture of lyric and military modes in
"Porgi, amor," and in the finale to Act III a ragged band of
militants for Eros executes a stirring march, the uniformed Cherubino at their head, before they outmaneuver
the Count once again. The gesture of the military march,
taking off from Cherubino's imminent field commission,
becomes a testimony to trust in the powers of human af.
fection when matched against the assailing brutishness of
men. "Amor vincit omnia": the lyrics of Cherubino the
poet celebrate this maxim in all its delicate compulsion.
l. "Go on, you old pedant, you stuck-up lady scholar; just because you
once read two books, and annoyed Madame in her youth ... " (I, v,
75- 78).
2. "Leggila alia padrona,/Leggila tu medesma,/Leggila a Barbarina, a
Marcellina,/Leggila ad ogni donna del palazzo!" ("Read it to my mistress, you read it to yourself, read it to Barbarina, to Marcellina, read it
to every woman in the palace").
3. "Povero Cherubin, siete voi pazzo?" ("Poor Cherubin, are you
mad?").
4. In the original of Le nozze di Figaro, Beaumarchais's Le mariage de
Figaro, the Countess explains that Cherubino is related to her family
and is her godchild (1, x). Da Ponte omitted the scene in which these
lines occur, but the Countess is referred to as Cherubino's comare or
godmother (by Susanna-!, v, 86). It was customary to take nobJe.born
boys into noble households as pages.
5. "I don't know what I am, what I'm doing .... Sometimes I'm on fire,
sometimes I'm all ice .... Every woman makes me blush, makes me
tremble. At the mere names of love, of pleasure, I grow agitated, my
heart skips a beat, and a desire which I cannot explain forces me to
speak of love!"
6. See Putnam Aldrich, Rhythm in Seventeenth-Century Italian Monody
New York 1966.
7. Lines three and four of the first stanza might seem to be an anomaly
in an anapestic scheme because of the string of six eighth-notes with
which they begin:
Q-.~.,; do11·n4.. CM·11'.fr- ,1; e~-/D-r~
n1nn
J JJ/JJ
But the first eighth-note on the syllable don- is an appOggiatura varying
the line by embellishing the all-important word donna; it does not distract from the underlying rhythm.
8. For a more detailed discussion of the reasons for substituting these
terms for the more conventional ones, see Leonard G. Ratner, "Harmonic Aspects of Classic Form," Journal of the American Musicological
Society 2, 1949, 159-68.
9. Measure 22, using for the first two lines the syncopation from the
earlier cadence.
10. Measure 27-vii7 ofF, the new dominant. Or the Db could be regarded as a chromatic appoggiatura to a V~ of V; the effect is the same.
ll. Ordinarily to register "truest" passion in the middle of an operatic
aria the character moves from strictly measured music to the freer
74
rhythms of recitative. For example, in the finale to the second act of
Figaro, in the midst of a spirited 4/4 interchange between the Count
and the Countess, he calls her suddenly by her Christian name and she,
deeply stung, answers him in a phrase of recitative which brings the
rhythmic action to an abrupt halt (II, 15, 230-233). In "Non so pill" the
strictly "poetic" setting is apprehended as the artifice, and the singer
need not resort to declamation to register his natural voice.
12. "I speak of love when I'm awake, I speak of love when I'm dreaming: to the water, to the shadows, to the mountains, to the flowers, to the
grass, to the fountains, to the echo, to the air, to the winds, which bear
away with themselves the sound ofthe empty syllables" (ms. 54-91).
13. "E, se non ho chi m'oda,/Parlo d'amor con me"-the last two lines
of the text of "Non so pill."
14. "Ladies, you who know what love is, see if I have it in my heart."
15. "I shall tell you again what I'm feeling; it's new for me, and I don't
know how to understand it. I have a feeling full of desire; sometimes it's
pleasure, sometimes torment. I'm cold, and then I feel my soul all
ablaze, and in a moment I'm cold again. I'm looking for a good which is
outside of me; I don't know who has it, or what it is. I sigh and moan
without wanting to, I quiver and tremble without knowing it, I find no
peace night or day, and yet it pleases me to languish this way."
16. Alddch, 103-133.
17. "No more, amorous butterfly, will you go flitting around night and
day disturbing the beauties' beauty-sleep, you little Narcissus, little
Adonis of love. No more will you have these fine little feathers, that light
and rakish cap, that sparkling air, that blushing, womanly color."
18. "All exit in military style."
19. "What a bearing, what a face! Look at the little colt, see how beautiful he is!" (II, 12, 89-92).
20. "What foolishness!" (II, 12, 119).
21. "And will destiny make me find this page everywhere!" (II, viii, 8385).
22. "Ye women who comprehend love ... "
23. "Women who know what love is, who comprehend love ... " My
sentence is a conflation of the opening line of the aria and the opening
line of Dante's poem.
24. This suggestion is made by Siegmund Levarie (Mozart's Le nozze di
Figaro: A Critical Analysis, Chicago 1952, 72), and by Frits Noske ("Social Tensions in Le nozze di Figaro," Music and Letters, January 1969,
52). Because it is important ammunition for those who see the opera as a
revolutionary comedy in the tradition of its original, and not as a pastoral
romance about the nature of true attachment, as it seems to me to have
become, this suggestion needs refutation. It depends partly on the assumption that Figaro, while he defers to Cherubino in public, addressing him in the second person plural at the beginning of this scene ("E
voi non applaudite?"), is in private insolent (he addresses Cherubino
thereafter exclusively as tu).
But since all Figaro's remarks except for one aside are overheard by
the Count and Basilio (see above), there is actually no distinction made
here between public and private. According to the original libretto, Figaro's final words to Cherubino before the aria ("Farewell, little Cherubino. How your [tuo]fate changes in a moment!") are said with feigned
joy (finta gioia)-the public prevails. Furthermore, although Cherubino
is probably of gentle birth, he is nevertheless a child, not in his proper
home, and in a position of service; ordinary protocol will probably not
apply. The issue of Cherubino's aristocracy never seems to be a live one
in his relationships with Susanna and Figaro, and so tu is no more necessarily insolent than voi defers. Susanna calls Cherubino voi perhaps for
the same reasons as the Countess does-to keep the attractive and
amorous boy at arm's length. And Figaro's tu to Cherubino is probably
affectionate, his one public voi a perfunctory attempt, before he warms
to his role as fond older brother, to conceal from the Count and Basilio
their relationship as friends and-as I shall show in a moment-future
conspirators.
25. "I want to speak to you before you leave."
26. "Little Cherubino, who on my advice has not yet left ... " (italics
mine).
WINTER 1982
�The Fury of Aeneas
Joe
The story Homer tells in the Iliad begins with the eruption of the anger of Achilles. As the twenty-fourth book of
the poem opens, that anger has reached its greatest intensity. Achilles "let fall the swelling tears, lying sometimes
along his side, sometimes on his back, and now again prone
on his face; then he would stand upright, and pace turning in distraction along the beach of the sea ... (At dawn,)
when he had yoked running horses under the chariot he
would fasten Hektor behind the chariot, so as to drag him,
and draw him three times around the tomb of Menoitios'
fallen son, then rest again in his shelter, and throw down
the dead man and leave him to lie sprawled on his face in
the dust ... So Achilleus in his fury outraged great
Hektor." (24. 9-22) The wrath which has withstood the
events of twenty-three books has swollen into a rage
which denies Achilles sleep, food, or the cessation of his
tears, a rage which breaks forth in monotonous acts of revenge which do not relieve but frustrate and provoke.
Achilles now walks the circular path at the center of anger
in which it is quenchless, infinite.
But the Iliad is not finally the story of the victory of anger over Achilles, because Zeus has one last scheme. He
arranges for Priam to visit Achilles, to stand before him
risking his wrath, to ask in person for pity. Priam kills the
anger of Achilles by displacing it with the grief of Achilles,
which can meet and merge with the grief of Priam and
come to rest in mutual comforting. Here is Homer's de~
scription of that last and least-expected turning point in
the Iliad: as Priam ends his words to Achilles, saying, " 'I
put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my
children,' " Homer continues, 10 So he spoke, and stirred in
the other a passion of grieving for his own father. He took
the old man's hand and pushed him gently away, and the
A tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Joe Sachs delivered this lecture in Santa Fe on September 18, 1981, and in Annapolis on October 2,
1981.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Sachs
two remembered, as Priam sat huddled at the feet of
Achilleus and wept close for manslaughtering Hektor and
Achilleus wept now for his own father, now again for Patroklos. The sound of their mourning moved in the house.
Then when great Achilleus had taken full satisfaction in
sorrow and the passion for it had gone from his mind and
body, thereafter he rose from his chair, and took the old
man by the hand, and set him on his feet again, in pity for
the grey head and the grey beard, and spoke to him and
addressed him in winged words." (24. 506-17)
Book twenty-four ends with one last Homeric dawn, in
which the doomed people of Troy celebrate the burial of
their beloved Hector with fitting ceremonies and a glorious feast. Such was the burial of Hector, breaker of
horses, only because, between his wrath and his own imminent death, Achilles rejoined the human community.
The climax of the Iliad, then, is the moment when Achilles remembers his father. That moment, which pierces his
heart and lets the anger drain from it, will not add a day to
his life or to the survival of Troy, but it does make supportable the enormous weight of grief which has built in
Achilles, in Priam, in the Trojans, and in the hearer or
reader of the poem.
Virgil's Aeneid is, above all else, a reply to the Iliad and
Odyssey and a rejection of the kind of comfort Homer offers. I have set before you at length the moment into
which Homer puts a power which counterbalances all the
horror and pain of the Iliad because Virgil frames the
Aeneid with two echoes of that moment. Twice in the
Aeneid, in scenes of battle, the image of Aeneas' father
comes into his mind. On the first occasion, Aeneas is looking at Priam, and the memory of his father stirs him to action. The scene is in Book two, but it is a flashback to the
beginning of Aeneas' story, and the memory of his father
marks the beginning of his undertaking of the deeds to
which he has been called. On the second occasion, Aeneas
has just watched a young man die whom he killed, and
75
�whose father he is about to confront. The two characters,
Lausus and Mezentius, evoke memories of Hector and
Priam for the reader, and in Aeneas a memory of his father which occasions a moment of understanding. This
scene is in Book ten, but it is a direct preparation for the
understanding of the concluding lines and action of the
Aeneid. Thus the climactic moment of the Iliad is present
in the first and last events in Virgil's story, and in both
cases it is put in a perspective in which its power is acknowledged but its weight is lessened.
In Book two of the Aeneid we watch alongside a helpless Aeneas while Achilles' one deed of comfort and kindness is desecrated by Achilles' son. Listen as this third
generation speaks to the first: " 'Carry off these tidings; go
and bring this message to my father, son of Peleus; and
remember, let him know my sorry doings, how degenerate
is Neoptolemus. Now die.' This said, he dragged him to
the very altar stone, with Priam shuddering and slipping
in the blood that streamed from his own son. And Pyrrhus
with his left hand clutched tight the hair of Priam; his
right hand drew his glistening blade, and then he buried it
hilt-high in the king's side. This was the end of Priam's
destinies ... Now he lies along the shore, a giant trunk, his
head torn from his shoulders, as a corpse without a
name." (2. 547-58) As Neoptolemus sinks back into the
horror from which his father had emerged, the words
"This was the end of Priam" overtake and destroy the
calm of the words "Such was the burial of Hector."
Aeneas can do nothing for Priam, since he watches
trapped on a roof-beam of the wrecked and burning palace. But as he watches Priam die, he remembers his own
father, and all his helpless loved ones whom he has left at
home while he fights a useless battle to vent his rage at
the conquering Greeks. It seems that the memory of his
father will recall Aeneas to the deeds the ghost of Hector
has asked of him: to let Troy fall, and carry himself and
Troy's holy things across the sea. Like Achilles, Aeneas
has been wasting himself in the effort to exact the satisfaction of revenge from his enemies, and like Achilles he
is restored to himself in remembering his father. But just
as we begin to expect Aeneas to return to save his father,
wife, and son, and leave revenge behind, his eye lights on
Helen. In that sight his father's need of him is forgotten,
and a blind fury to destroy the cause of so much evil overwhelms even his capacity to keep that evil from reaching
those dearest to him. As Aeneas' sword is about to fall on
Helen, his goddess-mother grabs his arm. Venus sends
him to save his family, after showing him that not Helen
but the gods are responsible for the destruction of Troy.
But the violent arresting of Aeneas' arm when it has been
set in motion by the strongest longing in his heart leaves
behind a feeling of frustration which is not released until
the last lines of the poem. That is the beginning of the
story of Aeneas' journey. Let us try to understand how it
speaks to Homer.
The healing of Achilles' anger is the last event in his
story, and nearly the last in his life. It is enshrined forever
76
by the structure of Homer's story, which makes it the resolution of twenty-three books of tension. Achilles' story
moves out of anger, through pity, to a peace in the midst
of war. But does Homer's framing of that story reveal or
distort? Does his emphasis convey the true weights of
things? Virgil carries Homer's story beyond Homer's ending, to submerge Achilles' humanity in the brutality of his
son and Hector's glorious funeral in the hideous, headless,
nameless corpse of his father. But more important, Virgil
appropriates the climactic moment of the Iliad to make it
a fleeting mood which has no lasting effect, none in the
world and none in the heart of Aeneas. The Iliad ends
with a frozen picture of a pendulum at the top of its
swing: the picture is beautiful but that of which it is a picture is unstable. If only the dualities in our lives could be
laid to rest by our embracing of their wholesome sides, if
only the death of anger could be an overcoming, once and
for all, of its power over us, then the world might be a turbulent but finally a simple good place, and evil our own
fault. But dead anger rises again; the self-destructive passions can be seen for what they are and still reassert their
power over us. The poet Homer can show us things that
make us glad, but is that seeing what we need? The anger
of Aeneas recurs throughout the Aeneid, and both its ebb
and its flow are destructive. One of the principal teachings of the Aeneid is that rage is ineradicable from the human heart, because its cure is worse than the disease. Let
us watch as Aeneas' eyes are opened to this ugliest of
truths, in Virgil's second echo of the climax of the Iliad.
The worst man in the Aeneid is undoubtedly Mezentius,
a tyrant who tortured his subjects for sport until they rebelled and he escaped. Thousands of those subjects unite
with Aeneas in his Italian war, solely for the chance to kill
Mezentius. Without any good reason, as Virgil puts it, another thousand remain loyal to Mezentius, among them
his son Lausus, called breaker of horses. When Aeneas
wounds Mezentius with a spearcast, Lausus, his valor
awakened by his love for his father, prevents Aeneas'
sword from falling, giving his companions the chance to
save Mezentius and drive back Aeneas. Fury rises in Aeneas as he is once again thwarted on the point of killing a
thing of evil, but as he waits in shelter for all his enemies'
javelins to be thrown he calms down, and shouts at La usus
to be sensible and withdraw. When Lausus insists on
fighting him, a greater anger surges in Aeneas, and in that
rage he kills Lausus.
At whom is Aeneas angry? Can it be at Lausus, whom
he has no desire to fight and for whom he has nothing but
admiration? As Aeneas looks at La usus' dying face he sees
the image of his own love for his own father, and gives the
dead Lausus to his companions for honorable burial. It is
at this moment that the transformation in the heart of
Achilles resonates most strongly in the Aeneid, but Aeneas felt his pity before Lausus was dead, and would have
spared him had he not been driven to a resurgence of his
dead anger. To understand the killing of Lausus is, I think,
to be halfway to understanding the killing of Turnus,
WINTER 1982
�which would be equivalent to understanding the whole
Aeneid. Let us keep trying.
'
Lausus loves a father whom no one could respect. His
motive is therefore pure, irrational love, with no other
support. By painting Mezentius as unrelievedly, monstrously evil, Virgil makes the central choice of Lausus'
life be between love and everything that makes sense.
Even further, the circumstances of the battle force Lausus
to measure the strength of that love, since after he has
saved his father's life he could retreat honorably, and
must decide whether to do so or to throw away his life.
Unrestrained love and loyalty are, for Lausus, consistent
only with what is wild and reckless: to attack Aeneas and
die. Both Lausus and Aeneas have a long time to think
about this before it happens. There is an irrational and inescapable logic at work in the scene: the better a man Lausus is the more is it necessary that he die in a bad cause,
and the more fully Aeneas recognizes his goodness the
more necessary is it that he kill him, and not do him the
insult of refusing his self-sacrifice. The rage which supplies the motive power for the killing Aeneas has no heart
to commit is a rage brought about by his recognition of
the way in which both Lausus and he are trapped.
Achilles and Priam, suffering the worst private grief,
could draw together in mutual recognition and give each
other what each needed most. Priam gave Achilles deliverance from his anger, and Achilles gave Priam the means
and the time to unite with his city and his dead son in one
last civic festival. In the corresponding Virgilian recognition scene, it seems that Lausus can give Aeneas nothing,
and Aeneas can give Lausus only death. With the image
of his own father in mind, Aeneas asks the dead Lausus,
"Miserable boy, what can I give you now? What honor is
worthy of your character?" (10. 825-6) He gives to the
corpse the weapons in which it found its only happiness,
and gives the corpse itelf back to its own people, to be
mingled with the ashes and shades of its ancestors, wondering aloud if that will matter to anyone. Finally, he dedicates to La usus the only gift in his power which can solace
such a miserably unhappy death: the resolve to make his
own greatness such that there will be no shame in having
fallen beneath it. Thus La usus has given something to Aeneas-the burden of another obligation to the dead. The
Homeric comfort of the sharing in human community is
not available either to Lausus or to Aeneas. Lausus, whom
Virgil introduces in Book seven as a young man worthy to
be happy, had the wrong father, and he cannot but be the
son of his father. Aeneas likewise cannot escape being the
man on whom Trojans, Italians, and gods depend to stand
divided in war from Lausus, and be his killer. The Homeric world, whatever divisions may be within it, makes a
whole; the Virgilian world is too full of purposes too
deeply crossed to be composed, ever.
Am I going too far in reading in an intensely painful but
small tragic event a vision of a tragic world? Is not Virgil's
theme the bringing of law to the world? Are not the tragedies of Lausus and Turnus and Camilla and Nisus and
1
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Euryalus and Pallas and Evander and Amata and Dido
and Palinurus the events which Virgil shapes into the
transformation of the world into a place in which such
things will no longer happen? It is true that the bringing
of the world to peace under law is the theme of the Aeneid,
but we must not let anyone but Virgil tell us what Virgil
thinks about that subject.
We hear of it first, early in Book one, from Jupiter. He
tells Venus that Aeneas' Roman descendents will be the
lords of all things, without limits in time or place, that one
of them, meaning Augustus, will carry his empire to the
Ocean and his fame to the stars, and in doing so allow the
rough ages of the world to become gentle under law. And
here are Jupiter's last words: "The gruesome gates of war,
with tightly welded iron plates, shall be shut fast. Within,
unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall groan
horribly with bloody lips." (293-6) Forty lines devoted to
triumph and glory seem to dissolve in four lines of ugliness. One's gaze is turned not outward, to a world finally
free of the source of war, but to the struggling caged being
confined within. The last words of this first picture of
Rome are not of victory or victors but of a victim, Furor,
and of the sights and sounds of his pain. Why is rage presented as a person? Why is a reader who is incapable of
enjoying a description of torture made to sympathize with
the cause of war?
Three lines after this ghastly and troubling portrait we
hear for the first time in the poem the name of Dido. One
third of the poem of the founding of Rome is the story of
Dido, and more than a third of its impact is carried by Virgil's presentation of her. One famous commentator has
said that Virgil was "no master of the epic art" because he
allowed such things as the sufferings of Dido to overwhelm his efforts to glorify Rome. Another has said that
the Aeneid is the first wholly successful epic ever written,
because it is the first to have the unity attained previously
only in dramas, a unity evident primarily in the complete
merging of the Dido story into that of the triumph of
Rome. Each commentator is half-right. The Aeneid is unified, but not around the figure of Augustus; Dido is the
most powerful figure in Virgil's composition, but not by
accident. The theme of Rome's bringing of a new age of
law to the world enters the poem, modulates to a strange
sadness, and passes over into the story of Dido. Dido's
story is deeper than Rome's, and illuminates it.
Dido is, to begin with, in the same situation as Aeneas,
and she has handled that situation so well that everything
about her gives hope to Aeneas at a time when he has
none. She too has been driven out of her own country and
been responsible for the lives of a band of fellow-refugees.
She too has had to find a new life in the strange and unknown lands of the West. She has won a place for her people by winning the respect of neighboring rulers, and under
her leadership, her subjects are building the conditions of
a healthy communal life: fortifications, houses, a harbor, a
theater, a senate. Already built, in the center of the city, is
77
�a temple to Juno, filled with scenes of the Trojan War.
The work under way is to Aeneas a vision of happiness,
and the completed work feeds his soul. One of the other
Trojans sees in Carthage a city with the power to impose
justice on the proud and a ruler with the goodness to
spare the defeated. We will hear almost the same words
spoken in Book six as an exhortation to Rome. The story
of Dido, smaller only in geographical scale, begins where
the story of Rome aims.
Dido's Phoenician Carthage, where Aeneas tells the
tale of his long wanderings, is, like the Phaiakian Scheria
of Alkinous and Arete, a city ruled by virtue and strong intellect. Dido herself, like Penelope, is a woman with the
dignity to keep arrogant suitors at a distance. And the hospitality, the capacity to permit another to be at home in a
place that is not his own, that is so beautifully depicted in
the Odyssey, is enjoyed by Aeneas nowhere but in the
home of Dido. In Virgil's re-casting of Homer's story of
Odysseus, almost all its places and people are condensed
into the story of Dido. Like the Iliad, Homer's Odyssey is a
story of the recovery of human community. Its culmination is the restoration of political order to Ithaca. But Dido's story reverses the Odyssean motion from anarchy to
order, from savagery to serenity. In the midst of his journey Odysseus is cursed by a one-eyed monster, a nonhuman being who lives outside all law. At the end of his
stay in Carthage, Aeneas too is cursed by a being who is
outside all law and community, and that monster is Dido
herself.
Why was Dido so successful as a ruler? I think Virgil's
briefest answer can be found near the end of Book one:
because her soul was in repose, because in turn her heart
was out of use {resides animas desuetaque corda, I. 722).
Since the death of her first husband, she tells her sister,
Aeneas alone has caused her judgment to bend and her
soul to totter. (4. 20-3) The empty pathways which the
flame of love once burned through her have not closed or
healed. The ancient flame is still within Dido, just as a living rage is still behind the gates of war which Augustus
closes with force and with law. In Latin, the name of Augustus' victim and that of Dido's conqueror are the same,
furor. Virgil's one brief portrait of a happy city is of Carthage under the rule of Dido for only so long as the furious
love within her is out of use. In the Odyssey, political community is displayed as the natural and the only life which
realizes what it is to be a human being. In the Aeneid, political life is presented as depending upon the inhuman
constraint that Dido practices upon herself and Augustus
exerts on the world. Carthage thrives on Didp' s serene
control, and collapses into disarray when she falls in love.
Many readers have seen in the fate of Dido a dangerous
example which Aeneas must see and learn to avoid. Such
readers see the foundations of the political life in Aeneas'
rejection of her. Like an oak tree in the Alps shaken by the
North wind, Aeneas suffers from love and care for Dido,
but he withstands their fury. Reason holds firm against
passion and duty vanquishes desire. One pities Dido, but
78
rejoices that Aeneas does not let his own pity become a
morass in which the hopes of his son and of the world
would be lost. But Aeneas is bound to Dido not just by his
love for her, which is his to control if he can, but by the
fact that he has allowed her to love him. That is not passion but choice, and to reverse it is not duty but betrayal.
In the simile of the oak tree, it is Aeneas' mind which
overcomes the care in his breast, but that is merely the
overcoming of the last obstacle to a choice he has already
made. The widespread interpretation according to which
Aeneas' rejection of Dido is a victory of the rational and
political over the passionate and personal does not stand
up to a moment's scrutiny. He has already told Dido that
he loves her less than he loves the remnants of Troy
which he had been bidden to carry to Italy. (4. 340-7) His
choice is personal through-and-through. And in setting
out for the city he will build in Italy, Aeneas knows that he
is leaving Carthage in wreckage. (4. 86-9) His choice is political through-and-through as well. Aeneas cannot choose
otherwise than he does. He has gotten himself into a fix
from which there is only one way out. But he cannot pretend that what he does is not a betrayal. Aeneas does not
understand his destruction of Dido as he will later understand his destruction of Lausus, but we need not be fooled.
But if Aeneas' abandonment of Dido cannot be praised
as an act of Stoic virtue, must it not be given its due as an
act of piety? Twice Aeneas tells Dido that his leaving her
for a bride and kingdom in Italy is not by his own will but
in accordance with what is fated, and we have known from
the second line of the poem that Virgil is writing of a man
whose deeds are compelled by fate. But what is the nature
of that compulsion? What does Virgil understand fate to
be? He tells us that Dido's death was not only undeserved
but unfated (4. 696), and, narrating a battle in Book nine,
he tells us that if Turnus had hesitated a moment to break
the bolts on one gate, Rome would never have come to be
(9. 757-9). In order to understand what Virgil has written,
we must conceive a fate that is both limited and fallible.
The Latin fatum contains all the meanings of our word
fate, but in it they are derivative meanings. Never absent
from the Latin word is its primary sense of a thing spoken
or uttered. And Virgil does not present the speech which
is fate as an irrevocable decree, but uses the word with
verbs meaning to call or to ask. The source of fate is a mystery in the Aeneid, but the nature of its action is evident.
Fated outcomes are known to some among the gods and
the shades of the dead, but are brought about only by human beings who must be lured, persuaded, or tricked. Every device of rhetoric must be used, because fate in the
Aeneid remains always and altogether subordinate to human choice.
The fall of Troy in Book two, for example, is a fated
event. The destruction of the city is completed by Neptune, who shakes the walls and uproots the foundations
from the earth, but neither he nor any other god acts so
directly until the conquest of the Trojans by the Greeks is
an accomplished fact. First, an indecisive war has been
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�carried on for ten years. Second, the Greeks have concealed their best fighters in a counterfeit religious offering
left on the beach of Troy. Third, a lying story told by a
Greek has aroused the pity of the Trojans and inclined
them to bring the fatal horse into their city. But beyond
all the strength, cleverness, and rhetorical skill of the
Greeks, one more element was necessary, without which,
Aeneas says years later, Troy would still be standing: the
minds of the Trojans had to be made left-handed (2. 54-6);
they had to be brought confidently to trust that the divine
purpose was opposite to what it truly was. One respected
Trojan leader, Laocoon, priest of Neptune, would have
held Troy against all the resources of Greeks and gods,
had he not been made to seem to be profaning a sacred offering. Laocoon pierced the horse with a spear, before Sinon told the Trojans that their prosperity would depend
on treating the horse with reverence. At that moment a
pair of gigantic snakes came across the sea and the land,
making straight for the small sons of Laocoon, and killing
them and him. That horrible supernatural spectacle was
the call of fate which the Trojans answered to their own
rmn.
That which is fated must be recognized, interpreted, assented to, and carried out by human beings, who may be
mistaken or may have been deliberately deceived. Aeneas
is responsible not only for his choice to answer his fate,
but also for the judgment that what fate calls him to is
good. The half-understood future that could be brought
about by Aeneas' deeds does make a powerful claim upon
him, but so does the life of Dido, which he has allowed to
become dependent upon him. No one but he can make
the final decision that the former claim is more worthy of
respect than the latter. That Aeneas is not comfortable
with his choice is obvious when he begs Dido's ghost for
understanding and absolution. Her stony refusal and undying hatred make it forever impossible for anyone to say
that his choice was right. And the unforgettable example
of Laocoon makes it equally impossible to take any comfort in the reflection that Aeneas' choice was fated.
There is a powerful presence in the Aeneid of the inescapable, but it is not the same as nor even entirely compatible with the fated. The divine call which pulls one
toward the future may be refused or defeated, but the human entanglements which grasp one from out of the past
cannot be escaped. Aeneas can abandon Dido, but he can
never be free of the pain of the knowledge that he has betrayed the love and trust he had once accepted from her.
The true fatalism of the Aeneid is not a sense of the inevitable triumph of what is to be, of a healing and elevating
future, but a sense of the sad burden of all that has been,
of past choices and rejections that one has not gotten
beyond.
Readers are sometimes puzzled by a character in the
Aeneid who is mentioned repeatedly but to whom Virgil
seems deliberately to have given no human features or
qualities. He is the closest companion of Aeneas, but we
never hear either speak to the other. He is the true or
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
trusty Achates, whose name has become an idiomatic label for a devoted friend, but he seems to be nothing more
than a label; we do not know who Aeneas' friend is or
what he is like. But Virgil often gives his characters names
which are descriptive in Greek. A Greek soldier whom Aeneas encounters on Sicily and whose story he trusts is
called Achaemenides, "still a Greek." An aging boxer who
rouses himself to win one last fight is called Entellus, "mature" or Hat an end." A monster who seems to delight in
evil itself is called Cacus, "the evil one." As a Greek word,
Achates would name ''one who grieves," one whose spe·
cia! or characteristic business is to grieve. Never absent
from the side of Aeneas in anything he does is the true or
trusty grieving one; never, in the Aeneid, does hope overcome grief.
The burden of grief which one feels through the last
two-thirds of the poem is thus explicitly figured in the person of Achates as Aeneas' second self. The inescapability
of the past is also figured by Virgil in one of the great central images of the poem, that of the labyrinth. We hear of
it first in Book five, in connection with an intricate display
of horsemanship by the Trojan children, but the words
are too strong for their immediate occasion. The sons of
Troy are said to be entangled in "an undiscovered and irretraceable wandering" (5. 591) as in the dark and ambiguous Labyrinth of ancient Crete. Aeneas soon sees a carved
image of that Labyrinth on the walls of the Sibyl's cave,
when he begins his journey in Book six to the land of the
dead. The Sibyl tells him that it will be easy to enter that
land, but to retrace his way to the upper air, "this," she
says, "is work; this is labor." (6. 126-9) We are made to
think of the Trojans' journey to Italy as labyrinthine, and
to expect Aeneas' return from Hell to be especially so. We
are startled, then, at the end of Book six, when Aeneas' return to the upper world is no trouble at all. Notoriously,
that return is through the gate of false dreams. Great ingenuity has been expended by many interpreters to remove
the taint of falsity from Aeneas' mission, but it cannot be
done. Aeneas returns to earth with his soul burning with
the love of coming fame, and that is a false exit from the
land of the dead, the place of Dido. The Labyrinth image
is still with us, the sense of betrayal of Dido's love has not
been left behind, and the Sibyl is right: what lies before
Aeneas is the true labor. He has not left the place of the
dead; he will carry it with him wherever he goes.
The war in Italy which occupies the last third of the
Aeneid has a labyrinthine structure. When Turnus enters
the Trojan camp in Book nine, he is pressed back to the
walls and carried back to his comrades by the Tiber before
there is any decisive outcome. In Book ten, when Turnus
has killed Pallas, he and Aeneas fight toward each other,
but juno lures Turnus away from the battlefield with a
phantom-Aeneas made of wind. In Book eleven, when
there is a truce, Aeneas and Turnus are both eager to submit to single combat when a double misunderstanding
makes the war resume; the two men finally catch sight of
each other across a plain, just as night falls. In the last
79
�book, Turnus' goddess-sister, disguised as his charioteer,
keeps carrying him away when Aeneas catches sight of
him. It is only in the last lines of the poem that Aeneas
reaches the center of the maze. The monster he finds
there is not Turnus, now humble, resigned to death, and
gracious in defeat. What is the meaning of Aeneas' last
furious act of violence? What does the maze of war and
frustration that stands between Aeneas and his final confrontation with Turnus have to do with the false exit from
the land of the dead by which Aeneas seems to have entered his labyrinth?
The strange and abrupt ending of the Aeneid collects
into itself all that has gone before it. It is a vivid culmination of the theme of the labyrinth, but that image in turn
takes its meaning from a chain of connected images of
which it is part. The first of these images is Aeolia, the
vast cave of the winds in which, we are told, angry tempests rage in indignation at the mountain which confines
them (l. 53-6). Unrestrained, those winds would destroy
the seas, the lands, and heaven itself. Therefore jupiter,
here called the omnipotent father, confined them and
gave them a king skilled to know when to loosen, when to
draw in, their reins. Can the word omnipotens be intended seriously in this context? It seems that it cannot
mean more than "stronger than anything else," so that
even the winds can be brought under the control of the
strongest one. If jupiter were truly able to do anything, he
could change the nature of the winds, or destroy them
and replace them with others just as useful and not as
dangerous. Could it be that one with the power to choose
otherwise would judge it good to design a world in which
hurricanes must sometimes be unleashed? The single
word omnipotens leaves that question hanging over the
poem.
The second image in the poem which picks up the
theme of caged fury is one we examined earlier: Furor,
rage itself, removed from the world and imprisoned behind the iron gates of war. What we found strange in that
picture was the presentation of rage personified as an object of pity. We saw then that the image of Furor led directly into the story of Dido and that her story was of the
unleashing of furor within her. It is in the story of Dido
that the two earlier images begin to make sense. Dido is
ruined because she is capable of loving without restraint.
The years of her self-denial make possible the existence of
Carthage, because the chiefs of the surrounding countries
respect her fidelity to her dead husband, and because it
gives her reign a dignity and stability under which her subjects thrive. But her sister, who loves her, does not want
Dido to continue that life. Royalty does not fulfill the
longings caged within Dido.
When Venus wants to bind Dido to Aeneas by means of
lust, she begins by arousing in Dido tenderness for a small
child. Once Dido falls in love with Aeneas, her ruin is assured, but she only becomes vulnerable to falling in love
by first feeling a loving response to a child. Would Dido
have been better off if a child sitting in her lap could
80
arouse no irrational longing in her childless heart?-if intimate contact with a child left her feeling no more than
the general benevolence she had for all her subjects? If
not, if a cold, loveless life is never choiceworthy, then the
omnipotent father was right to leave the furious and destructive things in the world, and Virgil was right to grieve
over the imposition of law on the earth. For even a mother's love is potentially furious, as we see it in the mothers
of Euryalus and Lavinia. And the loving, irrational desire
to have a child of one's own is inseparable from all the raging loves and hates within us. It is not the political life
which fulfills us, if Virgil is right, but the loving attachments to particular other people, which also make us vulnerable to frenzy, madness, and war.
Virgil uses the cave of the winds and the gates of war as
images of the human soul, which always encloses irrational longings and loyalties capable of furious emergence
into the world. Madness, as of Lausus, anger, as of Aeneas, rage of battle, as of Turnus, passionate love, as of
Dido, prophetic frenzy, as of the Sybil, and poetic inspiration, as of Virgil himself: these are the meanings my small
Latin dictionary gives for the word furor, the name Virgil
gives to the being at the center. And what is the labyrinth
which surrounds the center? It is, I think, Virgil's picture
of any life which ignores or denies the furious things at
the center. Aeneas leaves the land of the dead glorying in
his vision of the Roman future, only to find in Italy the
same intractable opposition he has left behind in Dido,
and finally to yield to it in himself. And Augustus subdues
the proud of all the world, only to become a monster of
pride himself.
In Book eight a fourth image joins the winds, the gates
and the labyrinth. In the land of King Evander Aeneas
sees the rock on which the Senate of Rome will one day
stand, and learns that it once enclosed the home of a murderous, fire-breathing, half-human monster named Cacus.
From the "proud doorposts" of this senseless killer there
had always hung rotting, severed heads of his human victims. (8. 195-7) Evander tells how Hercules killed the
monster and exposed his dark cavern to the light of the
sun. Commentators routinely take the triumphant Hercules as a '~symbol" for Aeneas, who overcomes the monsters
of unreason, Dido and Turnus, and for Augustus, who will
overcome war itself. One who reads Evander's account
not as a symbol but as a story, though, must feel some unease as Hercules, before he can kill Cacus, must become a
thing of fury and frenzy himself. Hercules' triumph is not
an example with which one can be quite comfortable.
Book eight ends with a hundred lines describing the future glories of Rome depicted on Aeneas' shield, culminating with Augustus sitting in triumph over conquered
peoples from all the nations of the earth. In a characteristic stroke, Virgil says that Aeneas rejoiced in the images,
ignorant of the things, so that once again a portrait of
Rome just fails to come into focus as a sight at which one
could be glad. The attentive reader will have seen that Augustus on the shield hangs the spoils of all the world on his
WINTER 1982
�"proud doorposts," a phrase used qnly of him and of
Cacus. The same spot is still the home of a monster, but
the new one ravages the whole world-'
There are two kinds of motion in a labyrinth. The outward motion is an illusion of progress away from something. It is the more pitiable, because the more ignorant,
of the two kinds. It characterizes the march of imperial
Rome outward over the world. It is seen in what Virgil
calls in Book six the "proud soul of Brutus the punisher,"
expeller of the Tarquins, the first to rule as consul, who,
"for the sake of beautiful freedom" put love of country and
praise ahead of everything else and killed his own sons.
Virgil calls him "unhappy father, no matter what posterity
may say of his deed." (6. 817-23) And Augustus cannot escape the same human vulnerability that Brutus tried to
deny. A few lines later in Book six, the entire spectacle of
the shades of the heroes of Rome is immersed in grief
over Marcellus, the young man Augustus adopted and
named as his heir, but who died when he was twenty. No
political order holds any answer for or relief from human
troubles. It is after Aeneas hears the infinity of grief over
Marcellus in his father's voice, that he looks back over the
souls of his triumphant offspring, recovers his own love of
fame, and returns to the world through the gate of false
dreams.
But Aeneas is no Augustus. He is too aware of the losses
and pains of others for his own proud illusions ever to last
for long. Aeneas for the most part moves in the other direction, inward in the labyrinth. This is the direction of "if
only." If only Helen were dead; if only Dido could be
made to understand; if only Lausus would see reason; if
only Turnus would surrender. Aeneas never uses his quest
for political glory as an excuse to turn his back on a human being in distress, but he cannot relinquish that quest,
on which so many others depend, and he can never quite
find his way to the center of the source of distress to remove its cause. At the beginning of Book eight, the last in
a long succession of divine apparitions comes to Aeneas.
The old god of the Tiber tells him that his troubles are
near an end, and that home and rest await him. He must
fight and win a war with the Latins, but for once help will
be available. Inland along the Tiber live Arcadian Greeks
ruled by King Evander. They will happily join Aeneas in
his fight and he can put an end once and for all to the
troubles he has carried with him for so long and in which
he has involved so many others.
Aeneas does find welcome and help in Evander's city,
Pallanteum. As in Carthage, he finds too much welcome
and too much help. It turns out that Evander once met
Aeneas' father, and adored him with youthful love. The
gifts Anchises gave him seem to be the only signs of
wealth Evander has allowed to remain in his city. (8. 15569) History repeats itself in Pallanteum, in a double sense.
As with their fathers, Pallas is fired with a loving admiration for Aeneas. As he joins with him, we see in one brief,
lovely scene, a greater closeness between the two than we
ever see between Aeneas and his own son. (10. 159-62)
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
But Aeneas' recent Carthaginian history repeats itself at
the same time: from Evander and from Pallas, Aeneas has
again accepted the loving gift of a human life, entrusted
to his care. Pallas seems to think Aeneas can answer the
deepest questions of his life, but the two men know each
other only for a day. When Pallas arrives in Latium he
begins to fight, and two hundred lines later he is dead.
Like every young man in the Aeneid, excepting only Iulus,
who is deliberately kept out of the fighting, Pallas dies at
the moment of his greatest valor. That is the theme of
Book nine, in which, in Aeneas' absence, only young men
are fighting. It is embodied in the figure of Euryalus,
whose longing for glory leads him to put on the shining
helmet of one of his victims, immediately to become a victim because that shining makes him an easy target. (9. 35966, 373-4) It is embodied, too, in the similes of Book nine,
which liken the young warriors to beasts of prey which, if
they are daring and successful predators, become a danger
to men and an easy prey. Pallas cannot escape the Virgilian logic of glory and death.
The saddest words of this saddest of poems are spoken
by Aeneas to the corpse of Pallas: "The same horrible fate
of war calls me from here to other tears; hail from me eternally, dearest Pallas, and eternally farewell." (11. 96-8) In
the last lines of the poem, Aeneas recognizes that there is
no such thing as an eternal farewell. The dead live as
sources of obligation, and neither death nor any ceremony
can cancel such debts. If Dido can be assimilated to a
larger purpose, then she did not live. If Lausus' decision
to throw away his life were not acknowledged as binding
his adversary, then Lausus would not be recognized as the
source of his own choices. And if Pallas can be forgotten
for the sake of the living, and the greater number, then
Pallas himself is accorded no worth at all. Human worth
does not fit in any scales. Its claims are unconditional.
We admire Aeneas in the war books of the last third of
the poem because he always seeks the sanest and most
sensible solutions for his enemies as well as for his own
people. We rage along with him when trivial, irrational
causes produce and prolong the slaughter. Aeneas longs
for peace and for harmony with all the tribes in Italy. And
what does Turnus fight for? For wholly selfish reasons
and for the joy of fighting. Must he not be cut down like
the irrational thing he is, so decent citizens might get on
with the business of living in co-operation? To see that
this is not how Virgil regards Turnus, listen to this simile
with which Turnus goes out to fight: "He is delirious with
courage, his hope already tears the enemy: just as a stallion when he snaps his tether and flies off from the stables, free at last to lord the open plains, will either make
for meadows and the herds of mares or else leap from the
stream where he is used to bathing and, wanton, happy,
neigh, his head raised high, while his mane sweeps across
his neck and shoulders." (11. 491-7) Turnus is young,
strong, brave, and handsome. He is not made for submission to a foreigner who arrives saying he is destined to
marry his fiancee and be his king. In the line following the
81
�simile of the stallion, Virgil brings 'Camilla into the poem,
to fight beside Turnus. She is in .instant and complete
communion with Turnus. The freedom and the lordship
of Italy is theirs by birth and by nature. Each of them is
crushed by what Aeneas has brought to Italy, but each
dies with the sentiment that something unworthy has
happened.
At the end, when Turnus lies wounded at Aeneas' feet,
we begin to hear again the familiar echoes of the end of
the Iliad, but this time they are like a deceptive cadence in
a piece of music. Turnus asks Aeneas to remember his
own father and to return him, alive or dead as he prefers,
to his father. But as Aeneas begins to relax, and we expect
the gesture of reconciliation that Aeneas has tried so hard
and so often to make to come finally as a healing ending to
the poem, Aeneas instead remembers Pallas, and kills Turnus in fury. Why? It is his seeing the belt of Pallas, which
Turnus is wearing as spoil, that precipitates the deed.
What does Aeneas see when he looks at the belt? I think it
is not too much to say that he sees in it everything that
has happened to him through the eight years and twelve
books that have gone before.
The belt is carved with a legendary scene of fifty bride-
82
grooms killed on their wedding night. It recalls the spectacle
Aeneas watched from the roof of Priam's ruined palace,
with its fifty bridal chambers for his sons. (2. 503-4;
I 0. 497 -9) It must, too, re-open the wound of the memory
of the bridal chamber he himself shared so briefly with
Dido. And as showing men cut down in their youth, it must
remind him of much that has happened around him in
the war just fought. But more than anything else, it brings
back to him Pallas, to whom he could not succeed in saying good-bye. As he kills Turnus, Aeneas calls Pallas "my
own." His acceptance of the call of fate prevented Aeneas
from dying alongside his own people in his own city of
Troy. It prevented him from remaining loyal to his own
lover, Dido. But the gods have now left Aeneas alone. The
last act of the poem is the first one that is unequivocally
Aeneas' own, and on his own, though inclined toward a
characteristic and politically sound act of kindness, Aeneas commits a furious and painful murder out of love.
Turnus dies rightly feeling that his death is unworthy of
him. But Aeneas, finally at the center of the labyrinth of
his own life, could not let Turnus live and be worthy of
the gift of Pallas' life and death. In the inevitable conflict
of unconditional claims, one can only cling to one's own.
WINTER 1982
�REvmw EssAY
Objectivity and Philosophical Conversation
Richard Rorty's Pht!osophy and the Mirror of Nature
ARTHUR COlliNS
Men have confident beliefs which they take to be knowledge,
and then it sometimes turns out that what was confidently believed is discarded and replaced by contrary beliefs, perhaps just
as confident. Such convictions can be important beliefs at the
heart of a whole way of looking at the world. Naturally philoso·
phers have concerned themselves with this instability in our beliefs, and they have tried to find permanent foundations for our
claims to know anything. With foundations our knowledge is reliable and objective; without foundations our pretensions to know
collapse into the beliefs we happen to have. Discourse with no
foundations seems to reduce to a flux of opinions, for we have no
way of determining which opinions are really grounded and
which are not. But where shall we find foundations for knowledge, and how shall our claims to know such foundations themselves be insulated from the possibility of error and replacement?
Discussions of the objectivity of knowledge were already sophisticated in Greek philosophy. Protagoras held that no objec·
tive foundation of a belief can get beyond the fact that it seems
to be true to the man who holds it. All beliefs, then, are true for
those who hold them, and grounding is an illusion. So Protagoras
proposed to substitute the contrast: healthy versus unhealthy belief for the unavailable contrast: objectively grounded belief versus mere opinion. If this report of Protagoras' doctrine from
Plato's Theaetetus is reliable, Protagoras was the first pragmatist.
Socrates opposed this relativism and Plato's theory of Forms is
an effort to articulate foundations of knowledge solid enough to
enable a philosopher to rule against one man's conviction and in
favor of another's on objective grounds. The preponderance of
philosophers since Plato have defended the idea of objective
knoWledge and pursued its foundations. A minority including
Nietzsche and the American pragmatists have more or less sided
with Protagoras.
This conflict is the theme of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature.* The thesis of the book can be summarized
in two general claims: The first is that modern philosophy has
been dominated by an essentially Cartesian and mistaken idea of
inner representations as the foundation of knowledge of all outer
realities. The second claim is the assertion of a sweeping historical and pragmatic relativism about human knowledge. In rejecting Cartesian inner mental representations, Rorty contends that
the dominant modern program that sought to furnish foundations for knowledge is a complete failure. In his general relativist
view, Rorty asserts, with Protagoras, that the objectivity philosophers have looked for cannot be found at all and knowledge can
have no foundations.
The conception of inner representations as the necessary
starting point for all knowledge is what Rorty calls "the Mirror of
Nature." The mind is this mirror. Descartes and most thinkers
after him place the source of objectivity in the knower's mind
rather than in any specially apprehended outer reality such as
Plato's Forms. Epistemology has been promoted since the Renaissance as a kind of bogus science that ·confirms its hypotheses
in terms of the ultimate evidence we find reflected in the mirror
of the mind. Rorty says that the rejection of this spurious epistemology will bring with it huge changes in philosophical practice.
This first claim is powerfully argued and richly illustrated, and
Rorty's many-sided discussion of it repays study.
According to his second general claim, Rorty' s Protagorean
relativism, philosophers are deceived in thinking that there can
be objective reasons for preferring one view of things to another.
In the course of exposition of this relativist view, Rorty denies
that science can be understood to attain a progressively better
approximation to the truth. He finds that we cannot successfully
segregate meanings and facts. We cannot distinguish features of
a conceptual scheme and truths that are asserted within and
*Princeton University Press, 1979
Review.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Arthur Collins has published articles in many philosophical journals. He has previously contributed "Kant's Empiricism" (July 1979) and "The Scientific
Background of Descartes' Dualism" (Winter 1981) to the St. John's
83
�with the help of that scheme. So we qmnot suppose that earlier
scientists were talking about the same reality that we speak of, but
saying different things about it. Thus there is no way in which
we can see ourselves as the proprietors of a better understanding
of the same world. Our distinctions between conceptual truths
and factual truths, and between mathematical propositions and
empirical facts, are not absolute. Such distinctions are always dependent upon our own contingent decisions and relatively transient objectives of our discourse. There are no privileged truths,
no absolutely secure modes of reference, no irrefragible assertions about meanings, and no incorrigible data of sense. All these
candidates for an Archimedean fixed point in epistemology turn
out to be moveable. Our intellectual undertakings, systems, and
theories are endlessly adjustable in many ways and subtle ways,
but nothing is permanent and there is no given point of contact
with the real, no unchanging frontier between our thought and
what we think about.
Unlike his rejections of the Mirror of Nature, which is limited to
a particular conception of objectivity (the Cartesian conception),
Rorty's general relativism does not leave room for a contrast between the situations of philosophy and science. In rejecting traditional Cartesian epistemology, Rorty says that philosophers
have mistakenly tried to copy what scientists legitimately do. But
when he advances from this critique to a relativistic rejection of
the very idea of objectivity, Rorty asserts that philosophers and
scientists are alike in their susceptibility to the mistaken idea that
rational investigation can lead, and has led, to a better and better
understanding of things. There are no thought-independent
truths to be sought by philosophers or scientists and no objective
methods to be adopted by either.
Rorty is right to reject what he calls the Mirror of Nature. He
is also right to say that it has exerted an enormous and mostly
bad influence on modern thought. But he seems to think that if
we don't have Cartesian foundations for our knowledge we must
become relativists. If the Mirror of Nature is no good, there is
nothing else. That means that Rorty himself is still under the
spell of Cartesian thinking about the mind and knowledge. He is
agreeing that if there is to be objective knowledge at all, there will
have to be Cartesian foundations for it. If this is Rorty's assumption, it would account for the fact that he moves so easily from a
penetrating critique of the Mirror of Nature to the general repudiation of objectivity. On the whole Rorty treats these two very
different views as if they were one and the same reaction to the
history of modern philosophy. This is a mistake.
1
The goal of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is an assessment of the claims and prospects of contemporary philosophy,
especially the broad current of thought finding expression primarily in English, called "analytic philosophy." Rorty identifies
the most important historical roots of the modern outlook in the
pervasive influence of Descartes' philosophy of mind and in
Kant's two-sided philosophical project: the identification of objective knowledge and the demonstration of the inescapable
though disappointing limits of such knowledge. The Mirror of
84
Nature is really Descartes' invention. Descartes imposed on subsequent philosophers, and prominently on the British empiricists,
the job of trying to get from a perfect acquaintance with inner
mental representations (which are taken to exhaust our ultimate
evidence) to knowledge of extra-mental reality. This project,
which is hardly represented in classical thought, determines the
characteristic schedule of solipsistic problems which are the first
business of all modern epistemology. Endless variations within
this Cartesian epistemological framework have been articulated
since the seventeenth century. As recently as 1949, in the Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle aptly called Cartesianism "the official
doctrine." Russell, Moore, Santayana, Carnap, Ayer, Chisholm,
and Sellars are some of the best known twentieth century philosophers whose projects are decisively influenced by this tradition.
This is so even though some of these thinkers have expressly rejected Cartesianism and tried to break its hold on philosophy.
Rorty's repudiation ofthe Mirror of Nature is the repudiation of
this tenacious idea.
The Kantian contribution to the modern outlook is, Rorty
says, the idea of a universal system for judging and comparing
the credentials of all intellectual undertakings. In Rorty's terminology this is the "transcendental turn" which projects a scheme
for the universal "commensurability" of all doctrines, theories,
and beliefs. The rejection of this idea is Rorty's relativism. It is an
error, he says, to suppose that all our thinking belongS to the
same intellectual space within which views can always be tested
against one another and choices forced by a fixed rational procedure. Accepting the idea of such a universal scheme, philosophers
have thought of knowledge as a matter of gradual convergence
on the truth.
Rorty, however, allows no concept of truth external to the particular pragmatically judged intellectual constructions that men
make in grappling with the world. In their pretense to occupy a
viewpoint outside all viewpoints, Kantian foundationalists are
dogmatic and self-deceptive. Their claims to permanent judgments and fixed tests conceal the creative and constructive play
of human intelligence under the guise of ever-closer conformity
to truth. For Rorty, what we take as known can have no foundations apart from acceptance in the unending interplay of human
discourse. Accepted truths, systems, and sciences have the value
that they do have because they confer an understanding on
things that enables us better to negotiate our existence, not because they approach more closely to the final truth about things.
In this view, Rorty substitutes the idea of the utility of belief for
the discarded idea of objective truth, much as Protagoras substituted healthy belief for objectively grounded belief.
There can be no epistemological foundations and Rorty thinks
pursuit of them should stop and is going to stop some time soon.
Foundationalism has so contaminated the structure of philosophical thought and so determined the content of modern philosophy that its rejection will mean the end of most of what we
know as philosophy. When current practices have been abandoned, science will still be science, and scientists will continue to
generate and discard their own standards of admissibility. But, if
Rorty is right, epistemology will no longer be credited as a kind of
preliminary science. The philosophy of mind has been develWINTER 1982
�oped almost entirely in the service of Mirrqr-of-Nature projects,
so it too is finished. The same is true of the bulk of the philosophy of science. Language has become, for analytic philosophers, the refuge of foundationalist pretensioD.s which are denied
appeal to the mind by contemporary hostility to dualism. As a
consequence, philosophy of language is mostly "impure," Rorty
says. It has been fatally infected by the epidemic passion to find
objective foundations somewhere. Most of the aspirations of
philosophical logic and ontology, including the resurgent essentialism encouraged by Kripke, are also to be cancelled in the
coming purge. Even the value-oriented branches of thought
have been hopelessly compromised by foundationalist schemes
that try to identify the cognitive part of discourse involving values and to relegate the rest, in the positivist manner, to emotion,
arbitrary preference, and taste.
Rorty thinks that some kind of philosophy will survive the
coming demise of foundationalism and objective pretensions. He
admits that he is vague about the contents and purposes of this
philosophy of the future:
Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so
tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge
claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be. (357)
The predictions that Rorty does make are the least convincing and
the least appealing part of his book. He sees the tendency of things
to come in -the continental hermeneutics movement (H. G. Gada mer, in particular) and in philosophical "deconstruction" (Derrida). He endorses a considerable list of European existentialists,
structuralists, and phenomenologists whose writings are as longwinded as they are difficult to grasp clearly. Rorty says that the
new philosophy will be "conversational" without being exclusive
and competitive. Philosophy will be "edifying" which contrasts
with misguided efforts to be "systematic." Philosophical discourse will be "abnormal" in the sense of Thomas Kuhn's "abnormal science"; that is, it will take place without the benefit of
an inherited framework of standards and methods shared by a
consensus of those participating. 1 Philosophy will be open, pluralistic, even "playful." It will abandon its agressive assertiveness.
The work of philosophers will become more like activities in art,
politics, and religion.
Rorty does not succeed in saying (in fact, he does not try) what
will be the subject matter or the goals of the conversations to
which philosophers will contribute when they have given up the
hopeless search for objective foundations. Nor does he say why it
is that anything such a philosopher could say might strike us as
edifying. It often seems as if he is only dreaming of something
nice that otherwise unemployed philosophers can apply their talents to when most of the things they now do have been abolished.
2
Like most radical relativists, Rorty is not entirely consistent.
His examination of analytic philosophy finds that this whole enterprise is mired in the Cartesian-Kantian "problematic." Analytic philosophers are prominently guilty of presuming that they
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
have at least our concepts or conceptual schemes at their disposal. The accessibility of his own concepts is alleged by an analytic philosopher to be the source of the necessity and objectivity
of his conceptual analyses. Rorty rejects this allegation and the
philosophy it tries to legitimize. But his own arguments are full
of points which are indistinguishable in their standing from the
views he rejects as lacking any credentials at all. For example, he
finds that Locke's confusion of explanation and justification is
one of the great influential errors of modern thought. Maybe he
is right. But, in what sense can Rorty allow himself access to
what is really "explanation" and what "justification" while denying that analytic philosophers have access to concepts and thus a
basis for their analyses? He praises Wilfred Sellars for not offering "a theory of how the mind works" or a theory "of the 'nature
of concepts'." He describes a claim Sellars makes as "a remark
about the difference between facts and rules" (187). The use of
the informal word "remark" for the praised opinion of Sellars
and the weighty word "theory" for the bad views Sellars avoids
sounds like an effort to deflect the question. If the foundation of
this "remark" about facts and rules is not a kind of conceptual
analysis, then what is it? Again, Rorty says in the context of the
possibility of foundations for knowledge:
The question is not whether human knowledge in fact has
"foundations," but whether it makes sense to suggest that it
does-whether the idea of epistemic or mo.ral authority having a "ground" in nature is a coherent one. (178)
This kind of claim about what makes sense and what does not,
and what is and is not coherent, is just the sort of thing that analytic philosophers propose all the time. If their pretenses to know
what makes sense and what does not are empty, then what gives
substance to Rorty's identical pretenses?
These inconsistencies are predictable. As Socrates said of Protagoras, a relativist is always in trouble when he tries to assert
anything. He naturally thinks his relativism is objectively correct
and he thinks the foundationalist thinkers he opposes are objectively wrong. It is hard to see how a relativist can say less than
this and still have an intelligible position.
Rorty's general relativism sometimes appears to undermine his
own best insights. He is attracted by John Dewey's thinking be~
cause Dewey emphasized the social character of knowledge as
opposed to the solipsistic stance of Descartes. Similarly, in psychology Rorty thinks that a healthy materialism that is not a reductive mind-brain identity theory will supercede the confusions
of Cartesian philosophy of mind. Perhaps these are very sound
convictions to have. They fit ill with relativism. If we are to appreciate the validity of physiological psychology do we not have
to suppose that idealism is objectively wrong? It is not just another alternative conversational stance for philosophy. Rorty
thinks a materialist philosophy will survive the prevalent philosophical errors. Why? Surely he thinks we will be left with the
body and its relation to all our intellectual functions after the illusions of the Mirror of Nature have been dispelled. If so, this
material subject matter must be objectively available to us. In the
same way, if we are to base our understandings, like Dewey, on the
irreducible social context of discourse and knowledge, we must
85
�take that context as something that the world objectively contains. There really are other people with whom we speak and interact. How can we praise Dewey's vieW if we say that even these
convictions about social reality are just "optional descriptions"?
Even Rorty's customarily sensitive historical judgments are
sometimes distorted by his application of a set of standards to the
views he rejects which he cannot apply to his own views and
those he endorses. For example, he simultaneously praises Jerry
Fodor and condemns Kant in this passage:
The crucial point is that there is no way to raise the sceptical
question "How well do the subject's internal representations
represent reality?" about Fodor's "language of thought." In
particular there is no way to ask whether, or how well, the
products of spontaneity's theories represent the sources of receptivity's evidence, and thus no way to be sceptical about
the relation between appearance and reality. (246-7)
This passage actually describes Fodor's view in terms which do
not distinguish it at all from Kant's. Rorty knows that Kant's theory of the mind and empirical reality also rules out scepticism
"about the relation of appearance and reality" and, therefore,
deserves whatever praise Fodor deserves on that count. But
Rorty's rhetorical usage of the Kantian terminoloy (''spontaneity"
and "receptivity") seem to imply that Kant held the opposite and
that Fodor's stand is an improvement and a correction.
3
Rorty is entirely right to say that epistemological illusions are ·
responsible for the spurious format of scientific theory-building
that many modern philosophies have adopted. Mirror-of-Nature
thinking leads directly to this format. If our knowledge has to
start from acquaintance restricted to inner representations, such
as seventeenth-century ideas or twentieth-century sense-data,
then the mere assertion that there is an extra-mental world
stands in need of defense. In the absence of a successful defense,
we have no reason at all for thinking that there is any subject
matter for sciences like physics or biology to investigate. So a preliminary philosophical theory is needed to vouch for the existence of a subject matter for all other sciences. Empiricists have
constructed a great many such "theories" which introduce material objects only in hypotheses that are supposed to be accepted
because they explain the patterns we encounter in our mental
experiences. Here the philosopher imitates scientific theories
that posit unobserved atoms in hypotheses that explain observed
combining weights of elements, or that posit unobserved heavenly
bodies in hypotheses that explain observed orbital perturbations.
When philosophers argue in this way they are making epistemology into a hypothetico-deductive science. Philosophers then posit
unobserved chairs and tables to explain observed perceptual experiences! It is a virtue of Rorty's critique to release us from this
misapplied model of scientific thinking.
When we have fully rejected the Mirror of Nature, a lot of this
"scientific" philosophy will automatically be eliminated. This is
very much to be hoped for, but it gives us no reason at all for
thinking, with Rorty, that these misguided epistemological thea-
86
ries will be replaced by the incommensurable badinage that he
sees coming. In fact, a significant scientific influence in philosophy is unaffected by Rorty's critique. For philosophers of the
empiricist, rationalist, and analytic traditions, quite apart from
theory-construction, scientific influence in philosophy has meant
a tough-minded independence, it has meant adherence to the
ideals of self-criticism and clarity, and it has meant the open ac~
ceptance of tests of one's ideas in competitive intellectual confrontations. Rorty's general relativism and his predictions for the
future appear to depend on rejecting these wholesome influences along with the inapplicable pattern of hypothetico-deductive theory construction. The elimination of Cartesianism and
its aftermath, however, does not show that there is anything
wrong with these ideals, nor with their adoption in philosophy.
Rorty claims that once the epistemological bias is eliminated
there will be a general change in direction in philosophy which
will not be limited to those disciplines directly engendered by the
Mirror of Nature. It is in this spirit that he says that language
tends to replace the Mirror in the continuing but spurious foun~
dationalist projects of anti-dualist analytic philosophers. This is a
sensitive insight. Perhaps it is generally true in philosophy today
that real advance in understanding is only attained with the recognition that all theorizing is out of place. Our intellectual needs
are mischaracterized and our confusions made permanent insofar as we think that what is required is something like a theory.
This may be the clearest and most enduring part of Wittgen~
stein's elusive teaching. Here is Saul Kripke's appreciation of the
same thought in the context of theories about reference and
names:
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You
may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place, but I
hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too, if it's a theory.2
If this attitude is right we have inherited a conception of philosophical thought which deforms our actual problems by forcing
them into the mold of scientific theory. The harmful conception
goes beyond the influence of the Mirror of Nature. To say that
we should stop this deforming and forcing is good, but that in it~
self does not show anything about what philosophers should do
instead, and it bodes nothing for relativism. The understandings
that survive misguided foundationalism ought to be, per se, more
objective, not less objective, than the illusory pursuit of philosophical theories where such theories can accomplish nothing.
4
Under the influence of Kant, most philosophers, according to
Rorty, have accepted the idea of the universal commensurability
of all opinions. Like the idea of theory-building in philosophy,
the idea of commensurability is modelled on scientific practice.
Scientists intentionally try to sharpen opposed views in order to
force a showdown which only one view will survive. The process
of sharpening differences and forcing choices is only feasible if
the holders of different opinions share a general framework
within which their views are commensurable. Rorty thinks that
WINTER 1982
�there is such a general framework which permits commensuration withiri particular sciences, or maybe wit,hin the whole scientific enterprise at a particular time. But there is no permanent
commensurating framework for science through all lime, and no
framework that embraces scientific,. moral, artistic, and philosophical activities all at once. There may be some great truth in
this view about commensurability. If so, Rorty's exposition of
that truth is inadequate. His discussions of incommensurable
discourse never get beyond the unresolved tension between insightful critique and disastrous relativism.
Can there be such a thing as discourse that does not presuppose a shared commensurating framework of meanings? How
can speakers get as far as conversation without commensurability? The framework of shared meaning may not suffice for formulation of a means for resolving differences, but this does not
establish incommensurability. Inability to resolve differences is
notorious, for example, in economics, but no one will conclude
that views on the effects of monetary policy are, therefore,
incommensurable.
We would, I_think, say that the views expressed in two different
poems are often incommensurable. To the extent that we would
say that, we would also say that poems do not make assertions in
any ordinary sense. If two speakers do make genuine assertions
for one another's benefit, that is, if they produce sentences that
they mean to be true and mean to be taken as such, then. they
must also hold out the hope, at least, that they can find some
way of telling whether their assertions are compatible OF ihcompatible, that is, they must presuppose commensurability. They
cannot be indifferent about this and simply go on with the conversation. So commensurability seems to be indispensable for
participation in a conversation in which assertions are made. It
may be that this is too rigid a conception of commensurability
for exhibition of the point that Rorty wants to bring to our attention about the multiple enterprises of the human intelligence.
He offers us no guidance on a less rigid conception.
These abstract difficulties find concrete illustration when we
turn to Rorty's examples of incommensurable discourse. He calls
Marx and Freud edifying philosophers whose discourses are incommensurable. He criticizes those who try to draw the thought
of these figures into the "mainstream," and that means those
who want to make the doctrines of Freud and Marx commensurable with other opinions and theories about psychology, physiology, economics, history, and morals. Rorty's relativism is out of
hand here.
We may all agree that the insights and theories of Freud and
Marx are hard to connect with less revolutionary patterns of
thought about man. These two are similar in that they both construct self-contained schemes of things with relatively clear internal rules for investigation and interpretation (though this is a
problem for these systems). Furthermore, for their initiation
such systems may depend on an exceptional willingness to ignore prevailing rules and concepts and entrenched opinions.
Rorty is sensitive to all this insulation of these radical theories
from the rest of the universe of thought. But this insulation is
necessarily only partial. Thinking, no matter how radical, must
preserve substantial contact with preexisting thought. This is the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
minimum price of intelligibility. Marx and Freud, in particular,
certainly do respond to earlier views and they both expect their
work to be preferred to other doctrines on rational grounds, even
on "scientific" grounds. Freud connects his work in straightforward ways to the international psychiatric thinking of his time.
He incorporates in his thinking some large ideas from earlier
German philosophy, and he openly commits himself to the ultimate commensurability, even the. reducibility, of his psychological
theory to the workaday conceptual scheme o£ physical medicine
and physiology. Similar points apply to the doctrines of Marx.
These thinkers regarded their own views as commensurable with
the "mainstream" and only in the setting of that commensurability were they able to think of their own views as important.
The question of commensurability arises for Rorty only when
he thinks about two beliefs that seem to be opposed. Freud's
opinions seem to be incommensurable just because he says such
things as, "Slips of the tongue and lapses of memory are intended." Assertions like this seem to be in flat contradiction to
our ordinary opinion that slips and forgetting are unintended.
Furthermore, there is something especially troublesome about
the seeming opposition of Freud's claim to the ordinary view
about slips and lapses of memory. The ordinary view is not
merely a widely held empirical belief. It belongs, rather, to a
framework of shared meanings. We all think, though we don't articulate such thoughts much, that a verbal performance is not a
slip, by definition, if it fulfills the speaker's intentions. This
comes, in some sense, from the meanings of "a slip'' and "intentional." Similarly, it is not just that we have found that people do
not intentionally forget things. They cannot intentionally forget
because doing anything intentionally entails knowing what you
are doing. If you knew what you were forgetting, that wouldn't
be forgotten. Within the context of this limited illustration, I
think it is this special character of Freud's opposition to ordinary
thinking that leads Rorty to the contention that his doctrines are
incommensurable and his philosophy edifying. Freud's view cannot be commensurated with the mainstream because it conflicts
with the framework of meanings within which assertions about
intentions and slips and forgetting can be logically related to one
another.
There is something in this. Freud expresses views which are
not only new opinions in psychology but which also deform the
accepted system of meanings within which psychological assertions are customarily formulated and compared. Freud does not
discuss these deformations himself. He seems to be far from fully
aware of them. But he is certainly not simply making false statements with the old concepts. He is trying to make true statements with altered concepts. No one seems to know just where
Freud violates the traditional system of interrelated concepts
and beliefs and where he relies on a common fund of meanings
in order to communicate anything at all. Now we have to ask,
Where does incommensurability fit in here? Can we say that
Freud is not really opposing established views but merely "sending the conversation in new directions," as Rorty thinks the new
non-foundationalist philosophers will? Can we agree that Freud's
opinions may become the prevailing belief by simply replacing
without ever confronting earlier opinion?
87
�I think that we must try to reconcile, or to choose between,
Freud's doctrines and the ordinary beliefs with which they seem
to conflict. For example, we can attempt reconciliations that
stress the unconscious status of the intentions Freud finds. We
can try reformulations of Freud's views that capture the spirit
without the conceptual deformations, for example, ascribing intentions to a subagent for behavior that is unintended by the
whole man. And we can try to soften the apparent rigidity of the
ordinary system of meanings by calling attention to non-psychoanalytic contexts, such as brain bisections, where the contrasts
"intended/unintended" and "forgotten/not forgotten" come
under remarkable pressure. These are suggestions for "continuing the conversation," and it may be that Rorty has in mind just
this development of conversational philosophy. But these efforts
at understanding Freud are also nothing short of efforts at making his thinking commensurable with the thinking of others. If
we are not trying to make Freud's ideas commensurable in such
ways, then we are just not trying to understand him. It will not
do to call this failure to understand edification or respect for a
kind of creativity.
Quite a bit of just this not-trying-to-understand is presently
done in the intellectual world. It generates the familiar self-enclosed cultish point of view in which unexamined and deformed
terminology become an insider's rhetoric. When this happens,
the failure of commensurability will not promote a democratic
conversational mentality. The very fact that there are still such
things as Freudianism and Marxism is in part a measure of the
extent to which incommensurability seals off thinking from the
give and take of ideas which Rorty values.
5
Rorty's thinking is very well-informed and he always tries to
use the views of other philosophers as guideposts even in cases
where he does not want to follow them. Throughout his book he
says that Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger have been his
greatest guides, showing him the path out Of epistemological
foundationalism. These three thinkers all reject the schemes
that have grown out of Cartesianism, and they all attack the Cartesian root and not just the modern branches. But Rorty actually
has little to say about the views of any of these three. In the
fourth chapter, which he calls the "central chapter of the book,"
he examines instead, and in quite a bit of detail, much more recent analytic philosophy and, in particular, the views of Sellars
and Quine._ It is as though these tough-minded analysts, who do
not reach the relativism he adopts and whom Rorty himself calls
"systematic philosophers," help him to see the virtues of the
much vaguer and more relativistic doctrines of Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. According to Rorty's exposition, Sellars
clearly grasps the hopeless defects of "the Myth of the Given,"
and all the foundationalist programs that have been based upon
it. His appreciation of "the logical space of reasons" marks Sellars's perception of the indispensable contrast between causal explanation and justification. But Rorty finds that Sellars remains
committed to the illusion of "analysis," which is the idea that
our concepts are, in any case, accessible to us, so that we can
88
make entirely secure judgments as to what is and what is not true
of these concepts. Just here Quine's thinking is most important.
Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction is aimed at
precisely this presumption of the availability of our own concepts as unshakeable support for analytic judgments. Rorty sees
the two ideas: (i) the incorrigible data of sense, and (ii) incorrigible
access to our own concepts as the twin supports of contemporary epistemological foundationalism. Therefore, a combination
of Sellars's critical rejection of the first view and Quine's rejection of the second, a combination that neither Sellars nor Quine
fully attains, is just what Rorty wants in order to disenfranchise
foundationalism.
Throughout Rorty's work there is erudition, sensitivity, and
much truth. At the end there remains a large gap in his argument. The failure of Cartesian foundationalism does not establish relativism. Rorty seems uncbaracteristically insensitive to
the problems of internal coherence bf relativism, problems that
have been known since Socrates criticized Protagoras. Even
Rorty's appeal to the painstaking work of analytic philosophers
seems odd, since they are, in his own characterization, systematic philosophers whose work would have to appear to be a waste
of time dominated by baseless illusions from the vantage point of
edifying conversational philosophy. Sellars and Quine are both
philosophers whose thinking is pervaded by the idea of science.
Given Rorty's meticulous presentation of their doctrines, and
given his appreciation of the clarity (Quine's anyway), the penetration, and rigor of this, the best philosophical thinking of the
analytic school, his final position that seems to applaud all the
voluminous obscurantism now produced in Europe is disappointing.
There is another kind of inconsistency in Rorty' s thought which
is understandable, maybe even attractive, if not altogether acceptable. At several points in his discussion, Rorty seems to draw
back from his own radical conclusions as though in recognition
of the fact that they are in themselves so profoundly unsatisfying. In this mood, Rorty describes the anti-systematic conversational philosophy he endorses as essentially reactive and critical.
Such philosophy demands a correlative systematic and objective
philosophy. Without systematic philosophy to react to, edifying
philosophy is nothing at all. In consequence, Rorty seems to envision a cyclical alternation between systematic and critical philosophy, each of which has its purposes and legitimacy:
Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer
satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its
point when the period they were reacting against is over.
They are intentionally peripheral. Great systematic philosophers like great scientists build for eternity. Great edifying
philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. (369}
Here Rorty seems to agree with my judgment that his conversational philosophers, left to themselves, do not have anything to
talk about. The only real views ever at issue are those of philosophers who look for objective truths. These truths try to be universally commensurable in that they are to be tested against all
comers. If this is Rorty's view, he may be right to oppose a partieWINTER 1982
�ular conception of foundations, but it hardly makes sense to oppose the very idea of objective knowledge daims.
It seems that Rorty might envision something like this: Some
day, through the reactive efforts of thinkers such as himself and
the great figures he admires (Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein), the program of the Cartesian Mirror of Nature will be set
aside and it will no longer have any appreciable hold on the philosophical imaginations of men. When that day arrives, a philosopher considering objectivity, rational methods, and truth will not
be planning to relate his beliefs to any supposed inner magazine
of perfectly apprehended representations. Of course, under
these circumstances edifying philosophers will have nothing to
say. Their conversations will have dried up as a consequence of
their own success. Their work will have "lost its point," as Rorty
puts it. Now, at this stage, we could imagine that there would be
no further philosophy produced at all out of a recognition that
any new objective theory is bound to have the same deficiencies
as its predecessors, or we could imagine a new systematic project
that is not obviously susceptible to the criticisms raised in earlier
reactive phases. When he says that edifying philosophy is essentially reactive, Rorty seems to me to envision the latter development, and in some passages I think he expressly foresees a future
return to thought with objective foundations. However Rorty's
speculations on this point come down, neither of these outcomes is compatible with the general relativism that he presents
in most of the book. For if there is no further systematic project
in the offing, then conversational, creative, and edifying philosophy is not a true successor to the philosophy we have known but
merely a final winding down of philosophy. And if further sys·
tematic projects are to be expected when conversationalism has
lost its point, then Rorty must concede the inadequacy of his
own arguments for relativism. If objective philosophy has a real
future, then we are not entitled to rule it out generally in favor of
pragmatic relativism.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
In this dilemma we can see that Rorty has become ensnared in
the very traps he detected in foundationalist schemes. A relativist
allows that, within the context of relevant human activities and
needs, one assertion may be warranted and another assertion not.
But the effort to elevate the concept of warranted assertibility to
that of objective truth allegedly fails because it presupposes that
we can abstract from any particular context of activities and
needs, or it presupposes that there is one all-embracing context.
This is the viewpoint beyond all viewpoints that Rorty repudiates. But his own efforts at characterizing the plural projects of
human intelligence have engendered just the same presupposition. Rorty thinks that he can assess objective projects from a
perspective in which they are a mere phase inevitably overcome
in the next phase of reactive criticism. The reactive phase, in
turn, is ultimately sterile and needs replacement by further objective efforts. Thus we are to see the intellectual life of man as a
permanent vacillation between the illusion of theory and the impotence of criticism. Perhaps this view can seem to be acceptable and not simply a form of despair, because possession of it
seems to embody a higher objectivity and understanding. But
really there is no such point of view and no occasion for despair.
It is impossible to accept a permanent role for systematic philosophy and at the very same time to repudiate the idea of such philosophy. Rorty's picture of alternating objective and reactive
phases of philosophy does invite us to regard his relativism as a
higher objectivity, but this is not so much a virtue of his account
as it is a contradiction in it.
I See Kuhn, T., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago 1962.
2
Kripke, S., "Naming and Necessity," in Davidson, D., and Harman, G.,
editors, Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht.Holland 1971.
Quoted from the slightly revised reissue, Naming and Necessity. Cambridge 1980.
89
�R:Evmw EssAY
Afghanistan Fights
The Struggle for Afghanistan
by Nancy Peabody Newell and Richard S. Newell*
LEo RADITSA
Le regime des Seleucides ne constituaitcependantnullement un
regime colonial dans le sens oil nous 1' en tendons aujourd'hui.
Comme ils n'avaient aucun zele missionaire, et ne cherchaient a
ameliorer ni la religion ni les egouts d~ leurs sujets, mais laissaient les indigenes aussi crasseux et aussi heureux qu'ils l'avaient
ete auparavant, la dynastie ne donna jamais lieu a aucune insurrection de leur part.
E. J. Bickerman
On December 8, 1978, just after signature of treaty between
Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, like the Soviet treaties with
Vietnam, Angola, and Ethiopia, the New York Times said, "Instead of being a strategic highway to India, as the Victorians
feared, Afghanistan looks more like a footpath to nowhere."! But
catastrophe teaches provincials geography. In the last three years
Kabul has become almost a household word. And people have
slowly come to grasp that places few had heard of before 1979,
Kandahar, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif, are not about to become
family estates of the Bonaparte family. The Afghans are fighting
to almost everybody's amazement in the West-and the rest of
the world.
This ignorance does not come from scarcity of books or lack of
involvement with Afghanistan. We have been more involved
with Afghanistan since 1945 than the British in the nineteenth
century.2 This.ignorance comes from lack of judgement.
In contrast to nineteenth-century accounts, largely written by
British officers in India, and to the diplomatic correspondence
the British government published at the time of the Afghan crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79, the writings in this century, especially those after 1945, betray little grasp of Afghan history. They
obscure fundamentals that nineteenth-century writings stressed:
*Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1981, 236 pages.
90
The difficulties of access that Afghanistan opposes on all
sides to an invading army, surrounded as it is by the vast
tracts of mountain and desert, the former only to be traversed
by surmounting steep ridges and threading narrow defiles
where a few hundreds of well-armed and resolute men could
effectually oppose the passage of as many thousands, entitle
it to be considered in a military sense, as one of the strongest
countries in the whole world, whilst the manly independence
of its hardy inhabitants, their sturdy valour, and their skill in
the use of weapons of war, to which they are trained from early
boyhood, combine to render them far from despicable oppo·
nents, especially on their own ground, for even the disciplined
warriors of Europe ... Afghanistan is the great breakwater established by nature against an inundation of northern forces
in these times. [Emphases minep
In the nineteenth century the British knew Afghanistan less
but saw it more clearly and respected it more. They knew less
but what they knew counted for more.
And wear~ busy relearning some of it-but it is already very
late. In its contrast with Richard Newell's earlier book, The Politics of Afghanistan (Cornell University Press, 1972), The Struggle
for Afghanistan betrays this relearning, for unlike the earlier
work it concentrates on events.
And events are teaching us what we should have known: that
Afghanistan is not a typical country of the so-called "Third
World" -a term that serves largely to undo nations, and to excite
them to undo themselves, by blurring the distinctions between
Leo Raditsa writes frequently on events in the world for Midstream
(most recently, "The Source of World Terrorism," December 1981). He
recently published a monograph on the marriage legislation of Augustus, "Augustus' Legislation concerning Marriage, Procreation, Love
Affairs and Adultery" (in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Roemischen Welt,
Berlin !981, II, 13).
WINTER 1982
�them-because it never experienced direct colonial rule and until1973 had a monarchy (not, of course, in ,the European sense)
that had lasted for more than two hundred years; because in its
many isolated valleys traditions of self-rule and assembly prevail
that are hundreds of years older than the monarchy. And that
just these traditions of self rule and their unwritten constitution
-and not the 1964 written constitution which in retrospect
turns out to have hastened the destruction of the monarchy
-give Afghanistan the strength of resistance: in May 1980 a traditional assembly-a jirgah-brought 916 representatives of
groups fighting in all parts of Afghanistan to Peshawar.
Based on the recognition of the fastness of the territory,
(greater than France) and of the courage of its peoples, British
policy in the nineteenth century supported Afghan independence-which meant independence from Russia and Russia's
manipulation of Persia-at the same time that it did not interfere with Afghan internal politics and its way of life except for
commerce. In the nineteenth century, the amirs of Afghanistan
carried on prolonged subtle and difficult negotiations with the
British government of India and much less frequently with missions of the Tsar-negotiations that betrayed a remarkable grasp
of relations between European nations and Afghanistan's place
in them, and a recognition that their capacity to cope with their
place in the world did not mean they had to become like the nations they dealt with. 4 The crises of 1836-42 and 1873-79 came
about when Britain forsook its own policy of support for the independence of Afghanistan, and interfered directly and unnecessarily in Afghan affairs.
The crisis that came to a head in 1878 and that, incidentally,
precipitated "The Second Afghan War," started in Europe in
1873, and especially in 1875, with the revolt of the Christian
provinces of the Turkish Empire, Herzegovina and Bosnia. Austria, Russia, and Germany, with Italy and France, in early 1876
demanded reforms of the Sublime Porte-demands that Britain
supported only after the Sultan's request. In May Bulgaria rebelled, in late June and early July, Serbia and Montenegro-in
the expectation of support from Russia. In September 1876, Turkey's brutal suppression of rebellion in Bulgaria reported in the
Daily Mail aroused public opinion and sent Gladstone out of
retirement to denounce in Parliament a government that countenanced such atrocities-a furor that hindered the British government's support of Turkey. With the failure of another attempt,
in this instance sponsored by Britain, at negotiations with the
Porte, Russia declared war on Turkey on April 27, 1877. Her
troops approached Constantinople in December.
In response to the threat to Constantinople, Disraeli summoned Parliament two weeks early and announced that the prolongation of fighting between Russia and Turkey might require
precautionary measures. In February 1878, the British fleet sailed
through the Dardanelles to Constantinople; British troops, some
from India, arrived in Malta, and, with Turkish consent, in Cyprus. War between Britain and Russia appeared possible.
In response to Britain's resort to troops from India, Russia mobilized an army of fifteen thousand men (whose size was exaggerated to thirty and eighty thousand men in the reports that reached
India) in Russian Turkestan along the borders of Afghanistan
and sent a mission into Afghanistan. At first in response to inTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
structions from London and then on his own, the viceroy of India
treated with the amir in Kabul for the establishment of a British
presence in Afghanistan, especially in Herat. Aware that the
pressure on Afghanistan came from the crisis in Europe and despite the insistence of his friends and associates that he sacrifice
the independence of Afghanistan in the choice between Russia
and Britain, the amir prolonged negotiations in pursuit of the inherited policy of preserving Afghanistan's independence by neither yielding to Britain and the British government of India or
Russia. The expectations of his delay were fulfilled when the
powerful nations of Europe came to an agreement with Turkey,
which deprived it of much of its territory in Europe, in July 1878
in Berlin, just at the moment of the arrival of the Russian mission in Kabul In part out of ambitious obstinacy-he apparently
dreamed of pushing the frontier of British India beyond the
Hindu Kush-and in part because of the slowness of communications, the viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, entered Afghanistan
with ill-prepared and badly equipped troops from the army of India, and started "The Second Afghan War" -after the resolution
of the crisis in Europe.
It had been the same in the crisis of 1838-42, "The First Afghan War." Britain had become embroiled in a war of succession
in Afghanistan on the side of the "legitimate" king after it had
foiled a Russian-manipulated attempt of Persia to seize Herat
from Afghanistan before it occurred. In 1838, in a letter meant for
Lord Palmerston, that accepted, without acknowledging it, Britain's understanding of recent events, the Russian diplomat,
Count Nesselrode, reaffirmed. with admirable clarity and nuance
the traditional policy toward Afghanistan, now generally identified with the catchword, "the buffer state":
La Grande Bretagne, comme la Russie, doit avoir a coeur le
meme interet, celui de maintenir la Paix au centre de l' Asie,
et d'eviter qu'il ne survienne dans cette vaste partie du globe,
une conflagration generale. Or, pour empecher ce grand
malheur, il faut conserver soigneusement le repos des pays intermediaires qui separent les possessions de la Russie de celles
de la Grande Bretagne. Consolider la tranquillite de ces contrees, ne point les exciter les unes contre les autres en nourrissant leurs haines mutuelles, se horner a rivaliser d'industrie,
mais non pas s'engager dans une lutte d'influence politique;
enfin, plus que tout le reste, respecter l'independance des
pays intermediaires qui nous separent; tel est, a notre avis, le
systeme que les 2 Cabinets ant un commun interet a suivre
invariablement, afin d'empl!:cher la possibilite d'un conflit entre 2 gran des Puissances qui, pour rester amies, ant besoin de
ne passe toucher et de ne passe heurter au centre de l'Asie. 5
The intelligence of British policy towards Afghanistan in the
nineteenth century was in part Afghanistan's doing. The Afghans
inflicted spectacular defeats on the British in the two instances,
in 1838-42 and 1878, in which they blundered into violating
their policy, defeats which brought the British Parliament
enough to its senses to have the government of India withdraw
its forces without being driven out.
In the story of these events there is nothing more instructive
than this capacity of the British government and public to learn
from errors-and Afghan courage. This capacity to acknowledge
error made the British blunders in Afghanistan different in kind
91
�from the present Soviet attempted conquest. In contrast to the
British, the Soviets, because they do not recognize opposition
and, as a result, have no parliament that can publicly acknowledge error, will not leave Afghanistan unless driven out. What officer in the Soviet army could say the words Lieutenant Vincent
Eyre published in London in 1844 and 1879!
We English went on slumbering contentedly, as though the
Afghans, whose country we had so coolly occupied, were our
very best friends in the world, and quite content to be our
obedient servants to boot, until one cold morning in November we woke up to the unpleasant sounds of bullets in the air,
and an infuriated people's voices in revolt, like the great
ocean's distant, angry roar, in a rising tempest.6
The unwelcome truth was soon forced upon us, that in the
whole Afghan nation we could not reckon on a single friend.?
Even a generation after the Second Afghan War the disasters
and the blunders of each war were vividly remembered and discussed clearly.
But Afghanistan was not to keep European ways out forever.
In the twentieth century the monarchs of Afghanistan, in varying degree, began to suffer the attractions of Europe they had resisted in the times of her greatest confidence. At the same time
the political experience they inherited allowed them to appreciate the full seriousness of the self-destructive convulsions that
overwhelmed Europe. "The Europeans demonstrated to the Afghans and other non-Western peoples that Western culture was
capable of self-destruction. Afghan modernists were confronted
with the realization that Europe did not have all the answers to
the needs of modern society," Newell sensitively observed of the
effects of the First V\'orld War on Afghanistan in his first book.
Fearful as they were, those convulsions intensified, rather than
weakened, Afghanistan's entanglement with Europe, because
they made it clear that Britain and Europe, with Russia turned
inside out in 1917, and refugees from Soviet Turkestan in
Afghanistan in the early twenties to prove it, no longer had the
control that the exercise of the traditional policy toward Afghanistan required.
Untill945, the monarchs remained capable of controlling the
European influence they encouraged: only their misjudgement
occasioned the excesses that occurred. But after 1945, they lost
control over the pace of "modernization" in part because of the
breakdown and reversal in the traditional policy toward Afghanistan that occurred, more or less unacknowledged, after the British left India in 1947.
At the end of 1948, with Europe still in ruins and Britain out
of India, the Afghan minister of national economy asked the
United States, without stating it in those terms, to take up the
traditional Western policy toward Afghanistan. At the same time
that he acknowledged the central government's need for arms
for domestic control, he foresaw that Afghanistan would fight
for the West in the war now actually going on:
._..it [Afg~an~sta~] wants U.S. arms in order to make a positive contnbubon m the event there is war with the Soviets.
Properly armed, and convinced of U.S. backing, Afghanistan
could manage a delaying action in the passes of the Hindu
92
Kush which would be a contribution to the success of the
armed forces of the West and might enable them to utilize
bases which Pakistan and India might provide.
Ab?ul Majid referred repeatedly to the "war", indicating his
behef that a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. is inevitable, and said that when war came Afghanistan would of
course be overrun and occupied. But the Russians would be
unable to pacify the country. Afghanistan could and would
pursue guerrilla tactics for an indefinite period. a
Several years later, in the early nineteen-fifties, the United
States decided as a matter of policy to refuse military aid to Afghanistan for fear of offending the Soviets, and because they
judged that no amount of military aid could defend Afghanistan
from a determined Soviet conquest-an expectation Afghanistan's previous history and the events of the last three years
belie.
After the American refus;l, Prince Daoud, prime minister
from 1953 to 1963, turned to the Soviet Union for military and
economic aid. After Bulganin's and Khrushchev's visit to Kabul
in 1955, the Czechs in 1956 supplied the first arms to the Afghan
army, and Afghan officers, eventually as many as 200 a year,
went to school in the Soviet Union.
At first Soviet aid projects meant to attract attention with
quick results: in 1954 a highly visible, twenty-thousand ton grain
elevator in Kabul whose grain, although mostly supplied by the
United States, was often mistaken for Soviet; the paving of the
streets of Kabul, a project rejected as unimportant by the United
States. But soon the Soviets concentrated on projects that would
count when it came to force: besides equipping and training the
army, exploration for natural gas and oil and minerals, jet airports, communications, and spectacular all-weather roadsroads that with their reenforced bridges now bear Soviet armor
and gas _decontamination equipment into Afghanistan. In 1956,
the Soviets offered credits for a road through the Hindu Kush
with a tunnel at the Salang pass which would cut one hundred
and fifty miles and two days from the distance between northern
Afghanistan and Kabul A few years later, work started on another road from the Soviet border to Herat and Kandahar.
Despite the warnings of writers in the West alarmed by the
ominous possible uses of the roads, the governments of the
West, first the United States but then, as Europe recovered economically from the war, France, Italy, and Germany chose to
compete with the Soviets exclusively in economic terms. They
helped agriculture, improved the southern roads, organized an
airline, built airports and hydroelectric projects, improved local
education on all levels, sent Afghans abroad to study-"education" to turn out fateful for the country. In contrast to Soviet
money which was lent against barter arrangements for agricultural produce and for raw materials, like natural gas, whose terms
have never become public, gifts made up eighty percent of
American aid to Afghanistan until 1967.
The United States' decision to compete on unequal terms, in
economic but not military aid-which represented itself as a continuation of the old policy under a new name, "non-alignment,"
instead of "buffer state" -actually amounted to an unacknowlWINTER 1982
�edged reversal of the old policy, for it substituted engagement in
Afghanistan's domestic affairs for support of its independence.
The West's unwillingness to recognize the new policy's reversal
of the old blinded it to its greater risks-risks that plainly acknowledged would have made undeniable the recklessness of
fostering change within Afghanistan without supporting its independence. Did Afghanistan need an army, which the United
States allowed the Soviets to control, for anything except standing up to the Soviets?
We pursued the inherently more dangerous policy, because
we feared the bluntness and explicitness of the old. The old policy faced the risk of war-and appreciated Afghan courage and
Afghanistan's formidible natural defenses-the new policy ignored the possibility of war (and true to its evasiveness, acts as if
nothing is happening, now that war has occurred!) in the protestation of good intentions and the condescension of the assumption
that the Afghans could not resist a determined Soviet attempt at
conquest. In retrospect, in pursuit of this policy of changing Afghanistan's domestic life without supporting its independence,
the West appears unwittingly to have cooperated with the Soviets in undermining the central government of Afghanistan
(which both it and the Soviets mistook for the country).
The new policy with its almost exclusive preoccupation with
Afghanistan's domestic affairs had another fateful consequence
besides the forgetting of Afghanistan's past. It forgot where Afghanistan was. It forgot how the world was put together. It forgot
that the independence of Afghanistan meant the safety of Pakistan and India, and to a degree of Persia, the Persian Gulf, the
Sea of Arabia. Because of this readiness to forget that Afghanistan was an actual country in a specific place that came of not
facing the possibility that Afghanistan might have enemies, Afghanistan despite our greater involvement in it appears to us
much further away than in the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, the British in some sense had it easier, because
they did not have to defend India without being there-and being there, and riding and walking everywhere they went, they
knew how the world was put together. But there are deeper
causes for this incapacity to see that countries are in specific
places and to remember their past. So-called ideological competition serves to blind people to the past and to what is actually going on before their eyes. Besides the diplomats of the West,
much of the youth in Kabul and many in the government fell for
this ideological brooding which does not distinguish between
one country and another: forgetful of their monarchy's political
experience and their country's independence and self-rule they
took themselves for any country in the "Third World" -an expression which, Irving Kristol has profoundly pointed out, exists
only because of the UN's capacity to spread its illusions.
After ten years, in 1963, the king dismissed Prince Daoud as
prime minister. In his concentration on winning money from
abroad for economic development, Daoud had suppressed all political activity except for the distraction of agitation for the "autonomy" of the Pushtun peoples in Pakistan-agitation meant to
foster the illusion of "national" unity and coherence. The foreign money for improving Afghanistan's "infrastructure" and for
education had produced the beginnings of a middle class (about
one hundred thousand by 1973) but not the increase in producTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
tion for the trade the new roads meant to facilitate. Largely dependent on the Kabul government, the new middle class spent
its money for imported goods instead of investing in light industry and agriculture.
In an attempt to make up for Daoud's neglect of politics, the
King in 1963 appointed a committee to draft a new constitution.
Approved by a traditional countrywide tribal and ethnic assembly-a national jirgah-the new written constitution betrayed
the divided mind of the monarch-and his hesitations. At the
same time that it granted parliament legislative powers and excluded the entire royal family, except the king, from political office, it granted the king control of foreign and military affairs, the
appointment of the cabinet, veto of legislation, and the dissolution of parliament. At the same time that it sought the consent
of the people, it attempted to preserve the absolute powers of
the king: "The King is not accountable and shall be respected by
all." (Article 15)
Of the 209 members of the 1965 Parliament, the first elected
with universal suffrage, 146 were tribal and ethnic leaders, 25 religious leaders. There were only four deputies from Kabul, four
women, four from the newly founded People's Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA), among them Babrak Karma] and Hafizullah Amin. Traditional authority, status, wealth, not political issues,
decided most of the electoral contests, especially in the country.9
The king attempted to mediate between this parliament
(largely from the country) and the Westernized Afghans in the
government in Kabul. At the same time as he called himself the
"founder of the progressive movement in Afghanistan," the king
attempted to explain his reforms in Islamic terms. The king's ambivalence betrayed itself in his vacillations in regard to the independent press he alternately tolerated and suppressed, and in his
refusal to approve a law parliament passed for the establishment
of parties that might have in the course of time, a generation-but as it turned out there was to be nowhere near that
amount of time, brought the country into the politics of the city.
Unwilling to risk the organization of the popular will of the country through parties, the king unwittingly encouraged clandestine
groups in Kabul and the other cities of Afghanistan- where less
than ten percent of Afghanistan's estimated fifteen million people live.
In all its ambiguity the new constitution brought an explosion
of political action, outside parliament, at the University and on
the streets of Kabul. For the first time, less than two years after
the dismissal of Daoud, in 1965, organized Marxist-Leninist
groups, especially the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan,
appeared in Kabul During the debate for confidence for the first
cabinet under the new constitution in October 1965, the police
and the army killed at least three high school and university students in demonstrations in the streets. In October 1968, students
prevented the enforcement of a law on education they did not
like. In May 1969, an unimportant matter precipitated a general
strike that closed the University until November. In November
1971, new exam requirements provoked another general strike
that rapidly assumed political character, and again closed the
University for five months.
In the absence of other political organizations, Babrak Karmal
and other representatives from the tightly-organized People's
93
�Democratic Party of Afghanistan often dominated debate in parliament at the same time that their coffirades manipulated crowds
at the university and in the streets. But the students did not need
much encouragement. Western and Soviet money during the ten
years of Daoud's prime-ministership had increased the numbers
of students, but not the quality of education. In primary and secondary schools throughout the country, the teachers, often with
only a few years more study than their students, persisted in rote
instruction that allowed students little discussion or initiative. In
Kabul language difficulties plagued the University: in the sixties
about one hundred professors from abroad lectured in six languages, with the result that the one European language Afghan
students chose to learn determined the· education they got.
There were not enough books: of the hundred thousand books
in the library, the bare minimum for a university, eighty percent
were in English. Also, students wanted to study "letters," fashionable and customary. But the country needed technicians. By
the end of the sixties, Afghans in Afghanistan who had returned
from graduate study abroad numbered five hundred-and in Afghanistan, in contrast to many "Third-World" countries, most
had returned.
Out of this chaos came many students more ambitious than
qualified-and in addition unemployable-good prospects for
the political agitation and the clandestine organizations bent on
undoing the world in the name of bettering it. In some ways a
grotesque magnification, and to some extent a reflection of the
battling that undid many western universities in the same years,
this chaos had more brutal-or, at least more obvious-consequences in Afghanistan.
At its founding in january 1965, PDPA openly declared its allegiance to Soviet foreign policy and the Soviet model. Like many
organizations that cannot cope with opposition, it succumbed almost immediately to the hatred of faction. Each faction had a
newspaper that bore its name: Khalq (Masses), was closed down
by the government in 1966 after five issues, because of vilification of Western influences and of the royal family, and Parcham
(The Banner) lasted until 1969. By 1971, Pareham began to
organize Marxist-Leninist cells in the army, especially among
junior officers-and perhaps to establish contact with Prince
Daoud in forced political retirement, who was to destroy the
monarchy in 1973 with its help. At the same time that it kept up
open and close relations with the government and the army, the
Soviet Union secretly financed and manipulated the organizations meant to undermine them, Parcham and, to a lesser extent,
Khalq. In this situation in which the street counted for more
than a parliament that could not muster the will to legislate, the
king unnecessarily contributed to the heady disorienting atmosphere in Kabul by siding with the Arabs-and the Soviet Unionagainst Israel in the international propaganda war that sought to
undo victory on the battlefield in 1967.
In retrospect it is clear that the present war for Afghanistan
started with Daoud's destruction of the Monarchy in 1973-an
event whose significance was hardly appreciated at the time by
commentators not used to valuing inherited institutionsiO_and
that was hardly remembered in the catastrophe of 1978. Up to
1973 there had been abdications and struggles for succession, but
no direct attack on the monarchy. The only institution of the cen-
94
tral government that had survived more than a generation, the
two-hundred year old monarchy, enjoyed real respect among
educated and uneducated Afghans alike, who called it the
"Shadow of God." Such an enormity required a prince like
Daoud, who was also cousin and brother-in-law of the king, but
a prince with a mind confused by "progressive" ideas-and
with an army ready to obey him in part because of Parcham's
infiltration.
With the exception of some tribesmen, the countryside did
not react to Daoud's destruction of the monarchy, probably because they did not realize that Daoud intended to do away with
the monarchy, rather than substitute himself for the king, and
because they were used to defending themselves from the monarchy rather than defending it. With the monarchy gone, restraint
gradually disappeared in Kabul.
In his proclamation of a republic after his seizure of power,
Daoud called the king a "despot." Despite his promises to turn
the king's "pseudodemocracy" into real democracy, he adopted
the Marxist program and pro-Soviet foreign policy of Parcham.
He emphasized the bloodlessness of his coup at the same time
that he admitted eight murders. 11 The Soviet Union offered
much military and technical aid to the new regime that it, India,
Czechoslovakia and West Germany quickly recognized. For the
authority of the king which rested on the consent of the tribes,
Daoud tried to substitute the fascination of his personality-and
the distractions of his Marxist program, meant for the students
and intellectuals of Kabul whom he mistook for the people of
Afghanistan.
A little more than a year after his seizure of power, Daoud began to undo the Communist infiltration of his regime. In 1975 he
expelled the Parcham leaders. In 1977 he dismissed forty Sovie~
trained officers and began to send officers for training to Egypt
instead of the Soviet Union. Despite his success in undoing
Communist infiltration in at least the top positions in his regime-but not in the army-Daoud still did not, or could not,
conceive a program other than Communist: democracy, in his
1977 constitution, turned out to mean a one-party state that
recognized no opposition.
After its expulsion, Parcham, probably upon Soviet instigation, came in 1976 to an understanding with Khalq, that had
from the beginning considered Daoud too "reactionary" to support. At the same time, in order to lessen dependence on the
Soviet Union, Daoud conciliated Pakistan and turned for aid to
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and, more importantly, Egypt and
Persia. Aware of Soviet and Marxist infiltration in Kabul, the
Shah had already in 1974 offered two billion dollars in credits,
mostly for the construction of a nine-hundred mile railway to
connect Kabul, Kandahar, and Herat with Persia and the world
outside. Several hundred thousand Afghans had gone to work in
Persia and the states along the Gulf. In early 1978 a few months
before his murder and the destruction of his regime, Daoud
visited Sadat, who had recently won the attention of the world
with his visit to Jerusalem.
But it was too late. Unable to defend the status-quo because of
his destruction of the monarchy, Daoud could neither go backward nor forward. That he got into most trouble over women's
rights tells something of the disorientation in Kabul that abWINTER 1982
�sorbed Daoud to the point that he forgot the countryside. 12 He
had become a European in spite of himself. In the end those
who did not hate him would not support him.
Unlike the seizure of power of 1973, the coup of 1978 brought
much murder: guesses ranged from two to len thousand dead.
Carefully planned (according to Khalq, as early as 1975) and carried out by some of the same officers who had seized power in
1973, the coup of 1978 was precipitated by the unexplained
murder of Mir Akbar Khyber, an important leader of the Parcham
faction-one of seven political murders in the last months of
Daoud. Frightened by Khalq-Parcham demonstrations of mourning and defiance that numbered, perhaps, ten thousand, the first
demonstrations against him, Daoud ordered the arrest of the
most important Communist leaders. Either inefficient or infiltrated, Daoud's police allowed one of these leaders, Hafizullah
Amin, after his arrest, to write detailed instructions to army and air
officers to begin the seizure of power the next morning, April 27.
With air battles, spectacular in their precision, and intense street
battles, the coup took a relatively long time, something like
thirty-six hours, time enough for decisive mediation by Western
ambassadors who understood the significance of eventsY
The April 1978 coup brought a mounting fury of intrigue between one faction after another in Kabul and an attack on the
countryside that by early 1979 had provoked violent resistance
throughout Afghanistan. Open in its hatred of the destroyed
monarchy and the murdered Daoud, the regime at first sought
to win confidence at home and abroad with its denial of Marxism
and Communism. Its first proclamation acknowledged God. In
an interview with Die Zeit, Taraki, a leader ofKhalq and the new
President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, denied
disingenuously that the violence of the seizure of power aimed
at anything other than democracy. 14 A leading expert on Afghanistan scolded the New York Times for calling the coup Communist.15 But soon the fancies that justified their violence overwhelmed the new leaders' capacity to distinguish their seizure of
power from an uprising of all Afghanistan, a "revolution." "But
he [Taraki] insisted on calling himself the leader of a revolution,
not a coup. The conviction that the masses were behind them
would lead Taraki and the clannish Marxist leadership to disaster."
Unwilling to know themselves in the distasteful role of despots,
which in any case was beyond their justification, the new leaders,
within a few months of their seizure of power, took the measures
that Montesquieu taught provoked the ruin of despotism: with
totalitarian arrogance which, unlike the open cruelty of despotism, knows no limits, they attacked Afghan customs and religion
in the name of freedom In October 1978 they unfurled a new
flag for Afghanistan, modeled after the flags of the Soviet Socialist
Republics, which by substituting red for Islamic green undermined their Islamic pretences before the whole country. In November they announced reforms that interfered with customs:
compulsory education; limitation of marriage price; required licensing of all marriages and prohibition of marriage before the
age of eighteen; prohibition of usury in customary credit arrangements between the poor in the country and their money
lenders; redistribution of three million acres of the best landmeasures all ·taken without adequate study of the conditions
they ostensibly meant to correct.
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
Used to heady "progressive" pronouncements of reform from
Kabul, the Afghans did not react until the arrival in the countryside of bands of fanatic Marxist university and high-school
students as government officials, backed by the well-paid and
radicalized police, showed them that the new regime, in contrast
to Daoud, meant what it said. Tribal and religious leaders who
resisted were arrested and executed.
The attempt to enroll by force all school-age children (up to
then families had voluntarily enrolled about fifty percent of their
boys but only ten percent of their girls) in schools of Marxist indoctrination in which Russian substituted for English amounted
to an attack by the privileged young of Kabul on the authority of
the parents in the countryside. Based on the crude brutality of
the expectation that the expropriation, and destruction, of the
top two percent of the population would free the rest from "oppression" and, even more cynically, win their allegiance to complicity in murder, and robbery, the land reform program ignored
many of the realities of land tenure in an old and poor country
only incipiently sensitive to economic differences. Despite the
recent appearance of something approaching a rural proletariat
of no longer independent nomads, a "majority of farmers and
herders appear not to be hopelessly poor" (by Afghan standards)
and own their own land. The uncertainty that came with the expropriation showed itself in a one-third drop in the spring wheat
harvest in 1979. In the Newells' judgement the abruptness of the
marriage reform shows that it aimed, not at the "emancipation
of women," but, like the compulsory Marxist education program,
at undermining families in order to expose individuals to "social
engineering." The resort to force in all these measures provoked
explosions of resistance throughout Afghanistan-resistance that
coalesced after Kabul showed its readiness to depend on Soviet
force, with its treaty with the Soviet Union on December 8, 1978.
With the countryside in resistance throughout Afghanistan by
the beginning of 1979, uprisings took hold of the cities: in March
1979, in Hera~ the Afghan city closest to Persia, perhaps five
thousand people, in a city numbering eighty-five thousand, including all known Soviet advisers and Khalq members, were
murdered, often with savage atrocity-an event that wants a
Livy to find its proper place in Western history; in April in Jalalabad Afghan soldiers, ordered to attack resistance groups outside
the city, killed their Soviet advisors in mutiny and fled to the resistance, after suffering defeat from loyal government and, according to some reports, Soviet troops. There was violence also
in Kandahar, Pul-i.Khumri, and Mazar·i-Sharif.
The first purges took place just two months after the KhalqParcham seized Kabul: in July, Hafizullah Amin expelled Babrak
Karmal and five other Parcham leaders to the exile of ambassadorships in eastern Europe and jailed hundreds of Parcham
members. Reckless, arrogantly confident that the Soviets needed
him more than he them, in some sense an amateur, with illusions of independence, for unlike Soviet trained Parcham members, he had learned his Marxism on American campuses,
Hafizullah Amin defied the Soviets in his fanatic impatience, only
to become more dependent on them. For instance, Soviet advisors, whose numbers increased from fifteen hundred at the
time of the coup to at least five thousand by the early summer of
1979 to ten thousand at the time of the invasion, often took the
95
�places in the ministries and elsewhere, of the Parcham members
Amin purged. By driving events beyoll,d anybody's control, Amin
probably more than anyone precipitated the Soviet attempt at
conquest that began with his murder.
Even as he jailed Parcham members and prepared the measures that by provoking rebellion in the countryside would make
him more dependent on the Soviets, Amin convinced visiting
American "experts" in the summer and fall of 1978, and apparently, the American ambassador, who saw him frequently, that
he could turn Afghanistan into a Communist country without
succumbing to Soviet domination. This fanciful expectation
came of the illusion, which led to the support ofTito in 1948 and
in the last ten years to the support of Communist China, that
the enemy is just another nation, Russia, and not Communism
that seeks domination by destroying governments of every sort.
Even the murder of the American ambassador in early February
1979 in a Soviet-directed attempt, supposedly, to rescue him
from unidentified terrorists, did not awaken the West to the
seriousness of the situation not only in Kabul but throughout
Afghanistan-and to the increase in Soviet penetration. After
all, what free nation makes a fuss about the murder of an ambassador? The United States which had up to then ignored
Amin's treaty with the Soviet Union meekly withdrew even further from Afghanistan after uttering its first disapproval of the
Communist regime. Perhaps nothing more shows the participation of Western diplomats and journalists in Amin's illusions than the sensation caused by Amin's foreign minister's
outburst against Soviet "unreliability and treachery," less than
three months before the invasion-in the fall of 1979. At the
same time Amin began to plot against his closest associate Taraki
who may have been in touch with Babrak Karmal and other Parcham members during his enthusiastic reception in Moscow in
September 1979.
Speculation about Soviet motives for invading Afghanistan on
December 25 with eighty-five thousand troops (soon to number
one hundred thousand) serves largely to continue the evasion
that kept Western journalists and governments from anticipating
the danger of attempted conquest throughout the preceding six
years, and taking action against it before it occurred-even after
intelligence reports of Soviet troop movements along the northern
bank of the Oxus River early in December 1979. According to
the Newells, Amin's defiance of the Soviets and his successive
purges of their favorites, Parcham and then Taraki, drew the
Soviets to attempt the conquest of Afghanistan. But the struggle
between factions that turned murderous in the end was at most
a precipitating cause. The reason for the attempted conquest is
that the Soviets can not face the uprising of almost a whole nation, of almost all the Afghans, not for their "world revolution"
but against it. "The most self-defeating aspect of Khalq's program was its failure to give those elements of the population it
championed anything they could recognize other than trouble.
As a consequence, Khalq ignited one of the most truly popular
revolts of the twentieth century." (Emphasis mine.)
In appearance abrupt, the attempted Soviet invasion of Afghanistan actually brought to a head a generation of active infiltration
in Afghanistan. Already in 1950, the year Spanish, incredibly, attained equal priority with English-and four years before the ap-
96
pearance of a ten-thoUsand copy edition of a Russian-Vietnamese,
Vietnamese-Russian dictionary-students at Soviet language
schools studied Pushtu.
To the surprise of both the Soviet Union and the United States,
it turned out, however, that without an open fight Afghanistan
was not for the stealing. Suddenly, the courage of the Afghans
rediscovered the buffer state, under all the obfuscations about
"non-alignment," and the wisdom of nineteenth century diplomacy. But the courage that was too much for the Soviets was
also too much for the West. The United States too could not
cope with the courage of men ready to fight, almost with their
bare hands and without waiting for support, against the soldiers
of a regime that terrifies it and the other leading nations of the
world. The Soviets tried to destroy the men of this courage; the
United States cynically took their destruction for granted. "The
primary inadequacy of American policy lay in the fact that it immediately conceded Afghanistan. Carter conveyed that concession even in his strongest denunciations of the invasion."
The unreality of the West's response showed itself in the ludicrousness of Western statesmen's remarks and proposals for
Afghanistan. Without blushing, the government of Germany remarked on the divisibility of detente, a remark which, if it meant
anything at all, meant that Germany expected Europe to be conquered last or next to last-and without fighting. Fresh from
handing Rhodesia to Mugabe with the acclamation of the whole
world, Lord Carrington proposed "non-alignment" for Afghanistan, just at the moment when the Soviets were lost in the attempt, and denying it, to destroy the buffer state, for which
"non-alignment" had been for a generation a kind of codeword
that obscured the realities of its survival both to the West and
the Soviets: the courage of the Afghans and nature's gift of
fastness.
The United States' admission that it would fight for the Gulf
of Persia but not by implication help the men and women resisting aggression in Afghanistan, showed for perhaps the first time
since 1945 that it was reduced to defending natural resourcesnot freedom. Against this shameless-and unintelligent, for it
forgets Afghanistan's strategic position (but mountains and courage do not appear in the defense budget)-admission of a policy
of expediency, nobody said a word. Least of all those who, with
the mindlessness of the "educated," had been quick to assume
that the lust for profits had driven us to fight for Indochina. The
consequences of preferring expediency to the defense of freedom-as if aid to those ready to fight for freedom in Afghanistan
were not expedient!-shows itself in the United States' readiness
to cater to the whims of Saudi Arabia and to forget that the importance of Israel comes not because of its ties with American
Jews, but because it has the reliable daring strength that can only
come of democracy-the only democracy in the Middle East ex·
cept for Turkey whose moderate temporary military dictator·
ship, terrorism's bitter fruit, now begins to awaken the contempt
of those who can only recognize freedom in its absence. It also
shows itself in the prevarications of our relationship to China, itself occasioned by our abandonment of Indochina, especially in
the refusal to recognize that China, which has not said a word
for Poland (but totalitarian countries fear nothing more than a
meaningful word), is more ruthless than the Soviet Union, and in
WINTER 1982
�the readiness to make embarassing compromises of dubious legality in the support of Taiwan. But the truth is that the struggle
that counts, and the only one we can win, r~ally win-and without major war, but at the risk of small wars in which individuals
but not whole populations die-is for freedoffi. We were in Indochina because of freedom.
United States and Western evasiveness shows itself most in its
incapacity to face up to the Soviet use of gas in Afghanistan, reported already in May 1980 by Newsweek-and in Laos since
1976, and in Cambodia-and to supply the Afghans openly with
elementary weapons and simple medicines. The Soviet resort to
gas in violation of two international treaties is an international
issue, that is, an issue that affects all countries if there ever was
one. It occurs at a moment when the government of the United
States, against its desires and probably unnecessarily, has yielded
to the importunity of some of Europe for arms control negotiations for both middle and long-range nuclear strategic weapons.
To enter into such negotiations in the knowledge that the Soviet
Union is violating two international treaties against the use of
gas, amounts to saying we will negotiate with you no matter
what you do. That is not to negotiate, but to yield without acknowledging, and even knowing, it-just what totalitarian countries mean by "negotiate." The only newspaper I know of that
has shown courage in facing up to Soviet use of gas, the Wall
Street Journal, is right in its judgement that the enormity of the
outrage is too much for the government.
Because the Afghans dare fight the Soviets we are afraid to
help them, not fight along with them, but simply to help. There
have been reports in the American press that the government
has seen to weapons for the Afghans from the beginning. But
then why the secrecy? And why President Reagan's casual remark in the first months of his presidency that he would aid the
Afghans if they but asked? 16 Do we really live in a world in which
Sadat dared say that he sent old weapons from East Europe, apparently paid for by the United States, to people fighting for
their homeland against brutal aggression with more or less their
bare hands in cold and heat we can barely imagine-but the
United States does not?
Whatever the truth of these rumors of covert aid to the
Afghans from the United States, every report I have read from
men who have dared enter Afghanistan and every report the
Newells cite tells of the absence of modern weapons, especially
of ground to air missiles, and of simple medical supplies. 17 We
may send some weapons, but they do not get through.
The underlying reasons for Western refusal to help the Afghans are not pretty. Fear, first of all And then condescension.
We are quite used to pitying the weak whom the Soviets, in
much of the world, know how to turn into unwilling victims of
their own hate and resentment, but not to respecting the brave.
Who are these unlettered rustics with their World War I rifles to
teach us courage? Who are they to fight for their country and us,
unasked?
The sixty to two hundred resistance groups, often acting on
their own and, thereby, baffling Soviet planning, draw their cohesion and authority not from European parliamentary institutions and "political" ideas, which served largely to destroy the
Monarchy and bring the European civil war to Afghanistan, but
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
from age·old tribal assemblies that make binding majority deci·
sions, assemblies where speakers with age, wisdom, courage and
brilliance in speaking, and lineage exercise the most influence.
That we take it for granted that these are ineffective and primitive tells a good deal more about us and our distance from the
past that made us than it does about the Afghans. For these institutions resemble those of Homer, who lived only a hundred generations ago.
The British in the nineteenth century were much closer to
that past. In 1841 Vincent Eyre knew who had marched in
Afghanistan before him-"a country hitherto untraversed by an
European Army since the classic days of Alexander the Great."
As a result Afghanistan was closer to them than Europe to Af~
ghanistan. In contrast, the Afghans now know the intimacy of
our minds and what Afghanistan means to us better than we
who can barely catch sight of their country in the distance. Several months ago, the leader of the National Liberation Front of
Afghanistan, Sayed Ahmed Gailani, explained the strategic and
moral significance of the war for Afghanistan to an Italian journalist with a clarity beyond most officeholders in the West:
The Pakistanis have done their Islamic duty by us, not only
because of solidarity, but also because they realize that in the
eventuality of the consolidation of their grip on Afghanistan,
the Russians already plan a blitz through Pakistani Baluchistan that would bring them to the Sea of Arabia-in the ful·
fillment of a dream of centuries. The Sea of Arabia means oil
and the strangulation of Europe. The Europeans either do
not grasp this sequence of events-or pretend they do not.
In answer to the reporter's question: "What would the Afghans like from Europe?" Gailani said:
A bit of solidarity, if not for humanitarian reasons, for the vulgar reasons of expediency. Would you dedicate to us a few of
those peace marches that occur everywhere often in favour of
our invaders. You walked for Vietnam where the two great
powers collided. You might walk for us, a country where nobody collided with anybody, which has been invaded in the
coarsest colonial fashion, the fashion we escaped in the time
of the British and which now comes to us from Moscow.
We ask ourselves over and over again: How can Europe, hypersensitive Europe, who rises to her feet for Chile and Cambodia, find the strength to close her eyes to our instance, the
most shameful of all?
Our fight can have three great consequences: the liberation
of Afghanistan from an invading army, the rescue of Pakistan
from probability of a similar fate, the frustration of the plan to
encircle Europe. Unless it is just this that you want-to be
encircled. 18
Tucked away in the pages of the New York Times several
weeks ago, the U.S. Army chief of staff remarked almost as a
matter of course that the Third World War had started in Af.
ghanistan. 19 It may also be won there. But there is not much time.
1. "Keeping Cool about Kabul," New York Times, December 8, 1978.
2. In his proposal on March 12, 1948 to President Truman to raise the
American Diplomatic Mission in Afghanistan from Legation to Em-
97
�bassy, George C. Marshall observed" ... that the American Community
in Afghanistan is now larger than that oLany other foreign state." Foreign Relations of the United States, Part 1, V {1948), 490-494.
3. Vincent Eyre, The Kabul Insurrection of 1841.42, London 1879, 1-2,
63. Published on the occasion of "The Second Afghan War," this second edition of Eyre's The Military Operations at Cabul, which ended in
the Retreat and Destruction of the British Army (London 1843) contains a
long introduction, not included in the first edition.
4. For an account, extraordinary in its intelligent subtlety, of the nego·
tiations that broke down in the crisis of 1879, see H. B. Hanna, The Second Afghan War, 1878-79-80, London 1899, 2 vols., especially I, 1-285.
5. Correspondence Relating to Persia and Afghanistan, London 1839, 261.
6. Eyre, Kabul 2, London 1879, 53-54.
7. Eyre, Cabul1, London, 1843,29.
8. FRUS, Part I,V (1948), 490-494.
9. Christine F. Ridout, "Authority Patterns and Afghan Coup of 1973,"
Middle East Jouma/29, 2, 1975, 165-78.
10. Without distinguishing between the king and the monarchy, the
New York Times called the King "conservative" the day after the coup,
July 18,1973. The next day, in perhaps a typographical error, it reported
that "Afghanistan had been ruled by the monarchy for 43 years." Two
days later, on July 21, 1973, C. C. Sulzberger assured everyone that
there was no significant difference between the King and Daoud: "Af·
ghanistan was no democracy under King Zahir nor will it be under President Daoud."
The former American Ambassador to Afghanistan (1966-73) Robert G.
Neumann ("Afghanistan Under the Red Flag," The Impact of the Iranian
Events upon Persian Gulf and United States Security, Washington, D.C.
1979, 128-148 also barely notices the disappearance of the monarchyprobably because the intensity of intrigue and gossip in Kabul robbed
him of perspective.
11. According to the New York Times ofJuly 26, 1973, Daoud stated: "I
can safely say that this was in every sense a bloodless coup. It not only
enjoyed the complete cooperation of all branches of the army but also the
support of all people, particularly the intellectuals and youth." (Emphasis
mine.)
12. Robert G. Weinland, "An Explanation of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," Center for Naval Analyses, Alexandria, Virginia 1981,7. For
an example of the disproportionate interest in the position of women in
a country with more tractable and pressing problems like a high infant
mortality rate, see the ideological but interesting study of Erika Knabe,
Frauenemanzipation in Afghanistan, Germany 1977.
13. See the interesting article by Hannah Negaran {pseudonym for an
Afghan), "The Afghan Coup of April 1978: Revolution and International Security," Orbis 23, 1, Spring 1979, 93-113. The reluctance of
Afghans even abroad to speak of events in Afghanistan openly betrays
the nearness of the violence that appears so far away.
14. Die Zeit, june 9, 1978.
15. Louis Dupree, New York Times May 20, 1978: " ... an enlightened
press should avoid the loose use of the term 'Communist.' All should examine the words of the new leaders carefully for governments, like persons, should be considered innocent until proven guilty."
16. New York Times, March 10, 1981. For the indications, all from unidentified sources, that the United States sends arms to the Afghans,
Carl Bernstein, "Arms for Afghanistan," The New Republic, July 18,
1981, 8-10.
17. I cite only the most recent reports: II Giornale Nuovo, December 2,
1981; Neue Zuercher Zeitung, December 20-21, 1981; Foreign Report,
January 7, 1982.
18. Il Giomale Nuovo, October 29, 1981.
19. New York Times, January 3, 1982.
See also the important article by Pierre and Micheline Centlivres,
"Village en Afghanistan," Commentaire 16, Winter 1981-82, 516-525.
AT HOME AND ABROAD
LETTER FROM VIETNAM
Hanoi, ecological city
Four A.M. at my hotel, right in the middle of Hano~ near the Grand Theatre. The
crowing of roosters from the yards nearby
awakens me. Not-to-be-believed! Thirty
years ago, at the age of thirteen, I had last
seen this colonial city that looked more like
a French provincial town-with, however,
every feature of an urban center-than a
capitol. In thirty years the regime has managed to rusticate Hanoi at the same time
that its population (not counting the new
suburbs) has quadrupled to 800,000.
98
In that early morning's walk and in the
following days, I saw other sides of the city's
"ecological" transformation. With the exception of a few public buildings, no new
housing had gone up within the city limits.
Banana trees, vegetables, chicken cages,
pig pens take up every square foot of the
gardens of the villas of the past. Fertilized
by the excrement of fowls and little pigs that
are raised like dogs, a vegetable green spills
from the terraces of even small apartment
houses. The inhabitants are even encour-
aged to take up part of the sidewalk to plant
fruit trees-or vegetables that the urine of
passing children waters.
Interior spaces are laid out with the same
ecological concern. Each individual takes
up an average of one and a half square
yards. He eats, sleeps, studies, works, and
entertains on a bed made of one large
wooden board. Thin panel-partitions and
balconies under the ceilings quadruple the
available space. Four to five households
now live in the space once taken up by
WINTER 1982
�one. This crowding makes for the mutual
surveillance the State desires. In the course
of time, however, it may make for loyalties,
and even connivance against the state's
hostility.
The housing crisis
Unventilated and usually dark, these low
houses in the center of town are still preferable to the recently and poorly constructed
dormitory houses of the suburbs that break
down into slums within four to five years.
They are preferable because the life of the
streets makes footage in front of these
houses worth a mint in rent or in sale price.
With their stands set up there, small craftsmen and peddlers earn ten times more than
state employees, even despite heavy taxes
and the necessity of restocking in the open
market.
In the suburbs humidity and mould
crumble the walls; doors and windows don't
shut; the stairwells stink; running water
reaches only to the second floor; the waste
drainage system is inadequate or nonexistent. Coming home from factory or office,
men and women have to carry pails of water
to the third, fourth, or fifth floor, and, for
fear of theft, in addition, their bicycles.
These houses in the suburbs are not available to anyone who wants them. Heroes of
labour and high-level state and party offi·
cials have preference; others may leave
their names on a waiting list that may drag
on four or five years. But money can always buy the right to rent from those who
enjoy preference.
The state also builds housing for those
who can pay lavishly for associative ownership-four to eight thousand dong down,
the rest in monthly installments, with salaries in the range from 50 to 200 dong a
month. And yet because of the crises in
housing the waiting lists for co-ownership
of these apartments are long: illegitimate
favors and illegal transactions are the rule.
The discrepancy between the earnings
of employees and bureaucrats and what
they spend always bewilders foreigners. A
family of four with two working adults
spends an average of 500 to 600 dong for
essentials: food, clothing, medicine, travelbut the two salaries together hardly add up
to 200 dong. How do people make up the
difference? This is one mystery in the everyday life of a citizen of Socialist Vietnam.
Small in size, the apartments hold a bewildering amount of stuff. Refrigerators
and TVs take center stage; then sewing
machines, radio-cassettes, thermos bottles,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
dishes, kitchen utensils, clothes, canned
and dry foods, table, chairs, bed; even a
mo-ped or a bicycle kept away from thieves
,-all crammed into a poor lodging of twelve
to twenty square yards.
No paintings, no vases with flowers. Even
in the homes of intellectuals, there is no
room for aesthetics. Only one picture hangs
on the wall, high above the many shelves
filled with useful objects-the portrait of
Uncle Ho, outward sign of loyalty to theregime, and protective talisman against the
indiscreetness of the cultural police.
Meant for lawns and children's play, the
space between houses was turned two years
ago into vegetable gardens with plots for
each apartment. Every family gets two
square yards of land for vegetables and its
pig or chickens. Dogs-traditional guardians of the Vietnamese house, children's
playmates, and a special holiday delicacyare nowhere to be seen. Utility and survival
are the only things that count.
The inhabitants of sprawling suburban
projects in Hanoi should count themselves
lucky in comparison to the half of Hanoi
dwellers who swarm in areas that have no
sewage system. On rainy days, it takes acrobatics to keep your knees dry crossing the
muddy lanes in these slums infested with
flies, mosquitoes, and rats. Thirty to fifty
people share a common toilet, a sink, a tiny
kitchen. Despite the single-story houses,
the population density makes the pollution
from the garbage and excrement left uncollected in the humidity among swarming rats
far worse than in the areas overwhelmed
by the exhaust of cars in Western cities.
The institute of health of Hanoi reports
the highest incidence of respiratory and intestinal maladies in just these areas that
the tropical heat makes ideal for the prolif·
eration of bacteria. And yet it is these streets
which house the favorites of the regime,
the proletarians of the workshops and factories-except when these rural-born workers still keep a house in the surrounding
countryside, fifteen or twenty kilometers
outside the city.
Urban life
In Hanoi people travel mostly by foot or
on bicycle, which should please the world·
wide ecological movement-except for the
anarchy of traffic. Fatal accidents occur
daily in the wild swarm of cyclists that
thread daringly between trucks driven by
young "bodoi" drivers still used to jungle
paths. No one pays any attention to the
traffic lights that hardly ever work because
of power blackouts. Without looking ahead
or behind drivers turn right or left. The
young policemen who casually direct traffic are completely overwhelmed. A cigarette
will do if you are stopped for a violation.
After dark, the undiminished traffic of motor·
bikes in the unlighted streets and boulevards
of Hanoi causes serious collisions between
cyclists-and fatal crashes between trucks
and motorbikes.
The use of electricity is severely restricted. With its frequent and prolonged
power cuts, Hanoi becomes a little village
after nightfall. Except for the embassy area
and the houses of the top men, darkness
covers the city. Ostensibly, the energy is
saved for the sake of factories and country
agricultural machines. But such darkness,
in a city of a million people, increases crime
-thefts, break-ins, rapes, prostitution in the
parks, juvenile delinquency. By depriving
the urban proletariat of its one relaxation,
TV sets and radios, it also invites a noticeable rise in a birth rate already rising at an
alarming thirty percent a year. One saying
in Hanoi goes: "I bury my joy deep in the
belly of my wife, and from year to year my
family grows."
Socialist "work"
Like space, time, especially work-time, is
used ecologically. The factories, workshops, and offices have realized the dream
of all Western ecologists, the two-hour day.
A worker, who barely lives five days on his
monthly salary, gives the Party-State its
due: two hours. The other six he keeps for
the pursuit of his private interests. In factory Number X in Hanoi, the team of mechanics makes spare parts for a series of
underground bicycle, kitchen-, and household-ware workshops. They draw upon the
state's raw materials, which rarely arrive at
the same time. This excess of some materials and absence of others equally necessary,
excuses non-fulfillment of quotas and leaves
workers with nothing to do. But since it is
the rule, the socialist rule, that machines
must run unceasingly, workers more often
than not turn the machines to practical advantage-instead of letting them run on
emptily. With the surplus materials or with
scraps that have a way of piling up, they
make themselves objects not forseen in the
plan. Garment workers have a way of cutting large scraps from the textiles the fac·
tory provides-scraps that they turn into
pretty blouses at home for their own use
or, more often, for sale on the open market
in competition with factory goods. When
99
�occasionally the local marketing of factory
"surplus" materials, or of items made out
of them, arouses the suspicions of the economic police, truck-drivers cart the illegal
merchandise away to sell along the roads in
the country~much to the delight of the
peasants, who usually have to do without
manufactured goods.
With such a duplication of effort, socialist enterprises have no chance of reaching
the goals they negotiate with the stateunless they indulge in the common practice of altering the books. The failure to
meet production goals, however, compels
managers to multiply expensive overtimea move that in turn encourages the workers to increase the amount of overtime by
further reducing their productivity during
the regular day.
For twenty years the Party-State has
thundered against the waste and theft of
the public property and means of production of the nation. But the workers and employees feel even more robbed and exploited by a state that pays them wages too
low for their biological reproduction. Who
is the thief here? That is the question.
Short of shutting down its own enterprises
-a move which it will never bring itself to
make-the state can always hold its managers "responsible" to more easily dismiss
them. But the system survives the removal
and replacement of advisors, unchanged.
Workers in distribution and service are
not to be outdone by factory colleagues. According to the Party's daily paper, the People, the Peoples' control committees from
a sample of 500 state stores exposed the following covert practices: the employees of
state stores keep the best of the merchandise, sometimes all of it, for themselves; in
food stores, employees sell customers flour
and other grains after buying up all the rice
for themselves; in the bicycle store M. K.,
the employees together buy up all bicycles
and tires for their own use and especially to
resell at large profit to relatives and neighbours; at a state "supermarket," Bach Hoa
in Hanoi, the shopper who asks for a piece
of fabric, a thermos bottle, a ballpoint pen,
a notebook, or a bar of soap, can expect the
automatic response of the saleslady, "All
out" -but he knows for a fact that a buyerspeculator ready to share his profit with
the saleslady could take home a good supply. Even for rationed items for which you
have coupons you often have to buy your
place in the long lines made up oflittle professionals between the ages of eight and fifteen. This mafia of buyers-speculators in
connivance with the salespersons, whose
wages rarely exceed twenty-five dollars a
month, infests almost all the state stores in
100
Hanoi and in the other cities of Vietnam.
In this racket, the buyer and saleslady
never deal alone but in concert with every
one of their colleagues-and with the omnipresent agents of the police.
Widespread corruption
The transportation business is just as riddled with corruption. It often takes weeks
to get the authorization necessary to move
from one city to another, and, especially,
from north to south-and just as long again
to get a train or bus ticket. The train ticket
from Hanoi to Haiphong, three dong at the
official state price, is available only on the
black market for ten times the price. State
officials take an unlimited number of "business" trips, often with their families. Employees of the railroad and bus lines sell at
least a third of their tickets to "relatives"
and friends who then renegotiate them on
the black market. The price of airplane
tickets is prohibitive. And yet the Vietnamese travel constantly, both to visit friends
and family and, more often, to speculate
on the significant differences in the price
of merchandise in different regions.
At least once a week the party papers accuse a bus or shipping line of misappropriating hundreds of tons of rice or wheat
flour. But the denounced crimes go unpunished. Prompt enough in handing down
harsh verdicts against their political enemies, public tribunals are slow and indulgent towards economic delinquents whose
hands are no dirtier than anyone else's.
The gangrene of corruption does not
spare the most "sacred" sectors of socialist
society, health and education. The managers and staff of hospitals and clinics skim
off substantial amounts of the medicine
and food intended for the sick. Managers
report an inflated number of beds or patients. If the state maintains it cannot meet
such inflationist demands, the patients
have somehow or other to pay for the supposedly free services and medications. In
this condition of severe scarcity and blatant inequalities, it seems only natural that
hospital workers attend to their own wellbeing before treating the rest of the people.
In the socialist system there are at least
three types of hospitals: those for the people, those for the middle-level bureaucrats,
and those for the higher officials of the
Party-State. Within each type treatment
varies according to wage or salary scales.
Everyone in Hanoi knows that the large
hospital, "Viet-XO" (Russian-Vietnamese)
admits only high-level officials, who are assigned to wards according to salary. Before
explaining his symptoms, a sick man who ar-
rives at a hospital must show his party card
or his certificate of salary.
The hard times of 1980 showed the weakness of the Vietnamese academic system. At
the start of the 1980 school year, the regime
took pride in an enrollment of 13 million,
from nursery school to secondary school,
and a teaching staff of 300,000.
At the material level, the academic system is totally inadequate. The buildings (including those made of wood and corrugated
iron or mud) barely suffice for a third of the
students. Classes are organized in shifts:
morning classes from seven to eleven or afternoon ones from one to five are for youths
following a normal course of studies; evening classes, from six to ten, are for adults.
Children are left to themselves a good half
of the day. The youth organizations cannot
cope with their numbers. They often loiter
in gangs in the parks or in the streets of the
suburbs. In the present hard times, children
help their families in their unofficial workshops or do their own small-time peddling in
front of state stores, train stations, movies,
and theatres. Some of them prove to be excellent pickpockets. A walk after dark in certain areas of Hanoi and Saigon is ill-advised.
In 1980, the students or their parents had
to buy textbooks and notebooks, often at
high open-market prices. In many schools,
students have neither paper nor pencils to
copy down the lessons of teachers, who cannot keep up standards. After school, students and teachers run into each other in
the pursuit of small deals on the sidewalks.
The teachers I interviewed said they had
never known their profession so debased
and humiliated. Their poverty wages allow
them no time for advanced study, for research, or self-instruction.
Secondary-school teachers with classes
preparing for degrees or for college entrance
are a bit better off. They reserve their best
teaching for those students whose parents
can pay extra for special lessons. To pass
the entrance and graduation exams of universities and technical schools, you had
better be the child of high-ranking officials
in the regime, or be able to afford large payoffs-or be a genius. The certainty that
their students, unless they are ready to go
till the soil in the New Economic Zones,
will be unemployed after graduation from
high school or university, discourages many
honourable teachers. In the south, the lot
of students and their teachers seems even
more desperate. There, in addition to the
material deprivation common to all Vietnamese, the newly "liberated" suffer the psychological torment that comes of not being
able to absorb socialist education based on
Leninist indoctrination.
WINTER 1982
�Indoctrination
Instruction in "revolutionary vigilance,"
even and above all towards one's parents
and relatives, replaces the teaching of mo·
rality. The outcome of an individual's exams depends in large part on his political
history and on the political history of his
parents and grandparents. As they say in
the South, "Hoc tai thi ly lich": "Study
with your brains, compete with your political past."
(Students in the South are divided into
four categories:
A. Militant, or belonging to the family
of a party militant;
B. Worker, or child of a worker-family
which did not work for the old regime;
C. Child of a petty official or non-ranking
military man of the old regime. Petty bourgeois origin;
D. Men who worked for the old regime,
or child of parents who held high positions
in the old regime.)
University professors and researchers
must keep strictly to "the eight valuable
hours of socialist work." A professor of
medicine from the faculty of the University of Paris, fifteen minutes late for his lecture, often puts up with the reproaches of
his doorman-comrade.
The regime appoints officials, recruited
from the illiterate peasantry, to watch over
the activities of Southern intellectuals
barred from all teaching. Former professors of literature and law hang on in untenured positions at the Institute of Research
in the Social Sciences. Others who are in
shape pedal bicycle-taxis. All of them
dream of leaving their country~now become a foreign land-even though not
many years ago most took part in the struggle against the American presence. The
Southern intelligentsia is most pitiable.
The regime distrusts the quarrelsome habits it took on in the long struggle against
the American war. To make matters worse,
the Stalinist conception of a proletarian
science and technology radically different
from, and far superior to, bourgeois science, still holds sway over Vietnamese
Communist bureaucrats.
During a national congress of the
Writer's Union, in Hanoi in May 1980, in
celebration of thirty-five years of literary
production under the regime, Nguyen
dinh Thi, famous writer and ex-president
of the union, conceded: "Over thirty-five
years of independence and socialist construction, we have seen a host of writers
and poets emerge, but not a single literary
work." This outrageous admission earned
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
him the total suppression of his play,
"Nhuyen Trai a DOng Quan," commissioned by the Party's Central Committee
: to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the
national hero, general, chief of state, and
poet. Party censors accused him of playing
down the great man's victorious resistance
to the Chinese army of occupation in his
overemphasis of his hero's time of disgrace
-and of implicitly slandering the present
socialist regime in his critique of the despotic monarchy of that time. The fate of
this party writer, producer of some twenty
novels extolling the anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist struggles and the construction of socialism, sheds a harsh light on the
predicament of not-so-conformist writers
and artists.
Painters and musicians are encouraged
to take up subjects that will build socialism,
and socialist love of country and of work.
Eastern or Western Impressionism, abstract painting, and painting of nude figures are on the index. A squad from the
cultural police descended upon the studio
of painter B one day to seize his paintings
of too-delicate young girls, and to teach
him to draw "a hand with all five fingers."
The censors classify music into three
fundamental groups: red, yellow, and blue.
The radio broadcasts red or revolutionary
music, martial in its rhythms and lyrics, all
day long. Yell ow music, romantic and softening like the former music of the South or
agitated like the Western "disco" music, is
passionately condemned. Finally, blue music, like classical music and the light music of
the West, is to be listened to in moderation.
Repression is so severe that many intellectuals confess that they do not dare to
write their thoughts and real feelings, even
privately. They do not dare pursue unorthodox ideas for fear these might slip out in
conversation with an unreliable colleague
or in the course of police questioning. The
motto of Buddhist and Christian monks,
"Banish impure thoughts," has become a
party order to the subjects of the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam.
In twenty-five years of socialism, at least
sixty famous writers and artists have
known banishment, expulsion from the
Party, reeducation through work in camps.
Professor Tran Due Thao, once a student
and professor at the :Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris, is the most notorious
case. For requesting more freedom in university teaching and in literary and artistic
expression, and particularly for daring to
criticize the anti·intellectual Stalinist practices of the Party, he was arrested in 1958,
subjected to self-criticism and sent to tend
cows in a reeducation camp in the High
Regions. Upon his return to Hanoi in early
1960, he was barred from teaching and
publishing. In exchange for a food allowance, he translates works of Marx and
Lenin. Denied hospital privileges, he must
depend on the help of friends in case of illness. Since 1971, at the request of some intellectuals of the French Communist
Party, the Vietnamese Communist Party
authorized Tran Due Thao to publish
some articles on the philosophy of language in the French journal La Pensee.
Country life
Compared to country life, the cities with
all their poverty seem to the Vietnamese
peasants like little heavens-for they still
have medicines, white rice, sugar, cigarettes, and all sorts of amenities. Despite
Party propaganda, the young people (students or graduates) sent to the country see
that the peasants are even more exploited
than the urban proletariat. Unable to bear
the harsh conditions of country life, the ostracism of local officials, the ignorance the
Party fosters in the peasantry, most of
these young people sneak back to the cities.
Organized into cooperatives that have
collectivized all the means of production,
land, and equipment, the peasants take
their work in the collective rice paddies in
resignation for a corvee for the Party. They
control neither the production plan nor the
distribution that allots them the bare minimum of food: forty-four pounds of paddy
per person per month in a good harvest,
about thirty percent of total production.
The rest must be sold to the state at ridiculously low prices. The manure, agricultural
equipment, and other items of everyday
use supposedly supplied by the state at low
prices are available in far from sufficient
quality or quantity.
With the exception of Party schools for
the children of the political bureaucracy,
the schools, which are free, offer no prospect of advancement. Because in 1980 the
medical clinics had no medicines, the peasants had to seek their medicines in the cities at black market prices. To survive they
must, in addition to the eight hours of socialist work on the rice paddies of the cooperative, put in as much or more time on
their family plots. The productivity of
these individual plots, that taken together
make up five to seven percent of the communal lands, surpasses the collective rice
paddies six or seven times.
Thanks to a tropical climate that knows
no harsh winters, the peasant may, with
101
�deft rotation, manage four or five harvests
a year: one of rice, one of potatoes or corn,
two or three of kidney beans, soy beans,
tomatoes, squash, tobacco, etc. He takes
his tools and fertilizer from the cooperative's stocks.
Convinced the state exploits him, the
peasant flaunts a high rate of absenteeism.
In his five to six hours on collective land,
the peasant prepares his strength for the
pursuit of much more lucrative work at
home: truck farming, pig and poultry raising, handicrafts or peddling. In consequence
of these arrangements, young researchers
from Hanoi, engaged in a survey of rural
life, were astonished to find thirty-hour day
schedules for peasants: eight hours of work
on the cooperative farm, eight more of work
at home, eight hours for sleep, four hours
of domestic activities (kitchen work, housework, childcare ... ) and one hour for relaxation or political meetings.
The family economy resorts to all available labor, from six-year-old children tore-
tired grandparents. The children are given
the least burdensome tasks, such as babysitting or watching the pigs and poultry.
But the children's work in the family interferes with their schooling: most Vietnamese peasant children quit school after the
elementary grades.
The yield of the family plots not directly
consumed at home fetches prices on the
open market in the cities from eight to ten
times higher than in state stores. Only this
parallel economy, which the State tolerates
in suspicion, allows the peasant to add
enough to the meager collective-farm food
rations to satisfy his basic needs for clothing, housing, health, transportation, social,
and cultural life.
More spacious than city homes, half the
houses in the country in the North are now
solidly built, with brick walls and red tile
roofs. Not the productivity of the cooperatives, as the regime would have it, but
twenty years of desperate work on plots of
individual land have built these houses.
This article appeared in 1981 in the autumn issue of Commentaire.
Eight years ago the writers, a physician
and a professor of education at the top of
French professional life-Paris-and about
to join the Socialist Party, accepted an invitation from the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to spend five years in Laos. With
their three infant daughters they arrived in
Vientiane, for an at first sight "mad adventure" that reflection had told them actually
amounted to an "extraordinary opportunity," on September 14, 1974-little more
than six months before the Communist
conquest of South Vietnam that they enthusiastically took for the "liberation" of
Indochina. Despite their expectations, their
eyes were alive enough to see what went
on before them-and their souls strong
enough to stand the pain of their sight.
Every Communist victory in Vietnam
brought the Communist Pathet Lao nearer
to power. A little more than six months after the signature of the Paris accords to end
the Vietnam War January 23, 1973, a Provi·
sional Government of National Union was
formed in Laos in which Communist ministers matched right wing minist~rs in pairs.
Even the police was reduced to powerlessness by the resort to pairs: a Communist
accompanied each American-uniformed regular policeman. The conquest of Saigon in
April 1975 made possible-in addition to
the Khmer Rouge conquest of Phnom Penh
-the "Liberation" of Vientiane and the
seizure of power in Laos by the revolutionary committees supported by the Pathet
Lao on August 23, followed by abdication
of the king on November 29 and the decla·
ration of the Peoples Democratic Republic
of Laos on December 2.
The more the Communists in Vientiane
The state may complain that the oblig·
atory deliveries of produce from the cooperatives leave much to be desired-and
sometimes do not occur at all. At fault,
however, are not the collective-farm members, who receive only thirty percent of the
harvest-but the middle-men who each
skim something off the surplus: officials of
the cooperative, of the commune, of the
district, and of the province; managerial,
administrative, military, and political officials. In the endless "bureaucracy" in Vietnamese rural society, there is an official for
each four or five workers.
Hdnoi, November 1980
JEAN DULICH
Translated by Colette Hughes
Jean Dulich is a pseudonym for a Vietnamese.
FIRST READINGS
LAOS
Au nom de Marx et de Bouddha, Revolution au Laos: un people, une culture disparaissent, by Marie-Noele and Didier Sicard
InterEditions, Paris 1981, 207 pages.
Laos has long since returned to the strategic insignificance for which, one judges,
nature intended it and for which its inhabitants unquestionably yearn.
J. K. Galbraith
New York Times
January l, 1982
This is a real book, a book that had to be
written. Like most such books it is also a
story of self-education. It has an awkwardness, not to be confused with ineptness,
that tells in its dreadful simplicity indelibly
of experience.
102
WINTER 1982
�tighten their grip on Laos, the more they unity, and equality between the various
fall into dependence on the Communists peoples of Laos. Who could object? People
of Vietnam. For instance, the arrest in responded to the regime's call with undeniMarch 1977 of the king, whose legitimacy , able eagerness: after thirty years of guerrilla
the Communists had made a great show of warfare they yearned for reconciliation.
respecting in their years of infiltrating the Since all were to take part, reconciliation
royal government, came a few months be- meant meetings which people in the beginfore the signature of the treaty of "friend- ning attended with enthusiasm.
ship and cooperation" (july 18, 1977) with
This readiness to trust the regime's offer
Vietnam that spelled out the "special rela- of reconciliation and attend its meetings
tions" that obtain between the two coun- was, in the Sicards' retrospective judgetries in national defense, the arts, radio, ment, a mistake that could not be undone,
press, education-and secretly traced a new for the regime had no intention of keeping
frontier between the two countries.
its promise of reconciliation. "Caution! If
To some extent the Communist seizure you trust in good faith, if you honestly deof power in Laos amounts to a disguised sire an understanding, know that under
North Vietnamese conquest. But the North their apparent frankness and good will your
Vietnamese ascendance, like almost every enemies of thirty years' standing intend to
other fact in Laos, has to be denied. Since remain that way." "The function of the pothe "friendship" treaty, expression of anti- litical meetings is to invite people to tie
Vietnamese sentiments brings eight years their own hands of their own free will."
in the camps. Haircuts, accents, and the
At these meetings, that took place in the
availability in butcher shops of dogmeat, a beginning two or three times a week, on
Vietnamese delicacy Laotians despise, be- short notice, at any time of the day or night,
tray the Vietnamese, who disguise them- individuals had to demonstrate their adherselves in the uniform of the Pathet Lao. ence to propositions that changed with beOnly the Thai kids, for the moment safe wildering rapidity. There was no question
beyond the wide Mekong, dare refer openly of objecting or expressing one's thoughts.
to the North Vietnamese domination of The ever-changing line had to be repeated
Laos: they call the Laotian children on the as if one meant it. The primary experience
other side, "dog-eaters."
of these meetings was that one can be made
Because they were less obviously brutal to assent to anything: the writers agreed at
and murderous than the Communists in one of these sessions that foreign reporters
Cambodia and Vietnam, the Communists should be kept out of Laos, because their
in Laos thought they could undo Laos with- news might hurt the "revolution." At least
out anybody, either Laotian or foreigner, made to appear to assent to anything. " 'I
noticing. At a time of exclusion of foreign- am sure that ninety percent of us make beers not from the socialist countries from lieve we agree. But do we have any other
Vietnam and Cambodia, they allowed men choice .... '" "To give up speaking, means
and women like the Sicards the freedom of dying to yourself and thereby to others."
the country. This confidence of the ComAnd the self-betrayal requires actions as
munists in Laos that they could get away well as words. Often, the betrayal of friends.
with anything that was not unmistakable Or symbolic "political" action: on a night
-and with their, in appearance, frank and in December 1977 the whole population
open manner they won the Sicards at first- suddenly turns to digging trenches to defend
makes the Sicards fear that "the 'normal' the "revolution" from imminent attack beworld of tomorrow will perhaps be closer to cause the line holds that Thai "imperialism"
the world of Communist Laos than our threatens the nation.
own."
In addition to frequent political meetings,
In the beginning, immediately after the there are weekly sessions of self-criticism at
seizure of power, the new regime offered work and, especially at the university,
reconciliation. In contrast to the old gov- monthly rehearsal of political thoughts in
ernment it promised to explain all its ac- writing-"autobiographies" that allow no
tions: people would no longer be ruled from fact or feeling to escape the great simplistic
the outside without explanation, but would divide "before and after the revolution." At
themselves take part in decisions. All were self-criticism sessions a person criticizes
to help realize progress, reconciliation, himself before suffering the criticism of
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
everybody else. In grand self-criticism sessions, an individual, for instance, a young
woman, pregnant by a professor who has
fled across the Mekong, faces a thousand
people on her feet for six hours. These criticism sessions serve to isolate individuals
-and at the same time to make them feel
responsible for their isolation. "'The most
painful thing is not to be able to speak
openly to anyone. Out of fear, we use ambiguous language. But the torture is unbearable.'" They reinforce each person's
sense of his own powerlessness and of the
force of the state without limits-which
cannot be distinguished from everybody
else and from oneself-that does what it
pleases with impunity. The forced writing
of "autobiographies" makes individuals feel
that Party cadres can see through them-as
one student put it. But again they are the
ones making themselves transparent.
In 1979, four years after the seizure of
power, Party cadres addressing these meetings openly confessed the deceptiveness of
their initial offers of reconciliation:
Now that you have advanced in your
study of our politics, you can realize that
we never had the slightest intention of
carrying out the program announced in
1975. The announcement of the program
was simply a step necessary to reassure
the people, to win their acceptance of
us- in order to reach the only and glorious goal of socialism.
Reconciliation that looked like an offer
to negotiate meant only to disarm the people and turn them to their own oppression.
"Between brotherly countries there are
never negotiations-there is only one reality: the correlations of forces." Negotiation,
even the demand for an openly acknowledged surrender instead of the offer of reconciliation, would have meant the Party
recognized limitations, acknowledged another will than its own, another world than
the mind of Lenin. The seizure of power,
therefore, does not bring the end of fighting
but continuation of fighting by other means:
fewer are murdered but almost all made to
lead themselves to a living death. "To reduce the forces of the enemy to powerlessness without fighting them, that is the
greatest victory."
But such a victory has no end, it needs
triumph after unacknowledged triumph,
for an acknowledged triumph would mean
103
�recognition of limitation. After the -.seizure
of power, the life in a person which•might
lead him to say or think something unexpected and obvious, to say "no," bec'omes
the enemy. In order to survive physically
the individual must never cease denying
that life-the reason for the frequency and
unexpectedness of meetings, self-criticism
sessions and the rest. "This process of education/reeducation really means learning
to cover up your individuality and turning
yourself into a skeleton or body of marblethe only stuff fitted to this society."" ... biological existence becomes the only point
of reference that does not arouse suspicion .... "
You cannot read the Sicards' account of
the Pathet Lao's exploitation of the yearning for pe"!ce and reconciliation to continue
war without combat-but not without murder-without wondering what it tells about
big international "negotiations" with the
Soviet Union and China. Ever since 1944,
the back and forth between the yearning
for peace and the failure of negotiations,
for instance, the failure _to conclude a
peace in Europe, has served to keep many
people from realizing that the Second
World War continues in a succession of
wars-small only in the sense they are not
total-which served to ideologize and
polarize the perceptions, especially of
"elites," throughout the world in unprecedented fashion. (And polarization of perception means paralysis of the capacity to
see what is going on and to make common
sense judgements: in terms of the struggle
to destroy men's minds, all wars since 1944
have been waged throughout the whole
world.) The terror at nuclear extermination, and the negotiations to soothe it, are
major weapons right now in the struggle to
destroy the remnants of Europe's freedom.
The pursuit of settlement through negotiation played a role in the destruction of
South Vietnam. Those who should most
study this book, diplomats, will probably be
the last to read it.
Besides political meetings, forced-voluntary labor also continues the war after the
seizure of power without guerrilla combat.
It acts out the theses of political meetings.
Everywhere at all times individuals must
look active. In the morning before work in
front of the ministries they water vegetable
gardens to foster the self-sufficiency of
Laos-gardens whose produce is not gath-
104
ered, for the point is to sow, not necessarily
to reap. After work there are calisthenics
and sports. At the university the grounds
show continuous regimented activity-in
contrast to the easy-going leisure before the
''revolution."
The point of this labour is not to accomplish anything but "to realize a concept for
a moment": to show that the people together can do anything-and the individual
alone nothing. Like the "discussions" at
meetings it is largely gesture, but gesture
with the purpose of turning people to their
own oppression-with the excuse that it
will earn them entrance into the "socialist
fraternity." Sometimes the forced-voluntary
labour accomplished the opposite of its intention. For instance, because of the failure
to consult the "reactionary" experts of the
past, ditches dug from the Mekong to irrigate the rice paddies drained them. "The
display of energy in labour has only one
purpose: to express vengeance, the vengeance of the fighters of the Pathet Lao on
those who collaborated or waited, upon
those who thought the nation could come
to independence without turning Communist. And those who suffer this vengeance
must not only undergo it-they must
desire it."
Like the political meetings, the forcedvoluntary labour turns people into accomplices in their own oppression. That everybody suffers makes the suffering easier to
bear. The satisfaction people feel at the
sight of others, once their betters or their
elders, suffering like themselves, blinds
them almost against their will to the system
that crushes them.
But they want somebody to blame for
their self-inflicted misery. "I will bear oppression, the absence of liberty, hunger,
the hardness of life on condition that I can
let my aggression loose on somebody whom
I can hold responsible for my misery. To
survive and overcome my misery, I am ready
to turn in my neighbour-even at the cost
of my moral consciousness." And the readiness to turn in neighbours also means the
nations nearby still outside the "socialist
fraternity."
In this book that describes a society turning into a camp, there is little about the
camps that are nevertheless a distinct unmentioned presence. At the center of the
life left in Laos, the Sicards were about as
far away from awareness of the camps as
anybody could be within Laos. Behind the
still dead waters of a dam about sixty kilometers from Vientiane, there are islands
with a series of camps of increasing severity.
On the first of these islands, one for women,
one for men, open to the world in the boast
of the regime, weaving, basketry, gardening, songs, and dancing "mildly reeducate
parasites-drug addicts, the young unemployed, juvenile deliquents, criminals, lepers,
and prostitutes. The Sicards were turned
away upon their arrival to visit these islands. In other camps there are something
like fifty to sixty thousand officers, soldiers
and civil se~vants of the royal governmenT
-about 2 percent of the population of
Laos. Upon the seizure of power, the officers and soldiers of the royal army went
willingly to political meetings that, in their
instance, turned immediately, brutally into
a concentration camp.
Everybody exists with the unexpressed
fear that they too might disappear into these
camps. "The talk is of freedom, but in reality there is fear and spying." The students
of the Sicards disappeared, it turned out
never to return, often on the excuse of fortyday political meetings or of study abroad in
eastern Europe. "Seven of my students disappeared in October 1975. Arrested because
they insisted on thinking for themselves
and because they could not conceive that
their classmates would use their lives to
dress themselves in progressivism's rags."
A student, a cadre in the Party, obscure
and incapable before the "revolution," now
full of that feverish energy whose characteristic is that it cannot focus enough to accomplish anything, who has the power to
decide which students can go home or
abroad, who makes a show of not going to
his home village for his mother's funeral
(for the Party has become his parents), goes
to a splendid dinner at the house of a
young woman, a classmate. In self-criticism
session the next day at the University, he
denounces her for keeping "bourgeois"
ways. The anger of the Sicards leads them
to the despairing realization that normality
has come to mean such betrayal: people
make believe they take it for granted.
A society that turns into a camp means
paralysis-literally the freezing of movement, not only in private and traditional
life-that is, feeling and thought-but of
actual physical movement, simply getting
around. At night patrols, meant to protect
WINTER 1982
�that sometimes arrest arbitrarily, discour- body else but themselves-as capable of
age circulation. In Vientiane, people are re- anything-and with impunity.
duced to walking because of the scarcity of ' The attack on tradition and the rigidifipublic transportation, and because other cation shows itself perhaps most in the noise
means meet with disapproval: cars show that replaces traditional music and even
privilege, tricycle taxis "exploit" drivers- traditional sounds like the calls of farmers
who as a result without customers must to their water buffaloes. From five-thirty in
work in the fields in the country_ The "rev- the morning, martial music in alternation
olutionary" salute, the clenched fist, like with political announcements blares from
the Hitler salute in Germany, replaces the loudspeakers at almost every comer in Vientraditional, now "reactionary," greeting, tiane. At the hospital and elsewhere there
hands together with a slight bow of the is singing of "revolutionary" songs and
head 1 The young walk apart from each music-which makes the traditional and
other and no longer hold hands. Dress ancient music look somehow out-of-place
changes from the elegance and fresh care and ridiculous. "For the first time in Laos I
that once distinguished one individual from saw that people no longer lived music with
another, to the disguise of monotony: hair their hands and bodies ... they listened rigid
can no longer be worn long, nails painted; in silence." "We can do nothing about it. It
Ho Chi Minh sandals made of tires replace is the people's will," officials told Sicard in
traditional footwear; above all, no jeans; no answer to his complaint that the earsplitting
American cigarettes except in secret; the noise at the hospital disturbed the-seriously
uniform jackets of the liberation army for sick. Like the meetings and the forced volstudents.
untary labour, the noise aims to destroy the
The attack on the spontaneous centers capacity to think-or, at least, to hear your
on the goodwill that informs private and tra- thoughts. At one point Sicard, to his astonditional life: it desires to violate and devour ished bewilderment, comes upon a tradiit. More than ten people cannot meet with- tional Laotian orchestra at the hospital
out permission. Marriages also require per- playing "revolutionary" martial music. Sudmission-and occasion political speeches. denly, the players stop playing but the music
Upon requesting permission for a tradi- continues: the orchestra had made believe
tional Laotian party, a baci, for a newborn it played the music that came from recchild, a couple is asked whether it has for- ords. "Laotian easygoingness makes it imgotten that the "revolution," too, is an in- possible to keep up subterfuge for a long
fant. Not ready to attack Buddhist priests time."
directly, the Party drives them to violate
In the name of return to traditional Laotheir vocation in its exercise. For instance, tian medicine-that had at first stirred Si~
they are told to preach hatred of "Ameri- card-lepers, later accused of "spying for
can imperialism" or to work to avoid arrest the Americans for pay," no longer receive
for "parasitism" -both violations of their antibiotics. The paralysis of life also shows
tenets. Individuals must give the traditional itself in hunger and the incapacity to protest
alms to monks in secret for fear of accusa- against it. The significance of the recurtion for "abetting parasitism." As a result rence of food in her students' grammatical
of this interference individuals and families examples finally comes to Mrs. Sicard: they
now do secretly the things they did openly have nothing to eat between five-thirty in
"before the revolution" -and suffer guilt the afternoon and eleven-thirty the next
and conflict, for they must risk their lives morning-but they had been ashamed to
to live in their accustomed manner. They tell her until questioned! Time rigidifies
experience the state-that is, almost every- also into universal Socialist time: the dates
of Stalingrad, the "October Revolution,"
obliterate the Buddhist festivals of custom
that bore no fixed dates. "The only reality is
1. For an essay showing exact parallels in Nathe undeniable existence of a society that
tional-Socialist Germany, and stressing, like the
Sicards, the acquiescence and cooperation of inmakes its power to crush felt at every modividuals in their own oppression in order to
ment."
survive, see Bruno Bettelheim, "Remarks on
Escape is the only resistance. Since 1975,
the Psychological Appeal of Totalitarianism,"
three hundred thousand have fled-around
(originally published in 1952) in Surviving, New
Ymk 1979, 317-322.
!0 percent of the population. Of the about
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
three hundred thousand Hmong tribeSmen
who fought with great bravery alongside
the Americans and the South Vietnamese,
seventy-five thousand have fled, fifty thousand have been murdered-many by Vietnamese and Soviet gas attacks since 1975
or 1976, largely ignored by a press that has
too long taken self~hatred for indignation.
To flee one's native land forever always
leaves scars that last for generations. But
for Laotians, more timid and with less ex~
perience of the world than Westerners,
flight from their native land means the end
of everything. They flee because of their
children, they remain because of their parents. They flee because they feel "nailed"
to a past they will never be able to live
down: not to have fought for the Communists means to have made the wrong choice
for all time. In the beginning, scornful and
uncomprehending of those who fled, the
Sicards ended up helping anybody they
could to flee. They tell a story emblematic
of Western callousness and the incapacity
to grasp the significance of events at the
moment of their occurrence. At about four
in the afternoon at the luxurious swimming
pool of the Australian embassy along the
Mekong river, a woman, tipsy or unconscionable, rose as if at a football match to
cheer a swimmer she had just noticed making his way toward the shore of Thailand.
The head went down under the surface at
the sound of a shot from an until-then-inattentive Pathet Lao guard. With its disappearance, she collapased when, and perhaps
because, it was too late.
Except for the daring of these flights, the
Laotians do not protest or resist. Brought
up never to show their emotions, they pre~
tend not to notice what is going on. They
are helpless before this seizure of power
and conquest called "a revolution" that exploits every weakness of their character, es~
pecially their incapacity to yield to their
rational anger and to defend themselves.
They are helpless before the onslaught that
above all-and in this it differs from the
clas~ical despotisms of the past described
by Montesquieu-makes them complicit in
their own oppression.
Unlike many observers the Sicards do
not feel this helplessness differs in kind
from the helplessness of the West. "We fear
that this change we lived through in Laos,
in the heart of Indochina, has a universal
meaning. For what is at stake is not simply
105
�a political phenomenon, not simply some
abstract correlation of forces, not simply
the replacement of one culture with another. This is the death of man, and riddle
of riddles, with his own consent.''
The last most terrible pages of this book
tell of the Sicards' own helplessness. Didier
Sicard demanded antibiotics, available in a
nearby ward reserved for Party cadres, for
an adolescent dying of meningitis. He was
told to mind his medicine and stay out of
politics. He demanded vitamins to treat the
alarming increase in cases of beriberi. A
commission of Soviet doctors replied they
knew of no beriberi in Laos. The Sicards
are overwhelmed by the realization that
they did not get through to the men responsible for the outrages all around them.
They take their helplessness for the helplessness of the Laotians. Perhaps, like the
Laotians, they proved incapable of undoing
their good manners. At the end of their account they bravely print the criticisms of a
friend, an anthropologist who left Laos with
them after ten years: "Do not fool yourselves, you were quite popular in spite of
everything. They never did you the honor
of hating you. We were all class enemiesbut hardly dangerous. You began to try their
patience only at the end with your criticisms and unceasing talk. Then you really
became a nuisance with your readiness to
help people escape across the Mekong and
your visits to the refugee camps in Thailand.
But on the whole you were tolerated. They
took you for too idealistic to be taken seriously."
They observe profoundly that the Communists feed on merely verbal opposition
because they know how to outbid and turn
it to ridicule. (An observation reinforced by
the recent revelation that one of the most
outspoken energetic anti-communists in
Saigon government circles was actually a
Communist agent-the Wall Street Journal,
February 10, 1982.) "To argue with them
means you have already surrendered. Pay
attention to what they do-not to what they
say."
They observe with fear that "this flight
into an imaginary world (really the world of
another, of Lenin?) paralyzes the capacity
to oppose, to say no." They ask themselves;
"Who can be against the declaration that
history is progress? What can you say against
Hate excited in the name of Solidarity?
Against the extirpation of a culture in the
name of Progress? The words are Peace,
Independence, Neutrality, Democracy,
Prosperity-what can you say in their faces?
Are we to say they are not true? That the
truth is that instead of Peace there is war,
instead of Independence, dependence on
Vietnam, instead of Neutrality, alignment
with the Soviet Union, instead of Democracy, totalitarianism, instead of Prosperity,
poverty? But in the name of what? In the
name of whom? What are we defending?"
Events in Laos are much nearer to us
than we dare imagine, just because we take
them to be so far away. For in the name of
freeing itself from Europe, from which it
had achieved formal independence in 1954
at the time of the Geneva accords on Vietnam, Laos has been abandoned by the West
and itself to the European civil war, the
war that did not stop after victory in 1945.
LEO RADITSA
A DEAD MAN'S KNOWLEDGE
Graphite, by Varlam Shalamov, translated
by John Glad, 287 pp., Norton, 1981,$14.95.
One day in 1929, a gifted, decent, indeed
noble young man of 22, Varlam Shalamov,
disappeared. The Western expression "arrested" does not describe the situation. After a brief, ghost-like reappearance in 1934,
he disappeared again, presumably forever.
Yet, miraculously, in 1950 he came back
from the other world. He entered the other
world a tall, powerfully built, handsome
youth, and emerged an invalid, an old, sick
man.
The other world had a very prosaic geographic location: Kolyma, some fifty miles
from American territory, beyond the Arctic
Circle.
106
This is Shalamov's second book published in the West. What is it? Short stories?
No. Apparitions from Kolyma are beyond literature or scholarship or essays.
Shalamov tells what Dante would call
"strange narratives."
Right on the cover of the book and in
the reviews of his previous book, Kolyma
Tales, Shalamov has been compared with
and to Solzhenitsyn. Why? Both are Russians who were in "Soviet prison camps."
Jack London tells a story of a French policeman not able to distinguish between
two natives until one of them explained
that he was small and stout, the other tall
and thin.
Shalamov says about an Andreyev, an
old prisoner (who is himself), gazing at the
newer Kolyma prisoners:
These were living people, and Andreyev
was a representative of the dead. His
knowledge, a dead man's knowledge,
was of no use to them, the living.
According to Victor Nekrasov, a Russian
writer in exile, Shalamov lives in Russia in
poverty and obscurity, completely forsaken
and forgotten by his relatives and whatever
friends he had, except for one devoted person who comes to see him.*
F arne, literature, politics, Russia, greatness, Tolstoy~all that Solzhenitzen, immensely ambitious and immensely successful, wanted in his youth and wants nowburned out in Shalamov. Hark to a dead
*Shalamov died on January 17, 1982.
WINTER 1982
�man's knowledge. Andreyev's neighbor
was crying.
Andreyev, however, stared at him without sympathy. He had seen too many
men cry for too many reasons.
These reasons are then described by
someone who no longer belongs to the humanity that weeps-by God or by angels or
by the dead.
The only touch of literature Shalamov
affords is an occasional final punch linethe last sentence of the narrative. In
"Dominoes," a prison doctor (a prisoner
himself) whose privileges (such as a separate room) made him a semi-god in the eyes
of ordinary prisoners, has a fancy (gods and
semi-gods do have fancies) to play a game
of dominoes, and his favorite ordinary prisoner is escorted to the doctor's room by
another prisoner.
In the divine privacy of the room, a di, vine orgy unfolds: the semi-god treats the
mortal to some porridge and bread, and
they drink tea with sugor(certainly the food
of semi-gods). Hours fly by in this heavenly
bliss, and after a game of dominoes, apotheosis follows: the mortal is treated to a cigarette which he smokes almost in delirium.
Ecstatic, he says goodbye to the semi~
divine doctor and walks out of the room
into the dark corridor. The punch line: the
other prisoner had waited for him by the
door all these hours (in the vain hope to get
a crust of bread or a cigarette butt).
Some reviewers invoked Dostoyevsky's
"Notes from the House of the Dead." Shal·
amov says, with his terse, lustreless, dead
man's scorn: "There was no Kolyma in the
House of the Dead."
Or: "Dostoyevsky never knew anyone
from the true criminal world." Even criminals in the Russia of Nicholas I and serfdom
(the first, ferocious half of the nineteenth
century) were not real criminals compared
with criminals in post-1917 Russia.
Kolyma. What's the moral of Shalamov's
life? Of anyone's Kolyma life? There is
none. Every minute of Kolyma life is a
"poisoned minute."
There is much there that a man should
not know, should not see, and if he does
see it, it is better for him to die.
Shalamov saw. The tragic mask he speaks
through is his death mask.
LEV NAVROZOV
FROM OUR READERS (continued from page 2)
mathematics than women. On the verbal
part of the SAT's, scores are about equal.
Perhaps women, in their passive way, read
more and hence become better readers
and so overcome their intellectual deficiencies and test as equals to men, or perhaps
they are equal. Both the math and verbal
parts of the examination demand reasoning ability, and so no conclusion can be
drawn from these results. In the absence of
solid evidence, it seems to me incumbent
on us to treat men and women as equals
rather than assuming inequalitieS and thus
injuring those who, though equal (or often,
be it noted, superior), are treated as..inferiors.
As for child-rearing, it is my impression
that as men spend more time with their
children, many of them become quite proficient at rearing them (sometimes even
better than their wives). Again this may be
a case where habit and prejudice are seen
as laws of nature.
Mr. Levin claims that child rearing is
highly valued by all but feminists. What is
the measure of that valuation? In a society
in which the value of one's work is measured either in terms of money or public
honor (usually the former), child-rearing
seems among the least esteemed jobs.
Nursery school teachers, kindergarten
teachers, and day-care workers, not to
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
mention mothers, get about as little money
or public recognition as it is possible to get.
It is true that those who prefer to have
women at home rather than in the workplace have tried to puff motherhood and
family publicly, but they draw the line at
considering raising children sufficiently
important work to make mothering a qualification for, say, social security. Rather, it
seems to me that the respect paid to rearing children is the kind one typically gives
to those who relieve us of difficult and, on
the whole, unappealing tasks to keep up
their morale. Though I think it is certainly
the case that managing a household well
requires a variety of skills, managerial, financial, social, and political, it is equally
certainly the case that women trying to return to the work-place after years of raising
children and managing households are
treated as if they had been idly passing
their time and had no useful skills, unlike
their male counterparts, who, whatever
paid employment they have had, are treated
as eminently employable. If Mr. Levin really
does value child-rearing, not in some abstract "Yes, the future of our nation depends on h6w our children are raised" way,
but by actually valuing the people who do
it, I commend him; but I think he is part of
a small minority of men.
I do not wish to belabor the issue, but we
should consider at somewhat greater length
the issue of what "sexism" means in terms
of treatment of women in the work-place.
Mr. Levin introduces "a complaint of dubious relevance" at this juncture: namely,
that "judging people on the basis of what is
usually true is unfair to the unusual." His
response to that "dubious objection" is that
"expectations must be based on what is
generally, even if not universally, true."
But this response is inadequate for at least
two reasons. First, "what is generally true"
is sometimes true because of historical circumstances. When Dr. Johnson, a man not
full of the prejudices of his time, met and
was so impressed by the intellect of Fanny
Burney that he offered to teach her Greek
and Latin, he was not permitted to by her
family, most strongly by her brother, be·
cause it was inappropriate for English ladies
to learn Greek and Latin. It was indeed
"generally true" that English ladies were
not classicists, but it by no means followed
from that historical fact that they could not
or should not be. What we are accustomed
to seeing is often the result of a history of
discrimination, and we should not be misled into thinking that what is "generally
the case" is generally the case for good reason. Custom sometimes misleads us into
107
�finding invalid reasons for those appearances, as, for example, the notion of' women's genetic incapacities. The notio~ that
women are genetically lacking either'. certain abilities or psychological traits t:[anslates into their not being considered on
their own merits. Employers have not always employed the "brightest" or the most
skilled, despite Mr. Levin's claim, because
prejudices have prevented them from seeing the talents in front of their eyes or
because they prefer to hire those with
whom they are psychologically more comfortable (see, for example, the study of hiring practices of monopoly and non-monopoly companies of Harvard Business School
graduates by Alchian and Kessel in H. G.
Lewis's Aspects of Labor Economics). Since
Mr. Levin, for example, is convinced of the
inferiority of women in "abstract reasoning" as distinguished from "twenty questions", I would assume that women in his
philosophy classes would be looked at
somewhat differently than men, and his
judgements of students might reflect his
"factual beliefs". The Supreme Court,
after all, knew in much the same way as
Mr. Levin does, that it was perfectly appropriate for women not to be permitted to
practice law (in an 1872 decision the court
ruled that 111inois was within its rights to
deny women admission to the bar). Mr. Justice Bradley's opinion is strikingly like
Mr. Levin's. He, too, claims that "the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which
belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it
for many of the occupations of civil life."
He, too, is not a misogynist. He is in sympathy with the "humane movements" which
have for their object "the multiplication of
avenues for women's advancement." But
this should not be construed to mean that
they should have free admission to those
professions which require "that decision
and firmness which are presumed to predominate in the sterner sex." We can now
laugh at such closed-mindedness, but common sense must have made this home
truth seem obvious to those justices and, in
fact, they had, not surprisingly, never seen
successful women attorneys. Women trying to enter medical schools faced much
the same kind of prejudice, though different rationalizations for the prejudice were
found. And, even when women have been
able to get the jobs for which their abilities
fitted them, they have traditionally been
108
paid less than men. For example, in a lawsuit brought against the U. of Maryland, it
was determined that women were paid, at
the same ranks, in the same departments,
and with the same qualifications, several
thousand dollars less per year than their
male colleagues. And the U. of Maryland is
by no means unusual in this respect. The
most recent figures comparing the salaries
of male and female academics (The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 25,
1981) showed that women on full-time,
nine-month appointments earned, on the
average, approximately 15% less than their
male colleagues. And this difference does
not result from the fact that women tend to
teach in the less highly paid departments
such as the Arts and Humanities. The salaries of women teaching in the Arts were
only 74% of the men's salaries while in the
Humanities the women earned 86% of
what the men ·earned. The only area in
which women's salaries came close to
men's was, curiously, Physical Education,
where women were only 6% behind. And
if it should be objected that women are
paid less because they have earned their
doctorates only recently and hence are
concentrated in the lower academic ranks,
or that women change jobs less frequently
because of family ties, or that they are more
likely to interrupt their careers for childrearing, a study by the National ResearcP
Council (see the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 2, 1981) shows that "Objective
factors alone cannot account adequately
for the career differences which exist between male and female Ph.D.'s." And this
discrimination continues despite "affirmative action" programs which, according to
the study, have not produced "reverse discrimination." I would suggest that sexism
on the part of those doing the hiring and
promoting is the cause of these disparities.
The relatively new issue of equal pay for
comparable work is the old story in new
guise. The jobs open to women simply paid
less than men's jobs, and the differences
had nothing to do with skill, arduousness,
responsibility, or any of the other distinctions one might draw. The only significant
distinction was whether men or women
were doing the work. For example, when
almost all elementary school teachers were
women, elementary school teachers were
paid significantly less than secondaryschool teachers, many of whom were male.
As men began to move into elementary
school teaching, the salaries began to
equalize, and today, in most school districts, all public school teachers are paid on
the same scale. The work didn't change,
only the workers.
Second, we have a long-standing and
rightly respected tradition in this country,
one not always followed but one worth preserving, that people are to be judged on
their individual merits or lack thereof, not
by their belonging to some particular
group, religious, ethnic, or sexual. To act
counter to this deliberately is to invite a
system in which we are judged, not by
what we can do, but by some general notion
of what the group we belong to is capable
of. This seems to me to be a pernicious
doctrine and one to be opposed strongly.
We should note, in closing, that similar
prejudices in the guise of natural laws have
been operative for centuries. The notion of
a decadent "Jewish physics" could only
make sense because it was obvious that
Jews were greedy, treacherous, and dishonest, though clever. Without such prejudices
based on what was obvious to most, the
idea would have been still-born. The presumed obvious inferiority of blacks was
necessary to make slavery a reality and a
morally justifiable institution. Just as "racism" and "anti-semitism" are genuine words
describing genuine facts about the world,
so is "sexism," and to fail to see the evidence of it around one seems to me to be a
case of willful blindness.
GEORGE DOSKOW
St. John's College
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
... Sexism, according to Professor Levin,
is meaningless, for what it purports to
describe is really the honest recognition of
reality. Facts are facts: there are innate differences between men and women it is only
sensible to recognize ....
But consider this: the illiteracy of the
poor in former days was "confirmed by
experience countless times"; would it
therefore now be correct to assume innate
differences between rich and poor individuals? And would it be fair to deny a job to a
poor person on the assumption of his personal illiteracy? Most of us would agree
not, yet this is precisely what we do to
women in our society. We deny them opWINTER 1982
�portunities based on historical experiences
which have little to do with their innate
abilities or present circumstances, and
much to do with past conditions.
As a female scientist "comfortable in
milieus demanding aggression," I can easily
define sexism (haVing personally experienced it) as the assumption that a generalization true of some persons of a given
gender is necessarily applicable to anyone
of that gender, and the consequent denial
of an opportunity which would otherwise
be granted.
... And what of the exceptional
woman ... ? Prof. Levin would accuse me
of being "perniciously utopian" to expect
exceptional talents to be recognized, but
does not the advancement of society depend upon the recognition, and utilization,
of exceptional talent? ....
Prof. Levin is co.rrect that no one promised me at birth that I would enter the field
most suited to my talents, but having one
way or another managed to do precisely
that, do I not now have the right to be
judged on the basis of my achievements
and experience, without regard to my gender,
as I would expect to be judged without regard to my race or religion? And yet in spite
of my proven ability to work in dominantly
male environments, I am invariably asked
in job interviews how I will "manage," as if I
were a deaf-mute or paraplegic, as if my experience proved nothing. This is the meaning of sexism. That Prof. Levin fails to
understand the meaning of this word in no
way disproves that the word has meaning.
But what of the innate differences between men and women? I would not deny
that men and women "differ significantly";
few feminists do. I do maintain, however,
that with the exception of tasks requiring
great physical strength, these differences
(which Prof. Levin noticeably fails to enumerate) do not necessarily, or even generally, make men any more competent at
holding jobs, solving problems, or wielding
authority than women. Different, yes; better no ....
... apart from the gross biological features, we just don't know what the innate
differences between men and women are,
because we don't know how to distinguish
the. effects of social conditioning from genetic determinism. But to deny that social
attitudes have any impact on human behavior is clearly absurd ....
... in attempting to justify the sexist attitudes which women encounter as the natural result of historical experience, Prof.
Levin actually demonstrates the need for a
"women's movement." He cites the examTHE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
ple of a professor who, used to encountering 1'inferior philosophy examinations"
from female students, comes to expect pre1
cisely that. (Should we ask who this profesl)Or might be?) His expectation is in fact
fulfilled by his own prejudiced perception.
This expectation is changed only by a "run
of good female tests," i.e., the woman must
first prove herself where a man need not.
She must, in fact, initially perform better
than that man in order to get the same
grade, in order to compensate for her professor's bias. Hence for women to obtain
equal recognition of their talents they must
change society's expectations; i.e., they
need a public umovement," a public declaration of intent.
Finally, albeit reluctantly, I must take issue with Prof. Levin's implication that to
be a feminist is to hate men, tacitly or
overtly, and that a woman who engages in
traditionally male activities is ~·m at ease
with her essential identity." As such an accusation can neither be proved nor disproved, Prof. Levin rna y further suggest
with impunity that such a woman "cannot
very well admit this to herself: no ego can
support such self-hate, such ·loss of
meaning."
Well, Prof. Levin, you may refuse to believe this, but I do not hate men. Indeed I
am close to both my father and my two
brothers and am romantically involved
with a wonderful man whom I hope, in
time, to marry. I also have every intention
of having children (by my lawful wedded
husband, I might add), although it may
take some time to work out the logistics of
doing so. How is it possible that I love men,
children, and science? ....
NAOMI 0RESKES
Unley
South Australia
To the Editor of the St. John's Review
I enjoyed the Autumn 1981 issue of the
Review, especially Harry Jaffa's remarkable
article, "Inventing the Past," which taught
me much about my adopted country.
One article, in my opinion, failed to
reach the high standards of this issue.
Michael Levin's" 'Sexism' is Meaningless"
does less than justice to either editor or
author, whose tastes, thinking, and attitudes are, I know, sympathetic to women,
their goals, aspirations, and difficulties.
Some of the article's arguments are clever,
but they have nothing to do with tbe subject at hand. In fact it is hard to say what
the subject at hand is, since Mr. Levin sets
up as a straw man the extreme rhetoric of
the "feminist,'' and then proceeds to ridicule it at the same shrill level. Much of the
discussion about feminism is certainly embarrassing and, as Mr. Levin says, confusing. Instead of helping to clear away the
confusion, the author adds to it by trivializing the argument.
It is silly to say that "sexism" is meaningless. It obviously means something important to a great many people, or he would
not be writing an irritated article against it.
His opening words point out the emotion
the subject calls forth. Should this emotion
not have alerted him to the fact that there
must be more to it than mere silliness? According to his own argument, the obvioUs
is often true, and people should trust their
own commonsense perceptions, feelings,
and beliefs. Are the perceptions of those
against whom he is arguing not bound to
have some validity? It seems perverse to
deny that there was a need for changes in
law and attitudes. Ten years ago I would
never have received a sizeable raise to put
me on the level of the men in my department had it not been for pressure to comply
with the new government rulings. Today
Time-Life has women writers, the Naval
Academy has women midshipmen, and it
works out fine-or at least as imperfectly as
usual. Some "obvious" things are true,
others are not, and it is part of growing up
to learn to distinguish between them.
Most surprising to me is the fact that an
article on "sexism" fails to mention the only
real difference between men and women,
the only difference which is not merely statistical and therefore endlessly arguable in
individual cases. (It need not maher to a
woman mathematician that there are few
other women mathematicians. A creative
person will always be different.) In not
mentioning that women are the only ones
who can and do bear children, Mr. Levin
agrees with 11 feminists" who strangely also
ignore this fact. Lysistrata, and Medea, said
they would rather face the enemy three
times than bear one child. Today, though
science has eliminated the dangers of
childbirth and-they say-fear of pregnancy, women have not changed in this respect. They are still usually responsible for
raising the children they bear; and raising
children is probably more difficult, not less,
than it was in the past.
The subject is highly charged, it seems
to me, because it is the area where public
and private can least easily be disentangled. Reason and emotion, individual and
family converge. How does a legal system
deal with this situation, ensure justice, and
allow freedom? How do men and women
109
�react, and children cope? Abortion legislation and ethics, open adoption r~Fords,
child welfare, ERA, pornography-all
these are highly emotional issues. And the
discussion is so often embarrassing beCause
it touches us personally, on the level of our
intimate feelings and fears. The irrational,
secret fears men and women have towards
each other are surely part of life; where
there is magic, as between a man and a
woman, or a mother and child, there is fear
as well.
Mr. Levin deals only with surface irritations. Does he mean-though he does not
say it-that many problems being discussed are part of life, private, and can
never be solved by political means publicly,
but only worked out privately, with as
much good will and understanding as
possible? His occasionally clever and amusing, irritated and irritating article has not
helped us to understand. And even today,
we need philosophers who will do that.
LARISSA BONFANTE
Professor of Classics
New York University
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin has a point in his article
"'Sexism' is Meaningless" (St. John's Review, Autumn 1981). Many women are angry with men and for no apparent reason.
He concludes that a feminist is angry because she has "lost the sense of the values
peculiar to her sex." This conclusion is possible only if the word "sexism" is meaningless. I suggest that Mr. Levin has simplified
the argument and in so doing has missed
the case where "sexism" does have meaning.
Anger is a result of facing something
that you want to change but cannot. What
can't be changed does not have to be a law
of nature. An individual may become angry if he or she is treated in a way he or she
does not like. If this treatment stems from
applying characteristics true, in general, of
either sex to an individual of that sex, it is
"sexism." Mr. Levin denies that anyone
holds the belief that gender is intrinsically
important. It is true that men and women
are different and that some characteristics
are generally true of men and some of
women. Because I can generalize this way,
I can know a lot about someone immediately. If I meet a man, I know that chances
are he is more aggressive, better at math
and stronger than I am. He may later prove
to be none of these, but they are fair assumptions. This is not "sexism." All I am
saying is that most men are like this and
110
chances are that this individual will fit into
the generalization. I accept that gender is
intrinsically significant. I can be called
"sexist" only ifl am unable to see this man
in any other way than that which fits my
preconception. When a woman is angry at
all men, that too is "sexism." Sexism is the
attitude which holds that the differences
which exist between men and women in
general can be applied, without qualifications, to individual men or to individual
women. It is exactly the belief that gender
is intrinsically important in evaluating individuals. If this is not accepted as the definition of "sexism," then "sexism" is indeed a
meaningless word.
By this definition of "sexism," the word
seems to be susceptible to exactly the same
problems in application as Mr. Levin
points out with the use of "exploitation."
There is a stable central case, that between
individuals, and vaguely peripheral ones,
the judgment of men and women in gen~
eral. Mr. Levin, then, is ignoring the ''stable central case" which gives this word
meaning and focussing on those "vaguely
peripheral ones" to which it is not applica~
ble. "Sexism" has no meaning when ap~
plied to groups. It is entirely a question of
the treatment of individuals.
If "sexism" is not,_ in fact, meaningless,
the question arises whether "anti-discrimination" legislation is an appropriate solution. Can an individual ever be considered
not by the general rule but as an individual
through the law? The law is impersonal
but it is made personal by the judicial system. You are judged in a trial, in which you
are faced by individuals. You and your situ·
ation are judged as a particular one. The
sole purpose of the judicial system is to
interpret the law and to apply it to particular cases. Women should have the right of
recourse under law if they feel they are being treated unfairly. This, however, is a
negative solution. The other side is the
question of affirmative action. Should
quotas be legislated? People should have
the right to hire whomever they wish, yet
will people recognize that women can do a
good job if they do not see many women
working in responsible positions? The generality of the law makes it impossible to
solve this dilemma theoretically. The real
issue is not one of the meaningfulness of
"sexism," or of the ability of the law to address it, but of the extent to which legislation can be justified in doing so.
KATHARINE HEED
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Mr. Levin uses the word "feminist"
with the same thoughtlessness and vehemence with which he claims feminists use
"sexism."
The author characterizes a feminist as a
woman who believes there is absolutely no
difference between the sexes and, therefore, objects to the, in her opinion, prevalent view that men are superior to women.
He also asserts that. feminists secretly know
there is a difference between men and
women although they profess otherwise.
As a result they are filled with self-loathing
and, in classical Freudian behavior, transfer their loathing onto men, the world, and
nature. Mr. Levin's very general argument
does not document this serious accusation.
Why does the request that people be
looked upon each as an individual meet
such rage? It seems reasonable that girls,
like boys, should perfect their talents in
sports, mathematics, physics, biology, literature, or language. Why shouldn't women
expect to have a career after they leave
school, and to receive the same pay as a
man for the same work? Most women will
have to work when they leave school. Mr.
Levin implies that the only permanent jobs
which have evolved naturally for women
are those of telephone operator and
mother. Where has Mr. Levin been if he
has not noticed that society has changed
drastically, not only over the past twenty
years, but since the Industrial Revolution
put women in factories? How can a woman's right to continue at these jobs but also
at others requiring physical or intellectual
ability be denied? Levin thinks it can be beqmse women lack the necessary aggression.
When Mr. Levin writes ''The discomfort
of women in milieus demanding aggression
has been confirmed by experience countless
times," I must question whose experience.
To survive, women must be aggressive.
More than half the households in the
United States require two incomes for sup·
port. Thousands of women work to support
families by themselves. Because women
pay taxes they deserve protection from the
government against discrimination.
Aggressive behavior is not limited to the
office. Perhaps Mr. Levin has never experienced shopping, especially in a bargain
basement or in a department store during a
big sale. Five minutes in Loehman's would
change even Mr. Levin's mind about ag·
gression. Perhaps Mr. Levin never has had
to return an unsatisfactory article of clothing or of food, or to argue about being overcharged for a service. No one can deny that
driving children to school or oneself to work
WINTER 1982
�requires aggression. Many women perform
at least one of these tasks daily.
Mr. Levin's expression "people think"
makes his argument less cogent. The people I know don't think the way Mr. Levin's
people do. My experience, both at St.
John's and in my job, shows me that a
woman is expected to perform tasks, both
academic and secular, as well as she can,
i.e., as well as a man.
On such a serious question which involves the lives of over half the population
of the United States, why does Mr. Levin
think he can dismiss legitimate demands
with the generalization "people think" or,
even worse, "ordinary people think"? How
can he attack with such vehemence "feminists" whose work and political beliefs he
does not clarify? Isn't his article merely
pOlitical cant?
ELOISE PEEKE COLLINGwOOD
Annapolis, Md.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
... What is one to make of a philosopher
who identifies "essential identity" and "significance" with gender and who lets a simple comma serve as the only argumentative
transition in the statement that "Women
differ physically from men, and act differently"? Our bodies are ponderous and
absorbing fates, each one different, but we
are capable of directing them in moral actions and of giving them meaning with our
discourse. We do not increase our chances
of finding meaning when stereotyping is
deemed reasonable and factual. Prof.
Levin worries about tiny firefighters when
he might have been watching the Olym·
pies, but the variety of biological "fact" is
acknowledged even by him, despite his
confusion of instances and hypothetical
classes, instinct and behavior, and biology
and politics (for the last of which we have
another useful neologism, "racism," to give
suffici~nt historical warning).
The implication that troubles me more is
the denial of the brilliance and achievement of St. John's women and, manifested
right here, their unequal share in recognition. And the damage to both the taught
and the teacher if anyone should seriously
think that "if a professor has found over
many years that females write inferior philosophy examinations, it is reasonable for
him to anticipate that the next female philosophy examination will be inferior." A
nice ambiguity toward the end there: who,
after all, in the philosophical life is the
marker? In a society more severely maledominated and oligarchical than our own,
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
and no less stultified, Dante submitted
himself under correction to "donne
'ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Such intelletto might get us all a better grasp of
public understanding and the cardinal virtues and help us distinguish the vicious circle of self-congratulating conventions from
the deep imperative of mutual liberation.
E. C. RONQUIST
Concordia University
Montreal, Canada
continue to enjoy the right to select national leaders, who routinely involve all of
us in crises that could destroy civilization
as we know it and, indeed, could destroy
the world and its ecosystems.
If the United States must remain militarily strong, women can help us do so. As a
feminist, I even dare hope they may help a
little to humanize the military.
LEON V. DRISKELL
Professor of English
University of Louisville
Louisville, Ky.
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
Professor Michael Levin's article "'Sexism' is meaningless" (St. John's Review,
Autumn 1981) so frequently violated stan·
dards of argumentation that I found it hard
to take seriously. Nevertheless, I suspect it
may do considerable harm, chiefly because
it appears in your publication-the standards of which have seemed to me generally high. I cannot undertake here to point
out all of the essay's faults, but I have selected one which seems to me particularly
flagrant.
Because it suits his purposes, or because
he is not paying attention to what he
writes, Professor Levin equates conscription with battle readiness. The issue of
conscripting women, particularly in times
of peace, must be separated from such issues
as degrees of aggressiveness and tolerance
of the stress of combat. When Professor
Levin writes that the "pivotal objection to
conscripting women has nothing to do
with any inherent 'inferiority' of femaleness, everything to do with the ability of
women to fight," he is guilty of grievous
equivocation.
Many a Norman has been conscripted to
do clerical work, administrative work, or
strategic work. Many a Norma has done
similar work in the private sector (with relatively higher pay, enormously greater freedom of choice), and some of those Normans
have been maladroitly thrust into combat
though no more aggressive or tolerant of
"the stress of combat" than their female
counterparts.
Conscription means yielding one's free~
dam of choice, but it does not automatically mean going into battle. Neither does
abandoning sex discrimination mean that
all of us-men and women-must give up
our differences or share bathrooms. Re~
turning from Korea some years ago, I
found that many of my male friends and all
of my women friends had been going
ahead with their lives while I submitted to
military regimentation. Meantime, all of us
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
I will not address Mr. Levin's callous misrepresentations of the positions of those of
us whose active vocabulary includes the
word "sexism," although anyone interested
in reasoning as opposed to sophistry could
not but take offense at the many misrepresentations in his article. I will, however, as
a social scientist in training, challenge Mr.
Levin, or anyone else, to present me with
clear evidence that " ... there are general,
innate, psychological differences between
the sexes." Mr. Levin claims that this is
" ... simply a factual belief, supported by a
vast body of evidence." I know of no such
"evidence" that can be drawn from the social science disciplines and that would withstand close scrutiny. If Mr. Levin's evidence
is drawn from disciplines or traditions other
than the social sciences, I would certainly
not object to seeing that as well. I ask him
to produce the evidence, and all can debate
it, and we will debate the larger question of
upon what basis is one able to make reasonable statements about human nature and
behavior, and what should be the method
of verification for such statements. These
are issues that members of the St. John's
community can get their teeth into, but in
order to do so we must move away from
the unsupported statements made by Mr.
Levin. Furthermore, I ask Mr. Levin to
produce this evidence because I believe
that the ultimate truth and validity of his
argument depend upon it.
I would like to make one further statement. (This should be allowed an irate alumnus.) I was deeply disturbed by the decision
to print that article. It was so clearly biased,
so badly reasoned and argued, in places simply so silly, that it does not represent St.
John's College well. Mr. Raditsa is using
The St. John's Review to propagate his own
political philosophy. I will not debate here
whether it is a good philosophy, or a correct one, I would only raise the question of
111
�whether it is the purpose of The Review to
propagate it. I think not. I also think that
his doing this is only made more unbearable
by the fact that he is in the process presenting us with articles which insult our illtelligence. I wonder if Mr. Raditsa does not care
more about propagating his political philosophy than he does about serving St. John's.
He must certainly see that the two goals are
not identical, and that he was made editor
of the St.john's Review to do the latter and
not to do the former at the latter's expense.
DAVID E. WOOLWINE
Princeton, New Jersey
To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
As an alumnus of St. John's College, I
was morally and intellectually affronted by
your decision to print the article, " 'Sexism' is Meaningless," by Michael Levin, in
the recent issue of The St. John's Review.
Has The St. John's Review become such a
mouthpiece for right-wing views that it will
print anything which supports them-even
an article of such patently poor scholarship
and moral insensitivity as Michael Levin's
piece? The factual and logical errancies of
the article are manifest, and scarcely need
refutation. The flagrant moral callousness
of the article is more serious, flying as it
does in the face of obvious injustice, first
by belittling and denying the history and
continuing reality of that injustice, then by
supporting and sanctioning it. If the article
had been titled not " 'Sexism' is Meaningless" but rather " 'Racism' is Meaningless"
or even "'Anti-Semitism' is Meaningless,"
would you have printed it? Let the Editorial
Staff examine its memory and it will discover how the arguments put forward by
Mr. Levin, and similar unsupported claims
of "scientific" evidence, have previously
been used to "prove" the genetic, moral,
and intellectual "difference" of blacks and
Jews, supporting institutionalized bigotry,
the denial of civil liberties, and unequal
opportunities in housing, education, and
employment.
STEPHANIE SLOWINSKI
Princeton, New Jersey
112
Professor Levin replies:
Those of us who persist in noting that
men and women differ are so regularly accused of being "for discrimination" that
my wife dubs this "The Ritual Missing of
the Point." The point, of course, is that the
typical man does differ in certain systematic
ways from the typical woman. It is no one's
fault, and people are within their rights to
use this patent fact in making judgments.
Within their legal rights?, some correspondents ask. Certainly. Anyone who thinks
that individuals should be treated as individuals will repudiate the quota mentality
that has settled on our public officials like a
disease. Quotas should be repealed and
abandoned immediately. I also believe that
laws against discrimination are unsupportable. They conflict with liberty of association. If I choose not to hire you because of
your looks (or sex, or color, or religion) I
withhold from you my consent to enter into
an agreement. I am not thereby thwarting
your will or interfering with your liberty,
since you do not have any prior right to my
consent. Unless you regard me as your slave.
Some confusion has arisen about the
Norma-Norman example. I was simply repeating the sort of thing feminists cite. In
fact, this so-called "Pygmalion effect" has
not been scientifically replicated, and what
is more, educators are now generally agreed
that the ordinary methods of classroom instruction are somewhat biased in favor of
girls, who are temperamentally more inclined to sit still for lessons.
As for my Freudian analysis: in addition
to the evidence cited in the references to
Ed Levine, there is also some suggestive
work by S. Deon Henderson on the rising
female crime rate and its possible relation
to anomie. Unfortunately, as Miss Henderson herself reports, investigation into the
adverse effects of feminism is an absolutely
taboo topic in sociology. No one will touch
it. That is probably why we have no psycho·
social profile of the typical feminist, even
though social scientists will normally rush
to study just about anything. So, even
though I lack medical credentials, someone
has to begin suggesting hypotheses. I should
note as well Frances Lear's concession (The
Nation, 12/12/81) that "lesbians make up
a large portion of the volunteer work force"
in feminist political organizations, which I
take as some further confirmation.
I agree with Miss Heed that anger is often prima face evidence of a wrong; often,
but not always. Sometimes it is a symptom
of dysfunction.
I stress again that I approve as much as
anyone does "treating each individual as
an individual." With little faith that repeti·
tion will convince my more splenetic correspondents of my good faith, I turn to some
more specific points.
l) Neurologists like Restak and Pribram,
endocrinologists like Money, and even selfdescribed "feminist" psychologists like Mac·
coby and Jacklin have found that by four
months male and female newborns respond differently to such variables as speech
tone and exhibit neurological differences.
Benbow and Stanley found that 10-12 year
old girls who both tested as well as the ablest
boys on math aptitude tests and reported
finding math as much a girl's as a boy's subject, did less well than the same boys on
more difficult math aptitude tests. At the
upper levels of ability, innate differences
appear most clearly. Some people still tell
each other that all this is "social conditioning" (whatever that might mean). Some
people also still believe the Earth is flat.
2) A woman should indeed be free to do
what she wants. Who denies that? But even
sanguine feminists have lately admitted to
"logistic problems" in pursuing a career
and raising a family. Even the EEOC has
lately admitted that the famous wage dis·
crepancies between men and women are
entirely due to voluntary decisions women
make-e.g., having babies during their
prime career advancement years. The feminist "solution" tends, unhealthily, to be
advocacy of government intervention.
3) That there are bad arguments for jew·
ish covetousness does not rule out good
arguments for gender differences. Since no
one is planning concentration camps for
women, the implied analogy is even more
absurd. In fact, all questions about racial
and ethnic differences are empirical, in
many cases still open, and worth investigating. Given the number of Japanese Nobel
Laureates in physics, I would be neither
surprised nor displeased to learn that Japanese are smarter than the rest of us.
WINTER 1982
�Editor's Note
On Harry V. Jaffa's
"Inventing the Past"
The policy of the St. John's Review is '
to publish writing addressed to important
questions. Some of these questions are To the Editor of the St. John's Review:
disturbing as the response to Professor
Levin's article shows. Such open invesHarry V. Jaffa's article, '~Inventing the
tigation and discussion is in the tradi- Past," (Autumn 1981) was interesting and
tions of St. John's College. The views valuable, but I was bothered by his slightexpressed by the writers in the St. John's ing reference to the protests and demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. He
Review do not necessarily reflect the
speaks of the people involved as seeking a
opinions of the editor.
minority veto upon majority action, as trying, ' 4 in behalf of their Thoreauvian consciences," to "arrest the process of constitutional government."
I question whether the events of the sixties and early seventies actually fit the
categories of "majority action" and "constitutional government." To mention some
of them: in the election of 1964 the majority
elected Johnson as President after he denounced Goldwater's proposal for extensive bombing of North Vietnam-and after
the election, he did just what he had denounced. The Vietnam war was waged, of
course, not after a declaration of war by
Congress as provided by the Constitution,
but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which itself was passed by Congress
after it heard misleading testimony by the
Administration.
Coming to 1968, the majority elected
Nixon, who had a plan to end the war-and
then waged it for four more years and included a secret bombing of Cambodia.
I submit that these events certainly do
not fit the categories of majority action and
constitutional process, and to talk as if they
do is to talk about a dream world.
THOMAS
RALEIGH
Cocheton, New Yark
Professor Jaffa replies:
Mr. Thomas Raleigh questions my assertion that the demonstrators against the
Vietnam war, or some of them, were attempting to "arrest the process of constitutional government." He does so on the
ground that the actions of the United
States, in prosecuting the war, were themselves unconstitutional
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
The principal ground of his objections is
that the war was not waged "after a declaration of war as provided by the Constitution, but on the basis of the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution, which itself was passed by
Congress after it heard misleading testimony by the Administration."
The war in Vietnam was a limited war,
and the United States has prosecuted
many such wars without a formal declaration by the Congress. Among these have
been the naval war with France, during the
presidency of john Adams, Woodrow Wilson's war with Mexico, many Indian wars,
and, above all, the Civil War. The last, our
greatest war, was from the point of view of
the Lincoln government a "rebellion." To
have asked for a declaration of war against
"rebels" would have been to confer upon
them a political status that it was the whole
point of the war to deny. This points up
the paradox that there are circumstances
in which a declaration of war may defeat
the policy for which the war is waged.
Such was the case in Vietnam. Rightly or
wrongly, the Johnson administration (and
later that of Nixon) thought that North
Vietnam itself should not be invaded, and
that this "privileged sanctuary" could not
be maintained once a formal declaration of
war had been made. It was feared that if
North Vietnam was invaded that China
would intervene, as it did in North Korea
in 1950.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was not the
sole basis for the prosecution of the war.
Not a man or gun was sent to Vietnam except upon the basis of appropriations made
by the Congress. And not a dollar was appropriated, except upon the basis of extensive-sometimes exhaustive-hearings by
committees of both houses, and after
debates and votes in both houses. The
Congress authorized every step that the
administration took, and the American
people participated in such authorizations
through their elected representatives. The
opposition to the prosecution of the war
was extremely intense, and extremely vocal, but no one can rightly say that their
rights were ignored or suppressed.
To say that the American government
acted unconstitutionally in Vietnam is to
say that a free government cannot act in
such circumstances except upon something
like unanimous consent. This is absurd.
113
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Radista, Leo
Parran, Jr., Thomas
Durholz, Janet
Bolotin, David
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Allanbrook, Wye Jamison
Brann, Eva T. H.
Dennison, George
Mullen, William
Loewenberg, Robert
Smith, Brother Robert
Bell, Charles G.
Le Gloannecc, Anne-Marie
Josephs, Laurence
Montanelli, Indro
Collins, Arthur
Dulich, Jean
Navrozov, Lev
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Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
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