Actual Johnny Carson Joke:
Carnac The Magnificent, holding envelope to his head to divine the contents: “Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Carnac The Magnificent, opening envelope and reading contents: “Give three reasons you should name your baby Al.”
How do you determine love? I mean, if you put your wife and your dog in the trunk of your car, who is happier to see you in two hours when you let them out?
Why do we do it? I mean, I’m the funniest writer on the Internet, so I know why I do that. But why do we do all of this? You know, the life stuff?
Life is difficult. It’s an uphill slog, and the ending (of the life part) is predetermined. Yet we keep picking up one foot and putting it in front of the next.
Why?
Because it’s who we are. It’s what we are.
We have lived in the most prosperous civilization that’s ever existed. In most Western countries, we have many, many more people afflicted with diseases because of too many available calories, rather than too few.
That’s a rarity in human history. In medieval France, peasants would essentially spend the whole winter in bed together, shivering, trying to minimize calorie loss in a simulation of hibernation. Now? It’s Cheetos®, PEZ™, elephant rides and pantyhose for everyone. We are in a civilization characterized by excess.
That may not always be the case.
I wish they made pantyhose that don’t rip, because now everyone in the bank has seen my face.
I’ve read a book or two, and one that really hit me was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It’s by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I think I come close to pronouncing his name correctly, which might make me sound pretentious. But if you read Solzhenitsyn, it’s not pretentious at all.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is just that, a day in the life of a guy named John (Ivan means John). This particular John is in prison. Why? He was captured by the Germans during World War II. Anyone captured by the Germans who wasn’t suffering from life-threatening wounds was considered a traitor to the U.S.S.R.
Denisovich was not only in prison, he was in the GULAG. It’s all capitalized because, like NATO, it’s an acronym. In this case, GULAG is an acronym for a series of Russian words, Гла́вное Управле́ние Лагере́й that I imagine sounds like a cat choking on a hairball made of fiberglass and cheap vodka when pronounced correctly.
See, that’s not pretentious!
This particular book is very, very short. Solzhenitsyn uses his language with economy, yet to me he creates a story that’s like a joke. It’s not clear what he’s talking about until the very last page, and (for me) it hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s like if M. Night Shyamalan wrote it with a particular twist.
You’ve already read Solzhenitsyn. See? You’re not pretentious.
I recommend it unreservedly. I bought it at a garage sale, and I gave it to the foreman of a crew who was putting in cinder blocks. That makes sense in an M. Night Shyamalan way, too, but you have to read the book. Here’s one place I saw a copy (LINK). I’d give you mine but I’d have to track down a retired bricklayer with a bad back.
The message I took away from this book is that life isn’t about grand moments. And, as I mentioned some time ago, life isn’t about comfort, either. Life is much more than that. In the book, Denisovich takes outlandish pleasure at what we would consider bare minimums.
That gave me perspective. Again, that’s not the insight grenade I took from the book, but it’s close. When is the last time you really thought about the salad you were eating, savoring the crisp crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the Caesar dressing, and the hard, yet yielding texture of the Parmesan cheese?
Each and every bite is a taste no king or potentate could have had out of season. I can have it every Tuesday. Or Thursday. Or any other day ending in y.
I know it was a bad joke. Everyone romaine calm.
In many ways, I often overlook the luxury I’m surrounded by. I can get a fresh tomato in the depths of winter, and when I bite into it feel the taste of a spring day erupt. I’d add in red roses in winter, but The Mrs. knows where the rose bush grows if she wants a few.
Our world is filled with unimaginable convenience. Our world is filled with unimaginable abilities to entertain and distract. Like I said earlier: our world is filled with excess, but it might not always be.
In Solzhenitsyn’s world, well, a luxury is an extra ration of rough bread made from poorly milled grain. Solzhenitsyn knew what he was talking about: he spent years in a GULAG for saying in a letter to a friend during the war that Stalin wore granny-panties. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it was a mild criticism.
In a letter.
So, off to GULAG.
In the GULAG, Solzhenitsyn got cancer. Ouch. He survived. And, when Nikita Khrushchev was leading the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn actually got to publish some of his critical commentaries on communism. Why? Khrushchev wanted to remove every bit of the stain of Stalin from the U.S.S.R., so Solzhenitsyn was his guy.
The Soviets made the best bread in history – people would wait in lines for days for a single piece.
That didn’t last long. In most cases, commies want to show the world (and their own citizens) that no one can escape. Sadly for them, Solzhenitsyn was too famous to pop into prison, and too outspoken to leave among the citizens. That sort of thing happens when you win the frigging Nobel Prize.
So?
They booted him. Stripped him of his citizenship. He lived in the United States until 1994. Famously, he predicted the future of the United States in an address to Harvard® that he’d be lynched for today.
How cool was the address? It contains these lines:
Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.
Read The Whole Thing: (LINK)
What irritates me the most is that on a long weekend when I was a kid, I probably could have gone, met the man, and bought him a beer. If I could write just once the wisdom that Solzhenitsyn gave in just that one speech I could go to my end a happy man.
Was it a missed opportunity in not just getting in my car and driving to find him? (I even had a copy of his book at that time.) If I regretted things, I’d regret that I never did buy Solzhenitsyn a beer and gave Gorbachev a wedgie.
Okay, I’d like to give both of them wedgies. Atomic wedgies.
Solzhenitsyn later moved back to Russia, his citizenship restored, and they gave him a nice house. Spoiler alert: he didn’t do it for the house.
He did it because, as he said in his speech to Harvard©:
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.
The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on Earth has any other way left but – upward.
This is why we do it. This is why we put that one foot in front of the other.
“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.” – Solzhenitsyn
It’s who we are.
It’s what we are.
Anybody need Doritos®? Oh, and remember, Solzhenitsyn outlasted the Soviets.
How many people have even heard of Solzhenitsyn? Or know about the gulags? Not many. They can tell you Nazis were bad because they saw it in a movie but the 100 million dead at the hands of Bolshevism? Nah, who cares? This is not an accident.
It is quite odd that communists who killed 100+ million are little known, while some guy who didn’t do anything worse than we or our allies did is the ultimate embodiment of evil.
Yup. WWII is badly distorted in our media and history, and the crimes of the Soviets and communism aren’t even touched.
WOW! My mind just a out exploded with happy. So many men were/are good and smart and funny and a gift from GOD. Thank you.
So true! And thank you!!!
That Alexander Solzhenitsyn guy sure does remind me of someone I read about in the bible…
Hmm, could be . . .
“Solzhenitsyn outlasted the Soviets.”
1) Oh, really? Have you seen ABCNNBCBS lately? Wanna make a small wager?
2) Solzhenitsyn only outlasted the Russian Soviets. Which is cold comfort to the 100,000,000 Russians who weren’t so lucky.
Amidst a nation of 330M, how do you like those odds?
3) There are much easier ways to outlast communists. The easiest being to shoot them in the face. 100% success, both ways. QED.
Well, he didn’t outlast all of the Leftists. And, boy, do Marxists hate him.
I didn’t say everyone made it out. And the tragedy that was the USSR still echoes today – there are large numbers of kids who, due to malnutrition, have permanently lowered IQs. Tragedy.
Well, I like that. And, Al figured that out in the camps. Maybe we can pick up on the message without the whole “camp” part.
Longish day, but it is WilderTime! again. The mint has come in, and the tree has leafed out, and my work day is done, and I can sip my julep and chuckle at the goramawful puns. If you’ve seen the Easter comic, that is where I am, looking up the Hill to the Old Shady (no actual gourd-based inn supplied).
The post lasts a good long while. Because the sky and the trees, and the crepuscular birdsong and the colors and the smells are so beautiful it will break your heart. And you know you cannot keep it: Summer is coming. So you cannot just read it in one go. And a good WilderTime post gives you things to chew over while you soak in the gazillion shades of green.
This is why we do it. For the beauty of it
By the by: I compared notes with my mom not so long ago, on this very thing. Yes, it was the same for her, in that sweet spot, when the hungry time is past and the biggest push to secure provisions against the next one is not yet come. Unlike us, she was so poor that she lived in a time and place where a tin can was a valuable possession. Yet her trees and her hills and her life then was still so sweet!
It has been so in Christendom, since Christ, wherever men love Him.
Okay. So we do it for love and beauty. For the world God made and the people in it, and the delight in what we can build there together.
Remember that the story Mr. Solzhenitsyn told was of s place where the inevitable ills “that flesh is heir to” were deliberately engineered for stupidity, and status, and profit. Ask any Ukrainian or Chinaman. Mr. Aesop is dead right about that bit. Keep your powder dry.
Ma Wilder saved aluminum tv dinner tins. She had Pa build a building to store things like that.
And we do it for those that follow. I’ve planted seeds that will never fully grow in my lifetime, and I’ve planted trees which will never shade me.
We build. And when storms knock it down, we rebuild.
June fourth — happy Killdozer Day, everybody!
We actually talked at dinner about that without realizing this was the anniversary.
Remember! Wonder how many people will need help on welding projects in the future?
A close relative confessed their ignorance after watching a video with a reporter asking people if they knew where Pearl Harbor is, and its significance in what world war. They didn’t know where it is, or what war. They went on to explain they weren’t taught about it in school.
So, while people watch their videos on the phone, laugh at Facebook memes, and surf for sales, a wonderful source of information is untouched by the curious. All that is here, is here, and there is no realization it’s all tenuous. History fades like a summer sunset, and liberty is close behind.
Yup.
Thankfully, I’ve done what I can to supplement Pugsley and The Boy when it comes to the things that schools skip.
I’m not alone.
I just got back from a backpacking trip. I was by turns hot, cold, thirsty, wet, hungry, tired, and sore. Why did I do it? Three reasons: 1) time well spent with my daughter; 2) so that the steak I had when I got back would be the best one I ever had; and 3) to harden up for the upcoming unpleasantness.
Opie Odd
Yup. The Mrs. last night said that I should work on 3).
She’s right. Started today.
Stolen from the internet regarding Chiquitastan-a profoundly sick society of overabundance on the verge of collapse.
Bolshevik Revolution 2.0 will finally burn it all down so that the best and brightest from the faculty lounge can administer to the useless eaters on the neo-Soviet serf plantation.
Sadly some comrades of the glorious Jonestown Kool-Aid Chiquitastan are quite happy to have government as their mommy.
May their chains rest gently, may the UBI/EBT purchase all of their supplies, may the rainbow stew bubble up never run out.
Forward to Wakanda, yes we can!
Ha! The faculty lounge will be first against the wall if the Left ever gets power. Remember, Pol Pot killed anyone that wore glasses.
It amazes me that this people don’t realize that they will the very first to be put against the “paredon”, they all think that they will be part of “nomenklatura”.
Yup, they always, always do. The worker’s collective needs zero poets.
John, truly, I don’t like being an editorial nag. But it sounded as if you were saying that the “And how we burned in the camps later” quote came from the last page of Ivan Denisovich instead of The Gulag Archipelago. I know you know this, but it’s a bit confusing. You may wish to fix that, for the collection volume you’ll be publishing later, making untold tons of money (which will, of course, be worthless).
Putting the nagging aside, I will urge both you and my fellow readers not to stop their reading of Solzhenitsyn with the two works referenced above. In particular, The First Circle, which is the source of the “take everything from a man and he’s free all over again” quote, and Cancer Ward. That last, its uninspiring title aside, might be the finest, most affecting novel I’ve ever read.
Gotcha! I’ll give that a review for clarity. (Thanks!!)
I’ve read TAG and ID, but not The First Circle and Cancer Ward. Back to reading!!!!
Lust: Short term rental.
Love: Rent to own. The payments never stop, and the interest really adds up.
And that can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you’re married to.