Thoughts on Solzhenitsyn by Salim Mansur

And yet we live with the hope, if we are not to be driven insane by the insanity around us, that we cannot, or must not, fold our hands and surrender to the fever and, instead, do our part however small in remedying the situation. This therefore calls for an honest assessment of the fever and its perilous temperature. The fever is evil and this evil, like all evils at all times in history, runs through the hearts of each one of us and we cannot deal with this evil, seeks its remedy, unless we rip it out of our hearts. But I am afraid, and history again is a reminder, we as a people are incapable of doing what is needed, of going deep inside ourselves, of taking the beam out of our eyes to enable us in cooling down the fever.

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Dear Friends,

Let me right at the outset of this email begin with an apology if it appears that I am being presumptuous in urging you to read the attached essay by Gary Saul Morson on the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which I downloaded from the New Criterion and have attached. I wanted to make a file copy of this essay for myself, and I believe it might be simpler for you to download or save it in your files for reading if you make time.

Our world, as we are observing, is broken and in tatters. No need for me to recall Yeats's opening lines from The Second Coming.

Ten months ago I lost my only son in a car crash up in the mountains of British Columbia. My world lay shattered. Many of you unbeknownst to yourself, and with your kindness and love, helped me through those days of pain that I cannot describe.

I was in the midst of the campaign for the October election. I was torn and did not know how to go forward with living when living for me had become meaningless, as I held my son and prepared to lay him to rest. But on my way back from Kelowna I felt, drawing upon my readings of sacred scriptures, that God gives life while death is only a passage between two stages of life and our task is to fulfil our dharma, a Sanskrit word that roughly means "duty, obligation, code of ethics and teaching". I returned to our campaign in which so many of my friends had invested, and despite the disappointing outcome the relationships forged in the heat of the campaign with what became our PPC family of friends and activists renewed for me once more my own dharma that whatever remaining time God has allotted me I devote it to securing freedom and prosperity for my country, Canada, that adopted me and gave me all that I possess, and for my daughter and her future, for my wife, family, and friends.

I express the above given the utter distemper of our present situation. We will recover, but it is unlikely we will return to the world we left behind as 2019 rolled over into 2020. I believe an age has ended, and the present tumult is the fever that has seized our body politics as its terminal sign. History is a record of such fevers taking hold of cultures and civilizations in due course of their passage in time, and then their eventual demise. Shelley's "Ozymandias" is a grim reminder of where each journey of kings, emperors, fuehrers, and their body politics ends.

And yet we live with the hope, if we are not to be driven insane by the insanity around us, that we cannot, or must not, fold our hands and surrender to the fever and, instead, do our part however small in remedying the situation. This therefore calls for an honest assessment of the fever and its perilous temperature. The fever is evil and this evil, like all evils at all times in history, runs through the hearts of each one of us and we cannot deal with this evil, seeks its remedy, unless we rip it out of our hearts. But I am afraid, and history again is a reminder, we as a people are incapable of doing what is needed, of going deep inside ourselves, of taking the beam out of our eyes to enable us in cooling down the fever.

But what we might fail as a people to do to remedy the situation we are in at the present time, each one of us can nevertheless find our own means by which to cope with what we face.

I have found my refuge in readings, as so many others have done in times of duress. Solzhenitsyn is one of several authors on hand who has become my companion, or soul-mate in a sense, and in whose company I find the repose that Trappist monks, such as Thomas Merton wrote about, found in the practice of silence.

The attached essay by Gary Morson on Solzhenitsyn is an appetizer for wanting more of him.

I had read a bit of Solzhenitsyn in the early seventies at school, and during my undergraduate years as required reading in contemporary politics and literature. His One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a required reading in my first year at University College, Toronto. Then came The Gulag Archipelago, which I scanned or did a fast turning of pages, and later bought a paperback copy of his 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, A World Split Apart.

This enforced stay at home and self-isolation for the past three months and counting ironically has given me a second lease on life to go back to authors and books I was familiar with, or read without a life experience to comprehend and fully appreciate, or were on my list to read if ever I could find time in the midst of all the other commitments.

Morson took me back to Solzhenitsyn, and now at the age I have reached I am reading once again Solzhenitsyn and discovering what I did not fully apprehend of him before. He was a prophet arisen from the depths of Dante's inferno, or Stalin's hell, to tell us the stark reality of our world and of evil that runs right through the hearts of each one of us, and that the choice between good and evil is for each one us to choose at every moment of our passage through the valley of the living. The truth he told of the evil he witnessed and from whose cup he was forced to drink was too harsh and bitter to listen to and, as Morson writes, those intellectuals in the West who at first welcomed Solzhenitsyn exiled from the Soviet Union were also quick to be disillusioned by his uncompromising bent of mind to write and speak the unvarnished truth that he had experienced.

On re-reading A World Split Apart, what strikes me is how clearly Solzhenitsyn foresaw and forewarned of the distemper of our time. He told the Harvard audience, "A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today." This was in 1978, and what do we see around us but a near absence of courage on the part of our leaders to confront the fever of our time.

Then Solzhenitsyn went on to say, "The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society."

Can anyone of us today disagree with what Solzhenitsyn observed more than four decades ago?

And then he concluded, "Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?"

The ancient Romans unaware of their fate elected Caligula as their emperor. It was an omen for their future. Slow doses of madness eventually become a tsunami of insanity. Seven justices of the U.S. Supreme Court discovered that in the American Bill of Rights was buried unknown to all, including the founding fathers, the right of women to abort unwanted pregnancy without undue government restriction. From that 1973 decision on Roe v. Wade evolved a culture of hydra-headed monstrosity, a culture in which sanctity of life and the protection of the unborn are no longer the basic axiom of moral law as spelled out in Deuteronomy 30: 15-20, a culture wherein nearly three-quarter of African-American children are born in a fatherless home, and a culture no longer protected by the guardrails of basic Christian values and ethics.

How can we repair our shattered world?

One of my favourite verses from the Qur'an reads, "God does not change the condition of a people, unless they change what is in their hearts."

Solzhenitsyn most likely, I believe, would have known this verse. And he would have been a witness to the truth of the words revealed to Muhammad.

In the beginning was the Word. And then that Word was lodged in our hearts as God's gift.

Courage, in concluding what I wanted to share with you, perhaps begins with re-discovering that Word imprinted in our hearts and sharing it once again with those around us. My son's gift to me, as I physically parted from him in this world, was to remind me of my dharma and return to engage in politics while holding steadfastly to the Word he and I were born with.

I hope you enjoy Gary Saul Morson's, "How the great truth dawned."

Salim

Here is the PDF of "How the great truth dawned"