A Review of 'Fathers and Children,' by Turgenev

 

After a long hiatus, I am back reviewing selections of our Baltimore Book Club. July's choice for our group of five avid readers is "Fathers and Children," by Ivan Turgenev. Our discussion will take place on July 12; I being retired, however, couldn't resist reading the novel the first chance I got.

 

Rereading the novel, that is, I recall having read the novel a half century or so, ago; I remember very little of it except that the title was "Fathers and Sons." One of the themes of the novel is the rapid generational changes that were taking place in Russia at the time, (liberation of the serfs, new political movements, etc.) This classic novel was first published in 1862; the recent translation I read is excellent. I am not sure about the title, which has been known to English-speaking readers as 'Fathers and Sons,’ for generations. It’s a little bit like renaming “War and Peace” “War and The End of Hostilities.” (If the name change was done due to political correctness, I object: it is folly, I think, to try to change the past, rather than learning from it. The novel was written during patriarchal times; among the novel’s main characters, are two fathers and sons, not daughters. But this is a minor point—what’s in a name?)

 

Turgenev is a master of characterization, which he accomplishes with great economy.  One of the main characters is one of the two sons, Bazarov, a young man with charisma and intellectual heft.  I view him as a Rousseau-inspired character. Rousseau believed that human beings were good, even noble, at their core. It is society that is the problem. Once the evils of society are eliminated, human nobility will shine through like sunrise after a pitch-black night. A new and just society will arise. This view is contrasted by the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who asserted that humanity is  fallen and without strong moral leadership, chaos results. This is a version of one of my favorite proverbs: Homo homini lupus—Man is wolf to man.

 

Bazarov characterizes himself as a nihilist; he denies the worth of everything until a new order is achieved.  We now know the result of this mindless idealism: the catastrophic history of the Soviet Union. (Stalin’s chief of agriculture, Lysenko, for instance, asserted such things as keeping seeds in a cold environment would result in plants resistant to cold.  The suffering caused by such beliefs might pale in comparison to Stalin’s terror, nevertheless a lot of damage was done due to neglect of genetic heredity.)

 

That Bazarov’s rejection of norms might have partially resulted from shame felt due to the ignorance of his parents—his mother was especially superstitious--is likely. But  Turgenev never states this, he shows this, and we must infer our interpretations.

 

That Bazarov is not as independent as he believes is shown by his passionate declaration of love to a very independent and strange woman, who seems more inspired by Eugene Onegin than, say, Schiller’s Maria Stuart.

 

The rejected and very bitter young man cuts his finger during an autopsy. An immediate cauterization would be the emergency procedure that might save his life, but this is not done.  When he tells his father three days later, the panicked old man wants to cauterize the wound immediately. Bazarov replies, “This should have been done sooner. By now, actually, even the caustic is a waste of time. If I’m infected, it is too late.” (page 196).

 

Basarov is of course correct; he is  indeed infected and dies of sepsis a few days later. That he did not seek treatment previously is a strong indication that he desired to end his life. (This is even more certain than the fact that the desperately depressed Tschaikowsky drank unboiled water during a cholera epidemic, which led to his death a few days later. It was common knowledge that such behavior was suicidal.)

 

No mention of suicide! We must infer it; once again, Turgenev shows and does not tell.

 

Nor does the author make any political comments. For instance, the nervous and rather incompetent Kirsanov has difficulties with the peasants and mismanages his estate. (Kirsanov, the father of Arkady, along with his son are the first ‘father and son’ duo of the book; Bazarov and his father being the second.) This wouldn’t have happened in an earlier age, during which hierarchies were unassailable. Once Arkady frees himself from Bazarov’s influence, the estates flourish once again. Management skill is now essential, not ancestral position.

This is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read. The characters are convincingly and memorably drawn. More important than this, however, is the author’s objectivity; Turgenev doesn’t take sides.  It’s as if the novel had been written by the Zeitgeist, whose Eye in  the Sky had no desire beyond relaying what it sees.  Turgenev, of course, was politically astute; keeping himself out of the picture, I believe, added greatly to the effectiveness of its images. A great read!

A 1977 Met Performance

 

Note: I was searching an old diary for information  on the article, “From Roshen to Vidya” a blog entry from a few days back. I thought I found  one, but couldn’t find it again. Instead, I found an entry from February 21, 1977, which I thought might be of some interest to some readers.        

 (Oh, I was more than a tad arrogant in those days.)

February 21, 1977

We attended a performance of Le Prophète (an opera by Meyerbeer) today at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

 

It was the cheapest production I  ever saw there. Since Meyerbeer’s music needs lavish productions to carry it across, the sets of this evening’s performance were doubly disappointing. The basic set remained fixed during the performance—some details  were changed to suggest a new scene. The background looked like some crazy Art-nouveau aqueduct, a semicircular wooden scaffold with several ladders.  One would have to have read  the libretto to know what was going on; for instance, when Berthe is taken into the castle—in this staging, she went through one of the openings in the scaffolding, followed by some soldiers, while others went through another opening in a different direction—who could guess where? The frozen pond for the skating scene looked like a a giant Dr. Scholl footpad. In the last scene, a red canopy suggested the pomp of the palace! As a few ribbons fell from it, people screamed—thus suggesting the collapsing castle! A really awful production, perhaps the worst I ever saw at the Met.

The singing was a lot better. Although Marilyn Horne was in poor form for her—it was announced that she was suffering from “an extremely bad cold.” It still was a pleasure to hear her. James McCracken (God! he’s still singing about a conflict with Mother—one would think Carmen would have cured him of that!) sang superbly. He acted as of he couldn’t skate, as if  the whole pond were really made of ice.  Ruth Shane was all right, albeit a little shrill.

The music is another matter. The opera contains many nice melodies, without any being truly memorable. The best parts have to do with theatrical effects—the skating scene, the coronation scene, etc. I believe the opera should be heard now and then, but not in cheap productions like this one was. A shoddy production of a grand opera can only succeed if the music is of a high order. This is unfortunately not the case with Meyerbeer, although he was certainly competent. The Met should have known this.

From Roshen to Vidya

This is the story of a life saved that turned out to be a life well lived. Roshen was born, sixty years ago today, with a serious heart defect and was not expected  to survive. Without the intervention of my wife Nirmala and me, two young doctors at the time, she would definitely not have survived. It was perhaps the best thing we have done in our lives. Now, as Vidya celebrates her sixtieth birthday, it is time to tell the tale of Vidya's amazing metamorphosis, from a sickly blue kid to a healthy woman still in the pink.

First let's travel back in time, sixty years ago, to the time of Roshen's birth. Vimala, Roshen's mother, was pregnant for the third time and quite worried, since the child of her first pregnancy didn't survive for long. She wanted to give birth at home. The midwife, however, didn't arrive in time. My wife, a medical student at the time, delivered the baby.  Vimala, delighted with the results, chose Nirmala as the one to name the newborn infant. She chose the name Roshen; why I am not sure.

Everything was not pink and rosy, however, for when Roshen cried her lips turned blue, an indication of a serious birth defect.

Blue lips is a sign that blood is not being oxygenated properly; this condition is called cyanosis. There are two birth defects that often cause this condition, Tetrology of Fallot and Transposition of the Great Vessels. In America, and now in India as well, surgery is performed soon after birth.

Not so in Roshen's case. A study, in which an iodine-rich dye is injected in order to document the flow of blood in the heart, was done. Roshen, however, reacted to the iodine and nearly died. The test was stopped and remained incomplete.

The partial study indicated to several doctors that Roshen had Transposition, a much more serious condition. 

The study was reviewed by the famous cardiologist, Dr. Bakey, who concurred. If surgery is not performed in time, the condition becomes inoperable and the patient is doomed. No wonder that Vimala was worried! Her baby would never marry, never become a mother, and was well on her way to an early death. Ir didn't turn our that way, however.

Let us now fast forward to 1976: Nirmala and I, recently married, came to India for the first time as a couple. Vimala greeted us with a Hindu ceremony I will never forget. I was welcomed into the family and was quite pleased.

At that time, the Arjun family lived in the R.B.I. Colony, that is, the Reserve Bank of India Colony, where Vimala's husband, Krishnarjun worked.

One day, Roshen, a thin kid of about 11, wanted to show off her bike riding skills to us. After riding around the R.B.I. track several times, she paused to catch her breath. She was gasping for air. Her face had turned blue as an overcast  sky in Provence. Vimala was at the door begging her to stop. That image stayed fixed in my mind.

When we returned to New York, we wanted to do something to help  Roshen, but what?

Serendipity, that Hindu goddess, intervened. Nirmala was working as a pediatrician at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn at the time. Over lunch one day, Nirmala explained her concerns regarding her niece to a colleague. Her friend informe her of a newly arrived cardiac surgeon by the name of Dr. Griepp. 

Dr. Griepp reviewed the partial study and said he could help. He thought that the condition was Tetralogy of Fallot, rather than the fatal diagnosis of Transposition. Not only could he help, but he agreed to do the operation for free! Those were the days; it is doubtful that this would happen today.

We brought over Vimala and Roshen as quickly as possible. I'll never forget our conversation before Roshen was wheeled into surgery. She was so serene!

Needless to say, the surgery was a resounding success,  Roshen went on to marry and had a lovely daughter, Shrada,  a psychologist.

Oh, and what about the name change? Vimala was a very religious person and had contacted a guru in order, she thought, to save her daughter's life. The guru told her that Roshen would survive and thrive if her name were changed to Vidya. Roshen became Vidya, and has remained Vidya ever since.

Vimala credited the guru for saving Vidya's life. I do think, however, that Dr. Griepp had something to do with it. And so did we.

Happy Birthday, Vidya! May you continue to thrive.

Note: This was read aloud to the family group on a Zoom meeting. Vidya looked beautiful!

Demon Copperhead, a Novel by Barbara Kingsolver, a Review

 

Demon Copperhead, a 2022 novel by the prolific author Barbara Kingsolver, is well worth the read. That is, if you have patience; it is over 500  pages in length—(In my case, I had gotten very ill on vacation, and  for a while had very limited mobility. So I just sat in a corner and read.)

It has been written that Kingsolver visited a house where Dickins lived. She apparently felt like writing a novel that not only updated Dickins but would take place in a section of the country she loves and in which she lives, Appalachia. She apparently ‘channeled Dickens', who informed her to let the title character speak for himself. I doubt if there are many novels written Holden Caulfield-like, in the first person singular in which an adolescent male is the main character, let alone one written by a woman; in this case, the novel is a truly resounding success. Writing in Dickens’s footsteps, is, however, a tough act to follow.

As I see it, her purpose in writing this novel was first and foremost to entertain, but, that said, she was apparently interested in bringing her beloved and besieged Appalachia to life, basing the characters very loosely on Dickens’s great novel. She certainly succeeded.

She is a staunch defender of her ‘neck of the woods,’ a large swath of the country that has been devastated by big business whose exploitations of the area is and was criminal, followed by the push of oxycontin by Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which has left so many families in the area in ruins. One would think that  there would  be powerful Anna Sewells for every beaten down horse in existence, but not so. Almost  beaten down Appalachia was beaten down even further by shameless persons whose only god is the almighty dollar.  Kingsolver has, in fact, a very non-Dickensian character by the name of Kent, a pharmaceutical rep paid by Purdue, who did his very best to make a lot of money--which he of course did--; if, as he knew, he was ruining lives in  the meantime, so what? I love the expression, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man; it has been the modus operandi of nearly everyone everywhere, since time immemorial. Some wolves are more ravenous than others, no doubt about that.

I think it’s safe to say that the author and I have similar political views. In the book, especially at the beginning she hints at these views in Damon’s voice at a time when a kid would hardly be politically aware. But she brilliantly succeeds in asserting politics later in the novel, when Damon is a student in middle school. One of his teachers is Mr. Armstrong, an African American who loves the area as well, and even plays the banjo in a Blue Grass band. If this combination seems unlikely to you, do recall that the world is a strange place; besides,  the character is very convincingly drawn. Kingsolver takes the racism of the area—and alas! of just about all areas of the world—head-on, Mr. Armstrong, confronted in the class, some members of which support the Confederate flag and conflate that support with patriotism, says the following:

“All right, let’s start with the obvious here,” Mr. Armstrong said. The Confederacy and the United States were opposite sides of a war.”

Still quiet. Among our kind there is stuff not talked about. And stuff not done, including insulting people straight to their faces.

We know words that were not proper noun capital Black being said; we definitely heard those, from older guys or parents or whoever, people ticked off over something they never met firsthand and knew nothing about. No real person…

“People,” Mr. Armstrong finally kind of yelled, like he did whenever we   were ignorant in class. "Are you following me here? A war. Opposite sides. Flying these flags at once makes no sense. It’s like rooting for the Generals and Abingdon Falcons (two local and very much opposing football teams) in the same game.” 

                                                        --page 266

Kudos to Barbara Kingsolver for having written that! Although, as a member of a mixed-race family  that includes prominent Black members, I would have been more critical of the racist views common in all areas of my country; but the author, extremely sensitive to criticism of Appalachian lives, has her heart in the right place.

Kingsolver apparently wrote a letter to the author of Hillbilly Elegies," and chided him for his condescending views. My view is this: Who am I to judge? People of Appalachia are not different from anyone else. Members of this relatively poor and extensively exploited area, deserve not only our sympathy, but admiration. (What would I be able to learn from so many Appalachians? A lot, a whole lot.)

Still, I wish she had written something about class. The prejudice against Appalachians has more to do with class than anything else. So-called ‘trailer trash” has its equivalents in the so-called White, Black and Brown trash in the rest of America. Everyone is a child of God; that we have forgotten this is our tragedy as well as the tragedy of the world.

Although her Dickens-based characters come short of the comic genius of the original, Demon Copperhead is still a miraculous achievement. Besides, where is MacBird, a play from the sixties based on Shakespeare, now?

I am convinced that Demon Copperhead will still be widely read by future generations. And if they don’t, it will be their loss!

A Harrowing Experience

I will never get sick; I will never get old. Yeah. Right.

Overall, we had a very pleasant river cruise up the Rhine, from Basel to Amsterdam, with extensions on either side, (Lake Como on one, Amsterdam on the other.)

We were very lucky to be able to travel with friends, Jerry and Barb, from Berkeley, Ca. We were together for a three week stay at Aix en Provence. Followed a year or so later by a three week stay in Madrid. At each city we took language lessons, French in one, Spanish at the other.  All four of us get along very well together.

At the airport, for our plane ride over, I was asked if I needed wheelchair assistance. I might be old, but I’m spry, I thought. By the end of the journey, however, I was completely dependent on wheelchair assistance. I had become very ill.

I had noticed that I couldn’t keep up at the Kinderdijk windmill tour The tour guide, a 74 year old man, hovered about at the end of the tour, expecting a tip. But I didn’t have the strength to pull out my wallet. Besides, one would think he would have noticed my difficulty keeping up. I hobbled on board the Viking cruise ship—I made it, although with great difficulty.

It was downhill from there.

The journey home was terrible At the airport, I was offered a wheelchair without having to request one. I looked that bad.

The flight from Amsterdam to London went well, but we missed the connecting flight to Charlotte. (We had paid extra to get a direct flight, which we had for a while. Then British Airways bumped us off the flight—I assume they had overbooked, and when push came to shove, we were unceremoniously shoved.

By this time I had a fever, was coughing like mad, and had  bilateral pink eye, with copious discharge from each eye. What’s worse, I couldn’t stand or walk.

The assistance crew at Heathrow was dominated by Southeast Asians, who, I might add, really treated me well. (For example, “Do you need water, Sir? Let me get some for you.” This would not happen in New York.)

They were in fact so solicitous, and I apparently looked so bad, that we missed our connecting flight to Charlotte,

I was given a voucher to stay at an airport hotel, dinner included. W were put on a flight the next day to Washington, D.C. But we live in Baltimore, where our car is parked, my wife complained. “Take a taxi.” was the indifferent reply. A fifty mile taxi ride! But I was in no condition to complain; I couldn’t even kvetch.

Since I appeared quite ill at this point, we were advised to call an ambulance. I resisted, recalling the wait we had when my wife was struck by a car in France. I couldn’t bear waiting in a hospital, I felt too ill for that. I actually thought that I might die.

The next day we were ferreted though security and customs by wheelchair. Thank God for that; we couldn’t’ have managed on our own.

After waiting hours in an Assistance Room, we were finally wheelchaired onto a huge airbus.

It was what I’d call a pleasant flight if I had felt better. I coughed throughout the flight. People who began the flight seating near us changed their seats.

At the end of the flight, I couldn’t stand. Supported by my wife on the left and a flight attendant on the right, I was eventually  led off the plane. “Now you see a doctor right away,” I was told.

Nirmala’s mother met us at the airport. I was glad about that until I recalled she had been dead for over twenty years. She disappeared before I had a chance to thank her.

I was actively hallucinating at this point, I will spare you the details.

It was Nirmala’s sister and brother-in-law who met us as the airport. They are both very much alive; to keep it that way, Nirmala didn’t want to stay at their place, since I was so ill.

We stayed at Nirmala’s nephew’s house, where I could be isolated. My wonderful son, Philip, picked us up the next day.

Back in Baltimore, my hallucinations dissipated along with my cough. I am on a rather bumpy road to recovery. I am apparently not going to die.

What a harrowing experience!

And Death Shall Have No Dominion--The Problem of Life and Its Possible Solution Part ll

 

Peter 3:15 contains the following advice: “Always be ready to give answer to anyone who asks the reason for the hope you have.”

In the little essay, I will attempt to do just that. (Admittedly, the hope I have is on somewhat shaky grounds; nevertheless.)

 

We have learned in the first part of this essay what the problem, as I see it is: how is a human being to maintain faith in the goodness of existence when faced with the reality of death? A faith not based on wishful thinking might not be easy to obtain, but it is possible.

 

In the first section, we discussed the human situation. Chance, as many scientists claim, might have initiated life, but once replication began, the Darwinian laws of adaptation to the environment and survival of the fittest replaced chance as the drivers of evolution. The will to survive is essential to all life forms, especially conscious life forms. For most creatures, death and aging are not problems, because they lack the intellectual capacity to experience them. Not so with humans, who have an acute awareness of ‘that bourne from which no traveler has ever returned.’

 

What happens when the will to survive confronts oblivion? Myths arise; belief systems that assert reasons that counter that ultimate bad reality, death. According to most religions, cessation of life is not final; justice, which hardly exists on Earth, will be fully realized on the other side, for instance.

 

You were perhaps confronted with such myths in childhood in one form or another; you have also perhaps drifted away from them in adulthood. Yet a belief in a cosmically meaningless existence is cold comfort to organisms programmed with the will to survive. Regarding the meaning of existence, is it really the best option to stick one’s head in the sand like an ostrich, until that dreaded high tide comes and sweeps you away? Is diversion the best answer we doubting Thomases have?

 

Although many pass through life without serious attempts to  transcend ignorance, most persons, at least those of my age, know something about life’s meaning. Research has proven it; relationships, not fame or money, are the key to happiness. After many years, I still remember many things from Martin Buber’s wonderful book, Ich und du, which extols the centrality of relationship. He posited three forms of relationship, namely, to God, to Nature, and to human beings. God, for instance, can be thought of as a mysterious intimation of deep meaning when experiencing a relationship, rather than the ‘man upstairs.’

 

Love, or at the very least, mutual respect, relieves the isolations of the ego. Many contemporary scientists and psychologists deny the absolute existence of the ego, however. One of the fundamental tenets of all forms of Buddhism is anatta, the conviction that the abiding self is a fiction. Maybe; but without an ingrained belief in the importance of one’s ego, human beings wouldn’t survive. How long would humanity last if we all decided to always turn the other cheek? As Simone Weil asserted, those that live by the sword die by the sword—and those that put it down die on the  Cross.

 

Yes, a sturdy ego is necessary for survival; but if the ego is believed  to be the only important thing in life, all the evils of solipsism and selfishness arise, thus assuring that paradise on earth is not on the horizon. What is it in us that cheats, whores, and begs, a great dramatist of the past century asked. An unbalanced ego! If we are never lifted beyond ourselves through love of others in the widest sense, greed, hate and delusion, the banes of existence, tend to rise. If the ego is unbalanced by love of humanity and devotion to rewarding work; well, you know what happens; look in the mirror, turn on the TV.

 

Prophets, philosophers, etc. have known what it means to lead a good life, since very ancient times. But what about the problem of death?

 

2.

In Part l, I included a poem of mine about non-fundamentalist faith and secular knowledge, which I repeat here:

The Scales

What does this speck think it is,

One grain become a black hole

Compact beyond the cosmic scale

That tips trillions of stars?

 

Albeit a very vast bubble

That very slowly breaks—

What does the world think it is,

Denser than its source?

 

Mere observers find no answer here:

The needle always points to zero

Until one puts one’s hands down hard

on one pan of the scales.

 

A mustard seed on one side,

On the other, galaxies—

Faith or knowledge, I ask you,

Which one matters more?

 

Well, it’s time to put my hands down hard on one side of the scales.  Namely, on the side of faith. I define faith as an inner conviction that life has ultimate meaning, despite any evidence to the contrary. But in my book, faith must transcend knowledge, not flout it. How does it manage to do that?

 

We mentioned that in earthy life, relationships, love, are most important. Research has borne this out. The way to transcend ego in life is through loving kindness, no doubt about that. But our inner lives aren’t everything; what about the cosmos, which appears completely indifferent? If God does indeed control the universe, he is certainly very silent about it.

 

There is little evidence that cosmic meaning and personal meaning are related. We find meaning in life through relationships, but what about support for us in the cosmos? I hold, as stated previously, that awe is the proper reaction to the unimaginable size of the cosmos and countless stare; for many of us, there is no hint of redemption here.

 

How do I keep faith in a meaningful cosmos then? My faith might be on shaky ground, but it is faith, nevertheless.

 

In South India, one of the names of the divine is Kadavul, which literally means inside/outside. We have intimation of the inner meaning of life through love in all forms; of the cosmic meaning of life, we have no evidence.

Here is the leap of faith: inside and outside forms a unity. Thus, the universe will reveal cosmic meaning in the future, albeit not any time soon. In the meantime, we believe that the outer, cosmic meaning, not only exists but will somehow be revealed in the future.

 

The importance of relationship, after all, has been revealed, as the universe has awoken compassion in humankind, relatively recently. The ‘outside’ revelation is to come.

In John F. Haught’s provocative and splendid book, God After Einstein, the author comes to a similar conclusion. (I picked up this book thinking it was a book about physics; I was surprised to discover that it actually a book about theology—Haven’t read one of those in a long time.) He divides world views into three basic types. The first he calls Archeonomy, the view taken by a majority of scientists. According to this, life may have meaning on Earth, but it has no cosmic counterpart. Thus, for them, life is ultimately meaningless.  Inexorable, impersonal laws govern the universe; life’s meaning thus dies when humanity dies. Chance is the initiator and sustainer of the universe, not any entity that might be called Father, as Jesus of Nazareth assumed.  Haught’s view is as follows: humans are key to the ‘awakening of the universe.’ Many scientists forget that the universe has already awoken to compassion in ourselves, a cosmic phenomenon which is ignored by ‘scientific pessimism.’ The second type of worldview, the typical religious attitude, he calls Analogy. In this belief system, God lives in eternity, beyond time, a realm which we will know better after death. Experience of eternity, sometimes called cosmic consciousness, however, lacks evidence. Perhaps the ancient Buddhists were right: according to the doctrine of anicca, there is no permanence, everything changes. Thus, although they have a life span much, much longer than humans, stars are subject to birth and death as well. Eternity is thus a construct of the mind, lacking a counterpart in phenomenal existence. The third view, the one the author accepts, is called Anticipation. The universe reveals itself as it awakens in time, not beyond time. Knowledge of cosmic meaning is therefore ‘not yet.’

In other words, the Kada part of the divine, the inside part, has already been revealed to us; the universe has awoken to love and compassion for as long as human beings have existed. The -vul part, the outside part of meaning, however, has not yet been revealed.

This is a faith to live by. We are to find meaning in earthly relationship and experience awe regarding the universe. In due time, however, we will fully understand “What is really going on in the universe,” the subtitle of Haught’s book.

 

Faith asserts that while meaning is found in our lives, it is somehow related to the universe as well. The contrary view is that the universe is not awakening at all, and that the dividing line between humanity and the cosmos is absolute.  Your choice. The scales are waiting.

Yes, I’m putting my hands down hard on one side of the scales, the side of faith. A faith that transcends reason and logic without flouting either.

 

I conclude with a poem I wrote after reading Haught’s book:

Be Not Afraid

How dare we tell our myth to hurry up?

It took the universe an extremely long time

To awaken compassion. Broken images,

What will you be when cosmic healing comes?

 

Ash. Dust. All goodness gone? Yes,

We still await redemption. How long

Will hapless flesh have yet to fail about

For that? In the eye of creation, we motes

 

Imagine cosmic love—Nothing lasts

While greed and hate create

Expensive gadgets? “They also serve

Who sit and wait” Where is Milton now?

 

Dare we expect resurrection?

Why do we still love, hope, and care?

Our myth is quiet, yet our myth survives—

Today we are broken. Tomorrow we thrive.

 

The message of this essay is contained in the title of this poem. Have faith.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion: The Problem of Life and its Possible Solution--Part One

 A blip between two oblivions--is that all there is to life?

1.

Science still does not know how life began on Earth, but evidence proves that life began here shortly (in cosmic terms) after the Earth formed. Then, after over three billion years of unicellular organisms, bacteria and viruses, multicellular organisms came into existence, during the so-called Cambian Explosion, over 500 million years ago. And here we are, after many millions of years of extinctions and evolutions of whatever life remained after these cataclysms, trying our best to survive in what was once touted as the best of all possible worlds, but what we now know to be a tiny fleck in the cosmos that is, as far as science can tell, totally indifferent to our survival. An unconscious cosmos, has, of course, no interest as to whether we finally get our act together and get along.

Once matter began to replicate, survival, not chance, became the determining factor. Once this will to survival was present in conscious beings, us, we were and are faced with the unthinkable: knowledge of death. A mouse in a glue trap, for instance, will struggle to free itself until it starves; it doesn't know what's coming; we do.

One of the starkest contrasts that exist, perhaps the starkest, is the will to survival, which most organisms share, and the knowledge of death. Some animals, elephants for example,  have nervous systems advanced enough to have some knowledge of death. We have seen videos of elephants bidding farewell to a member of kin, by gently stroking the body of the deceased with its trunk. However, this lasts, as far as we can determine, only briefly. The elephant soon resumes its life of foraging, mating and raising young. Only humans, with the most developed brains we know of, know that their precious individuality can be over in a second, and if not now, undoubtedly later. 

Of death we know; oblivion after death, however, is something which a great deal of humans, following their will to survival, cannot accept. In addition, mourning of a beloved person is often so extremely painful, that it is psychologically unacceptable. Such wishful thinking such as "Mom is now in a better world," is commonplace. Our instinct for survival has great difficulty wrestling with possible oblivion, either of the individual or of his or her loved ones.

As Nietszche wrote in a poem, "Denn alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit"; ("For all desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep eternity.")

Our will to survival makes this desire universal...

and causes a lot of sadness as well, even despair. For the cosmos seems to be totally indifferent to our lives and to our death'

In previous generations, it was a lot easier to escape the reality of suffering and demise. We 'escaped into eternity' by believing in a righteous God and in an afterlife in heaven. Eternity hovered above us; Aristotle, for instance, Aristotle believed that change only occurred on Earth. The moon and the stars were eternal celestial objects; heaven was often believed to be just above a starry, changeless canopy. 

This human-friendly myth began to be shattered by Galileo and others. We all know what happened to Giordano Bruno in 1600 (--He was burned at the stake--why? Bruno spoke against the narrow cosmos of the Church by asserting that the universe teems with life; this outlook posed a threat to the power of the Church, which resulted in his miserable execution.)

We now know that the universe is over twenty billion light-years across; in addition, the assertion that our universe is only a small fraction of the actual universe is largely accepted among scientists today. Our galaxy, 100 light-years long, contains perhaps 400 billion stars; the known universe is estimated to have many trillions of galaxies. In short, the universe is on an unfathomable scale, many orders of magnitude beyond human comprehension.

It is now very difficult to imagine that something in the vast expanse of outer space cares about the vast expanse of inner space of our unhealed minds.

The conflict between the will to survival and the knowledge of death, is, I believe, the problem of human existence. For instance, attempts at immortality by 'lording over' others might be doomed to failure, but are the root cause of a lot of suffering in life.

What is really going on in the universe? We don't really know. Despite our ignorance, however, a meaningful, full life is possible. How this is achieved is the subject of the second part of this article, which will soon follow.

2.

To give the reader a hint of where this article is going, I conclude with a poem of mine, which appeared several years back in the British journal, Verse:

The Scales

What does that speck think it is,

one grain become a black hole

compact beyond the cosmic scale

that tips a trillion stars?

Albeit a very vast bubble

which so very slowly breaks--

What does the world think it is,

denser than its source?

Mere observers find no answer here;

the needle always points to zero

until one puts his hand down hard

on one pan of the scales.

A mustard seed on one side,

on the other galaxies--

Faith or knowledge, I ask you

which one matters more?

Yes, mention of a type of faith is coming. But it is one grounded in experience, and does not flout rationality.