You know, I'm really tired of hearing "things are getting worse." If things really are going to hell in a handbasket, you couldn't prove it by me. Why would anyone say this? Looks to me like there are more people living longer on Earth than at any previous time, fewer of us dying from hunger or war (as percentages), and about the same amount of heinous torture and crime as usual. It's true that I romanticize the world at 28,000 years ago and think it would be cool to live a certain kind of Native lifestyle. But truthfully, I get tired camping after about 2 weeks of it. I could probably live off the land for a month or more, but ultimately, I like my memory foam mattress and my TV and my computer. I like grocery stores and that I can be dreaming up new arugula mashed potato goat cheese recipes while watching Flight of the Conchords delivered by Netflix.
Nope. I think people whine about handbaskets and hell in order to enforce their own political agenda. Their own personal agenda, in fact. Usually, they simply want to shut other people up. What people really don't like is freedom of speech. Some people don't like freedom, just in general.
So, here are some quotes that give me sustenance on days when the jabronis get to me:
Winston Churchill: "Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage."
John Berry: " If your library is not 'unsafe', it probably isn't doing its job."
Charles Bradlaugh: "Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."
Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky: "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
Brodsky knew what he was talking about. He was a poet, born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1940. It was the Soviet Union, then. The man with all the power was Joseph Stalin. Stalin claimed to have the true self-interest of Russia in mind when he banned freedom of speech and killed something like 1/5th of the entire population for being smart-asses or trouble-makers, or just being in the way of progress. No one really knows what happened, or how many died. I'm not counting the Russians on the battlefields of World War II, but Stalin certainly wasn't one to listen to other peoples' opinions on how to run a war.
Brodsky was born Jewish, in Russia, not really a happy circumstance. His parents were loyal Russians, his father was in the Soviet Navy. As a child, Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad, experienced real deprivation, but still grew up loving Russia. He wanted to be a Submariner. He was rejected, at age 15, from the School of Submariners, so he went on to try and become a machinist. In 1955, that was a worthy occupation in post-war Russia. He hadn't had a really good education, he was a drop-out. He decided, in his mid-teens, to try and educate himself. He had made friends with a poet, who happened to be Polish, and he wanted to read the guy's poems, so he tried to learn Polish. He tried to read anything that came his way, in fact.
He became enamored of English and soon learned that many great books were written in English, so he learned English, too - on his own.
In Russia, books and ideas were and are tightly controlled, so Brodsky had to work hard just to find things to read. Brodsky inhabited garbage dumps and looked through trash, looking for anything at all to read.
At age 17, Brodsky began writing his own poetry and trying to translate texts, mostly from English into Russian. This didn't go over so well with Soviet authorities.
None of his poems or translations were particularly political, but they did involve translation from English into Russian, which made authorities suspicious. Sort of like a kid who draws a space weapon on his binder paper, at school, in the contemporary U.S.
At age 23, he was arrested and prosecuted for "parasitism." He wasn't making a good enough living and he was attempting to write poems, that was the charge. He was accused of a strange kind of "plagiarism." Russian authorities wanted to know, since he hadn't finished school, how it could be that he could translate anything or write poems?
Brodsky said he didn't really know how he did it. When pressed, he said, "I think it comes from God."
Not the right answer, for the Soviet Union in 1964, when his trial took place.
Brodsky was found guilty and sentence to 5 years in a labor camp in Siberia, Archangel region. For writing poems and translating from English into Russian.
Protests from inside, but especially outside Russia, led to the commutation of his sentence (by Brezhnev, I think). The Soviets were particularly embarassed when people like Jean-Paul Sartre wouldn't quit writing about and publicizing the Brodsky case.
To this day, only a handful of Brodsky poems have been published in Russia. He refuses to let them publish censored poems (duh!) The Soviet Union banished Brodsky in 1972. By then, he was quite famous as a dissident and was welcomed in the United States, where he was eventually named one of our country's Poet Laureates (in 1991). He knew the value of freedom, and sometimes, Americans need to relearn that lesson, as we are quite complacent, mooing about like fat cows instead of cherishing our freedoms.
Or protecting them.
The University of Michigan hired Brodsky in the late 70's, and Yale gave him an honorary degree. He began to write poetry in English, and it was good poetry. He received a McArthur Foundation Genius Award, too. We're lucky our country has such good manners, good sense - and great people to fund such awards.
In 1987, Brodsky won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Good for him. He finally felt secure enough in life, at age 50, to marry. He and his wife had one daughter, but sadly, Brodsky died young. Only 56. Heart attack.
Did you know that today, there's a new and relatively inexpensive ultrasound method, available mostly only in California, that is a substitute for those heavily advertised cat-scan thingies of just a few years ago (they were very expensive). Anyone can approach a cardiologist and request one, and if Brodsky had even availed himself of technology available in 1995, he might still be alive - but frankly, scans of this type weren't advertised then, nor were they as readily available. That's how fast things change.
While Brodsky considered himself to be Jewish, a Russian poet, and an English essayist, his family chose to bury him in Italy. But not in a Catholic cemetery - in an Episcopalian one. He loved Venice, and that's where he wanted to be buried.
Brodsky believed - and so do I - that the Western literary tradition and the humanities in general - are just about the only thing standing between us and even further human made catastrophes of the type the twentieth century is famous for. In particular, Brodsky extolled the Anglo-American poetic tradition, and loved the works of Auden and Frost. He preferred English over his "native" language, he was a great judge of linguistic potential.
Conservative Ike Eisenhower, the first president who I can personally recall said this in 1953:
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
He didn't mean people who were burning CD's or DVD's. He meant real book burning. I think he should have gone further and said that it is everyone's obligation to intelligently look about themselves and to read and to know what's going on. It's more important to our future than anything else we do, and people who are having children and building the planet's future gene pool should, at the very least, take full responsibility for knowing as much about whatever they can. And if someone says you shouldn't know it or read it, all the more reason to do so. If that means some people think you're antisocial, so be it.
Thinking people know what to do with what they read - or think. Words are not dangerous. They are our friends.
