Temporality and Personhood: The Second Novels of Alyosha

This is my talk at the conference honoring a beloved Northwestern University professor, Gary Saul Morson. The conference was organized by the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. Here’s also the Forum of the Initiative.

You will not hear professor Saul Morson’s name much in this talk. But I hope you will hear something else. In some sense, I hope the talk is an performance of the idea suggested in this paper: it is the expression of what grew from what professor Morson’s thought seeded in me. His work is part of a constellation to which all of you belong. In this sense his work gives you orientation toward beauty, but it also gives you freedom: so here’s the expression of this freedom with orientation.

It is often said that Aristotle is the champion of individuals who, contrary to his teacher, Plato, descended from the world of abstract ideas to the essences that belong to sublunary things. Aristotle remains a scientist, and his interest in individuals is determined by his desire to understand them as members of their species. In other words, he wants to understand what is that which makes them the kind of things that they are. This scientific approach never changes, regardless of whether he studies the life of plants and animals, the souls of various species, or the characters of tragedies. Oedipus, for example, is interesting for him because he exemplifies a type of character: “a man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some fault, of the number of those in the enjoyment of great reputation and prosperity.”[1] For a spectator who enjoys Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus is interesting because of the particular attributes he has and because of this odd destiny in which he marries his mother and kills his father. However, this particularity is achieved only because he belongs to a type of character, and scholars of tragedies, like Aristotle, find interest in studying this typology. In other words, Oedipus is a great hero because he perfectly exemplifies the type to which he belongs. His clear determinations as a type of character allow him to be a hero.

In this Aristotelian framework, Dostoevsky’s question in the first paragraph of his The Karamazov Brothers comes naturally:“Why would I, the reader, spend my time studying the history of his life?”[2] Dostoevsky speaks of Alyosha, his book’s “hero”: a hero who has nothing remarkable about him, the author claims. Most of all, he is “of indeterminate character, whose mission is undefined.”[3] The lack of determinations is the first sign that Alyosha is not truly an individual character in an Aristotelian sense. If he were, he would be understood according to the type to which he belongs. Dostoevsky claims, however, that he belongs to no type: he is of indeterminate character. This also means that one cannot have a typological knowledge of Alyosha: no one can say what he is, that is, define him according to a type. Of course, we may be able to describe him and thus claim, together with Dostoevsky, that he is an eccentric, but this is not because he belongs to a species, that of eccentric people. It is his lack of belonging to his era that makes him so. He is a man and he is a Karamazov, but this does not distinguish him from any other man, first, and from any other member of his Karamazov family. After all, he is not distinguishable from anyone else, since we are all Karamazovs, insects overtaken by Sodom while we are aglow with the beauty of the Madonna. His lack of determinations makes him unknowable: he is a man like anybody else, and this is hardly the matter of heroes.

I mentioned Oedipus above because he is the kind of character who is usually placed into categories. People who read Sophocles’ play form not a personal relationship with Oedipus, but rather learn from his life. If indeed the tragedians were considered the genuine teachers of virtue, as Martha Nussbaum says, [4] the Greeks went to the theater to learn something about how to act in life. Perhaps their attitudes toward this character differed according to their interpretations, just as the attitudes of readers and spectators change depending on their times throughout centuries, but the approach is the same: we deal with a category as it is exemplified in a person. Dostoevsky’s readers cannot claim that Alyosha belongs to a type. He has no character, so it is difficult to know how to approach him, just as we don’t know how to approach the unknown. However, each one of us will decide about his “quality” in our encounter with him. “Perhaps you’ll find for yourself from the novel,”[5] Dostoevsky says. He points here to a different kind of relationship a reader can have with a character. A reader no longer observes the development of an individual life that exemplifies a type, but he or she has a personal relationship with this character, one in which the character comes to life in the hearts of all of his readers.

We have a different type of knowledge here, which does not depend on the typological features a hero has. Instead, the reader can have knowledge of Alyosha by entering into a special relationship with him. Nobody can be silent with Alyosha. Some may want to destroy him, as Rakitin does.[6] Others may perceive in him their only chance of redemption, as his father does.[7]  In fact, it is particularly telling that Dostoevsky brings one other element in his introduction about his non-character: his own book, The Karamazov Brothers, even if it is about an indeterminate hero (or perhaps precisely because it is about an indeterminate hero) is merely the first volume of a larger project. “I have one life story and two novels. The second novel is the main one; this concerns my hero’s actions right up to the present time.”[8] Dostoevsky did not write a second volume. He mentions it only once in his other writings,[9] and he also comes back to this in The Karamazov Brothers.[10] I think Dostoevsky cannot write a book in which Alyosha is a determinate hero because that would transform Alyosha into a type: it may define it. But Alyosha haunts us, just as Dostoevsky’s book does. This is so because the second book, while it is Dostoevsky’s, is not only his: it is the volume that comes to be in his readers’ hearts, which takes place every moment, “right up to the present time.” It so happens when someone dwells in your heart: the relationship you have with him is renewed at every instance.

Dostoevsky’s own book becomes like a person, one that gives birth in its readers to the new volume of The Karamazov Brothers, that which will live in their lives as long as they truly approach it. Of course, “nobody is under any obligation,”^[11] as he says. Some will get nothing out of it, even if they will read everything, “so as to not commit any error of judgment.”^[12] But they will not get it because they will make the same error that people do when they approach a person trying to know her according to categories. In fact, for them there is no second volume: the book cannot give birth to anything, but it can only be consumed, just as an individual can be used for whatever his function may be.

Dostoevsky’s note to the readers brings an ambiguity about the connection one has with a character. On the one hand, he is a nobody, indefinable. On the other hand, he is special. The lack of definition in these first pages keeps Alyosha a person, and I propose that Dostoevsky does this on purpose. If Alyosha were defined, he would have to be described according to categories: he lives in a monastery, for example. However, his life in the convent is not yet decided either, since he is only a brother, not yet a monk, and thus has a status that can change at any moment. Even later, in the chapter that presumably describes Alyosha, the author is at pain to say anything him. He is “the most difficult of all to speak about in this story.”[13] To describe him, Dostoevsky applies a different method: he shows what happens in those who interact with Alyosha, while also emphasizing that which lives in Alyosha’s heart: he has an early memory of his mother. It is the kind of memory that “will continue erupting throughout one’s life like points of light in the darkness.”[14] It is the kind of memory for which Alyosha hopes when he is surrounded by children at Ilyusha’s grave: “But still, no matter how wicked we become—which, God grant, we may never be—when we recall how we buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in these last days, and how we talked together by this stone with such closeness and affection, then even the cruelest and most cynical amongst us—if such there be—will not dare to mock the kindness and goodness of this moment! Moreover, that memory alone, perhaps, will restrain that person from some great wickedness…”[15] In Dostoevsky’s works, we see that our responsibility is to give birth to such moments in other people’s souls, and Alyosha does just that.

What is the difference between individuality and personhood? The short version is this: individuals are perceived as members of a category; persons are indefinable due to their uniqueness and are understood only in relationship. This is certainly an incomplete explanation, and, as Albert Einstein says when approaching the aims of mechanics, “I should load my conscience with grave sins against the sacred spirit of lucidity were I to formulate”[16] this distinction without detailed analysis. As he does, I shall try to partially expiate these sins here. If we use the principles of metaphysics, we determine a human’s essence, that which belongs to all human beings and which makes them the kind of things that they are. Doing so, we discover individuals that belong to a category and that participate in diversification or individuation by distinguishing from each other through various characteristics. These characteristics can also form types, as we can see in Aristotle’s masterful assessment of tragedies. Regardless of whether we are metaphysicians, we engage in this activity of categorizing others every day. At times, this activity is performed according to their essence; at other times, according to the various functions they perform or their physical and psychological characteristics that we find they share with others. Individuals are then people who belong to a larger group because of a common denomination. Any definition I apply to Alyosha as human being must also be applicable to all the other characters of the novel. We can then further bring new categories that separate him from them: he is a Russian, a brother at a monastery, and, most importantly, a Karamazov. Rakitin, the character who constantly applies categories to others in Dostoevsky’s novel, tells Alyosha, “Everything’s pretty clear.[17] It’s the same old story, my dear fellow. But if there’s a sensualist in you too, then what about your brother Ivan? He’s a Karamazov. The whole of the Karamazov family problem boils down to this: you’re sensualists, money-grubbers, and holy fools!”[18] A person, however, cannot be known in the same way. A person’s uniqueness brings her in the realm of the ineffable, and the methods of knowing her are different: one knows a person by partaking of her being and taking her into one’s soul. In some sense, it sounds like consumption and determinism. In a different sense, and this is what I want to discuss here, it is indeterminism with orientation. One way to clarify this is to consider time. Doing so, we’ll see that Dostoevsky reveals that a movement toward indetermination and freedom has, at the same time, orientation. The difference between individuality and personhood also appears in the concept of eternity. Philosophers perceive eternity unmoved—the unmoved mover of Aristotle. But Dumitru Staniloae says that eternity cannot be just an unmoved substance – this is death. Life is activity and movement. And so eternity itself, which is life, is also activity and movement. The one activity and movemet that we can understand as being part of divinity is love. And here is a quote from Staniloae: “The true meaning of eternity can be found only in the perfect communion which subsists between eternal Persons whose love is inexhaustible” (2). Persons are not immovable; in their interconnections, there is a constant and inexhaustible renewal of love.

So, if we do not understand eternity in a strictly philosophical fashion, as something unchangeable, but rather as something that goes beyond our notions of rest and change – and this is love itself – then we can see, Staniloae says, that time and eternity are compatible.

Time is not a sin against eternity. It is not as if we were in eternity, fell from it at the beginning of creation, and are waiting for our time to be received back in eternity. Time has not begun with the Fall, and in this sense it is not opposed to eternity. In fact, Fr. Staniloae says, the Eternity of God, Love between the Persons of the Trinity who are perfectly in union, carries time within itself.

How does eternity carry time within itself. Staniloae says that God enters into a relationship with temporal beings, with us, in our own reality of time, waiting for each of us to give a response. The communication is personal, so that we all have our own times. If God enters into a relationship with temporal beings is because all things begin with him and also end with him, and time is the response that we each need to enter, by grace, in communion with God.

Here’s a beautiful quote from Fr. Staniloae: “Love is the gift of oneself to another, and the waiting for the full return of that gift from the other in response […] The interval of waiting for the response is time. As such, time represents a spiritual distance between persons, while eternity is beyond all distance or separation” (3).

But I want to emphasize that time is a spiritual distance that has an orientation. So God offers to us his love, orienting us toward him, in proportion of our growth, so that through our slow response, we can rejoin him, by grace, in eternity.

The idea of orientation is important, and I will talk about it by mentioning prison and persecution. Fr. Staniloae was in communist prisons. When someone persecutes you, he gives you a different orientation; he arrests you in the sense that he redefines your world in connection with him only. It is what could happen to Alyosha when Rakitin redefines his world after Zosima dies. In terror, you are fully focused on the danger coming from your persecutor, and you exist only in his world. Under torture, it is difficult to think of God and of your love for your neighbor. Fr. Roman Braga, who was in a terrible prison in Pitesti, where friends were forced to torture their own friends, said that he encountered the devil in Pitesti, but God in solitary confinement. What comes to life in you in the presence of your enemy is nothingness—no connection. The enemy takes you away from any connection you have with others, so with love, because he places you on a pedestal. The enemy tells you that you belong to his world. YOU are the one who must be tortured. In this way, he gives you an orientation and a different kind of eternity, the eternity of separation and loss, in which there is no connection with anyone else.

So there are two types of eternity: one of love, and one of pain and suffering. In fact, Fr. Staniloae says that, and I quote, “time is like the distance between the two ends of a bridge. There is something ambiguous, uncertain about it. It is a state of movement in the direction either of death or fullness of life.” Death and fullness of life are not the two ends of the bridge. Both ends are in God, at the end of the journey on the bridge. You begin with God at the beginning of the bridge, you are given an orientation, but on this long journey of the bridge of life you are brought to the reality that the enemy forces you toward a different orientation. The enemy makes you focus on yourself because he makes you defend yourself. The enemy cancels your personhood. He restructures your cosmos, he gives you a definition, and it tells you that you can only exist on one level only, that of a victim.  He makes you focus on yourself, and he cancels all personhood, and you remain alone. The danger is that, on this bridge of life, we end up in the constant refusal of love. Here’s Staniloae again: “A constant refusal to respond to the offer of love fixes the creature spiritually in the total impossibility of communication. Here there is no more waiting, no more hope, no more expectation” (10). It is a different type of eternity, one that has no time and no genuine eternity.

So death and fullness of life, both of them, are in God. Eternity is either that of death, because you are no longer able to love anymore, or the eternity of life, in your full response to Love.

It seems that time and eternity remind us that the highest challenge we have in life is the ability to respond to love, especially when things around us (because of torture of pleasure) encourage us to focus on ourselves. Life is an attempt to walk on the bridge of time, living in the hope that at the end we will experience what we have lived, in part, on the bridge as well: the eternity of God’s love. On the bridge, this is experienced in the gift that our lives become for the lives of others.

The love of a genuine person is a gift that offers orientation. The connection that Alyosha provides in his presence opens him up to others, but also opens the possibility of life in the kingdom for them. Their response to Alyosha is the creation of a new life within their souls. In some sense, I think this is how Gary Saul Morson’s sideshadowing works.

The gift that Alyosha’s life is in the souls of his brothers, but also in the souls of his readers, brings about freedom and responsibility. We do not know how much each of us embraces Alyosha. But we know the orientation that his love proposes. The memory he provides may prove to be our salvation one day. Perhaps we shall grow wicked, and we may not refrain from some evil action and mock the tears of others. But then we may remember our encounter with Alyosha and thank that we were wrong to mock.

I want to end with a poem, called “A Gift,” written by Valeriu Gafencu, imprisoned politically in communist Romania at the age of 21. He died in prison when he was 31 years old. This poem was written in prison and remembered by his colleagues who survived incarceration.

As a gift I send a lily,

Dear brother, from the garden.

It would give my eyes some comfort

With its pure, virginal garment.

Dear white, beloved flower,

How I’d wish that I could go

All embraced by your clean costume

To my Father, white as snow.

Seedling thus would I become,

In the most wonderful garden,

And my life would have as warden

Jesus’ love, from where I come.

In the night I cry all muffled

And I sigh with my faint voice:

Give to me the wedding garment

With white lilies: I rejoice.

Alyosha is such flower from the Garden who seeds in us the potentiality of the garden itself. The time we take to bring this seed to fruition is the time we spend with Alyosha.

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[1] Aristotle, Poetics (1453a6-11).

[2] F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 5.

[3] Ibidem.

[4] See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 12. Nussbaum says, “Indeed, epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”

[5] Dostoevsky, op. cit., p. 6.

[6] See chapters 2 and 3 of Book 7.

[7] “I feel you’re the only person on earth who hasn’t condemned me, my dear boy,” Fyodor Karamazov says. Dostoevsky, op. cit., p. 31.

[8] Ibidem.

[9] Ignat Avsey, the translator of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Karamazov Brothers, mentions that Dostoevsky planned to begin work on it in 1882, and he cites the Russian novelist Collected Works in 30 volumes, Polnoye Sobraniye Sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh (Naula, Leningrad, 1976) (p. 975 in The Karamazov Brothers, the cited edition).

[10] Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, p. 15.

[11] Idem, p. 6.

[12] Ibidem.

[13] Idem, p. 22.

[14] Idem, p. 23.

[15] Idem, p. 973.

[16] Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Princeton and Oxford: Pricneton University Press, 2015), p. 18.

[17] This is the certainty of the one who knows in categories. In his certainty, he can have no surprises. The world is clearly determined, being divided according to various principles, and human beings fall into these divisions. The organized can make decisions about others, can know their destinies, and believes that they cannot redeem themselves.

[18] Dostoevsky, op. cit., p. 101.

What is your use, single tree, in the world of black and white?

At the beginning of his The Karamazov Brothers, Dostoevsky asks a question that may come naturally in a utilitarian world: “Why would I, the reader, spend my time studying the history of his life?” His “hero” is Alyosha, but there is nothing remarkable about him. He is “of indeterminate character, whose mission is undefined.” What is your use for this world, Alyosha Karamazov?

In this contemporary world governed by usefulness, this is a question that we all face. And the answer has to be given here and now. It has to follow a rubric. And it must be assessable. The world asks you constantly to justify your existence. The world asks you to be determinate. To take upon yourself a feature, any feature, so that it can judge you and it can pin you on a map of meaning. Who are you, Alyosha Karamazov? In the absence of a definition that makes sense to the world, your indetermination becomes itself a determination from the perspective of the world. The odd, the indeterminate, those who do not fall into our normal categories, those who are neither “friends” nor “enemies” trouble us. They challenge our own sentiment of justice, because we lack the categories according to which we can reward them. And so the easiest way to deal with them is to give them a determination: they are the exiled.

This is what happens to philosophy on today’s campuses. Philosophy is the hunchback of medieval times: send it to the outskirts of the city, for we can find no use of it in a world in which the heroes are masters of dealing with black and white. We need answers now. In the absence of values, we need values to orient ourselves in a meaningless homogenous space. Alyosha gives no immediate answers. Philosophy gives no immediate answers. So we plunge ourselves in the cold world of monetary value that gives an answer in the now. Philosophy departments? Too expensive for today’s academic world, and their outcomes are not immediately measurable. What is your use for this world, Alyosha Karamazov?

Of course, we value individuals. But what we mean by that is individuals clearly defined, who belong to a category. If they do not belong to one, we rush to define it. But you, Alyosha Karamazov? You, the man of indeterminate character, what is your use for this world? You, Socrates, what is your use for this world? You, philosophy department, what is your use for this world?

*

After he points out that Alyosha Karamazov is a non-hero, Dostoevsky immediately brings about a new topic, the real book about Alyosha. The Karamazov Brothers, even if it is about an indeterminate hero (or perhaps precisely because it is about an indeterminate hero) is merely the first volume of a larger project, he says. “I have one life story and two novels. The second novel is the main one; this concerns my hero’s actions right up to the present time.”

Dostoevsky did not write a second volume. He may have planned to do so. Be that as it may, Dostoevsky could not have written a book in which Alyosha is a determinate hero because that would transform Alyosha into a type. Alyosha haunts us, just as Dostoevsky’s book does. The second book, while it is Dostoevsky’s, is not only his: it is the volume that comes to be in his readers’ hearts, which takes place every moment, “right up to the present time.” It so happens when someone dwells in your heart: the relationship you have with him is renewed at every instance.

*

In one of Aesop’s fables, two travelers walking in the noonday sun sought the shade of a tree to rest. They saw a plane tree and rested in its shadow. “How useless is the plane tree,” one of them said. “It bears no fruit whatever, and only serves to litter the ground with leaves.” All of this while resting in its cooling shade

What is your use, Alyosha Karamazov?

What is your use, Socrates?

What is your use, philosophy departments across the world?

We will discover it when they will stop giving birth to beauty in our hearts.

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Oases of Freedom

There are two conditions for constituting an oasis of freedom for others. First, you have to stand for something, so that others know where you are. Second, you have to embrace others as persons, regardless of where they are in life, and so accept them fully without any rest. The second condition is usually championed by all. At the same time, the first condition is often perceived in contradiction with the idea of freedom. How can you say that you accept all, some may say, if you also claim at the same time that you have certain standards? Don’t these standards encourage you to reject those who do not live by them?

Of course, if you have the first condition without the second, then you may likely reject others. My question, though, is whether the second has any meaning in the absence of the first. What kind of embrace is the one who comes from absence of values? What worth does it have? If you do not stand for anything, your embrace seems to be a meaningless act: it takes place in the absence of being. But there is so much meaning in the embrace of those who take you in their arms despite of all the reasons they have to not take you.

There is one character in Dostoevsky’s works who lives his life as an oasis of freedom for others: Alyosha Karamazov, in whose presence all have “moments of goodness,” as his father remarks, because all feel free to be who they are, regardless of their wickedness. They find in him rest, because there’s no judgment in him. This doesn’t mean that Alyosha has no values. In fact, it is precisely because he has values, because he has standards, that people find rest in him. If he did not, he would be a non-place, a desert in which you cannot quench your thirst.

Perhaps this is another reason why the dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha is so rich. Ivan is the brother who has judgment. His freedom: if there is no God, everything is permitted. But such freedom is meaningless: the notion of “permitted” disappears. If there is no God, it is not as if everything is permitted or not; being allowed is no longer comprehensible. “Being embraced regardless of who you are” is meaningless.

Alyosha’s freedom: if there is God, everything is allowed. The notion of “everything” is not the same as it is in Ivan’s statement. In God’s presence, all things are different than they would be in his absence, because they already belong to God. If I begin with God, everything is permitted because I act within an embrace, and the embrace gives meaning beyond the phenomena. In Ivan, if there is no God, then everything is outside of God and outside of meaning: it no longer matters whether my actions cause harm.

Ivan allows all things, but he has no values. He wants to start with freedom outside of meaning. But in the absence of meaning, freedom and embrace are just as meaningless as anything else.

The Gift of Failure

Costica Bradatan. In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Harvard University Press, 2023, ISBN: 978-0-674-97047-2)

In one of Aesop’s fables, two travelers find a place of rest on a hot day under a plane tree. One of them remarks on the uselessness of the tree: its existence is governed by failure, since it has no fruit. The tree is vexed about the ingratitude of the traveler, who cannot see the benefit he receives from its shade. The plane tree appears again in Plato, in a dialogue where Socrates invites Phaedrus to deliver his speech about love under a plane tree. The Phaedrus is a dialogue where two arts and their respective pedagogies are placed face to face. On the one hand, sophistry, which claims to give its students measurable knowledge. On the other hand, Socratic philosophy, which is often accused of having nothing to offer to the measurable, objective world. Why the plain tree, though? It may be that ancient writers were fascinated with the ingratitude of human beings, who, while benefiting from the world, reproach it for not giving them what it was never meant to give them. The plane tree is also the image of philosophy, often accused of being sterile, because it does not produce anything palpable. Just consider Socrates’ education, which begins with a most confusing claim: “I only know that I don’t know anything.” How many parents would send their children to a school that has such a claim on its frontispiece? While a hero for Plato, Socrates remains someone who produces no measurable outcome. Whether it is Euthyphro, Ion, or Crito, Socrates’ interlocutors do not leave wiser or open to learning after encountering him. By all human accounts, Socrates is a failure.

Socrates’ singularity would suggest that failure is not a property of human beings, at least clearly not an essential one. Failures are trees that offer no fruit. Failures are philosophers who, as someone once said, produce dust around a topic and are then surprised that things are no longer visible. We often think that some people are failures, not the species itself. After all, when Aristotle searched for the essence of human beings, failure never entered his mind as a candidate. In the process of distinguishing among species, he naturally searched for positive aspects, whether these features have to do with rationality or social behavior. And then there is Costica Bradatan, whose stories lead to one unstated conclusion: a human is a creature whose life is defined by failure. So perhaps there is a Socrates in us, waiting to be born the moment when we realize what he knew 2500 years ago: attempt to know yourself, and you’ll end up knowing nothing.

To be sure, there is no other animal that contemplates its own failure; when we say that animals “fail,” we express our reading of the situation. We humans judge their actions against some perfect ideal. The lion “fails” to prey on an antelope in our eyes. For the lion itself, the unaccomplished action does not have the flavor of failure. This is because animals do not evaluate their actions in reference to a standard, nor do they contemplate what could be their ultimate failure, death; they just act. Humans have plans, desires, and also questions about the meaning of life or a perfectly happy life. Our being-toward something that is not yet manifested makes us beings governed by failure. After all, Bradatan’s book is always about a person’s failure, regardless of the circle he describes: the person fails externally, politically, socially, and intimately. All things fail because we fail, because we understand the world in terms of failure.

Failure is a funny thing: it comes with that which is specifically ours, our personhood. Only persons, Cristos Yannaras says in Person and Eros, understand Being “as temporality, as a rising up to presence, and this means that the human person is the only being which “stands out” (ex-istatai), which can ‘stand outside’ its being, that is, which can understand its being, as presence, as temporal ‘nowness.’” Be a person, and failure is with you regardless of whether you realize it or not. It governs all the moments of your life, even those of glory. Your successes take place under its shadow, and your evaluation of your and your world’s existence rests upon it. Of course, “how we relate to failure defines us, while success is auxiliary and fleeting and does not reveal much,” as Bradatan says. But failure is more than this: it is an essential ingredient to our minute evaluation of this existence. Of course, if you are a human being, you will fail. Even more, the way we respond to it will write the story of our life, but we have no escape from having to respond to it. But failure is much more than this: even a life filled with successes only (as if such a thing existed) will be governed by the possibility of having failed and by the certainty of our ultimate failure: death. As Fr. George Calciu once said, “You are the most unfortunate being on earth, for neither plants nor animals have any consciousness of life and death, but you do. You know that you live, and you especially know that you will die. Your whole life unfolds under the somber perspective of death.”

Some may say that the Heraclitean existence of our world makes us participate in failure: everything changes; what has a beginning has an end. However, Heraclitus by himself cannot produce thoughts about incompleteness. We need Parmenides’ perfection to see Heraclitus’ world as the one of failure. The world does not embody failure; we do. This is because while we live in a changing world, we thirst for Parmenides’ unchanging one.

The Greeks saw the entire life as part of becoming. They didn’t call becoming ‘participation in failure’; however, becoming is nothing else than changing at all times without ever reaching a status of final completion. This is not problematic as long as nobody is searching for that state of completion. But since we all desire eudaimonia, which is expressed in an excellent, complete life, we are bound to fail. If we bring Bradatan and Aristotle together, this is what humans are: those beings who search their entire lives for excellence while being doomed to never have it.

Bradatan’s heritage is not Greek, but Romanian. If this were any other kind of book, his Romanian heritage may be just an unimportant biographical detail. But Romanians are, as he mentions, particularly good at failure. It’s not that failure is ever-present in Romania, or that we, Romanians, believe that we are good at failing, as Bradatan himself reminds us. It is more that we delight in it. There is nothing like the pleasure of telling yourself that you will never be able to do it, that everything you have done to reach a certain stage can only show that you qualified for nothing, since inevitably you will fail. And you fail because you don’t truly want anything, caught in the eternity given by your what some call the Romanian ethos. “Eternity was born in Romanian villages,” Lucian Blaga, a Romanian philosopher and poet of the 20^th century, used to say. E.M. Cioran, a contemporary of Blaga and one of the historical figures discussed in Bradatan’s book, was despaired by the ability of his nation to excel in lacking excellence.

Failure is always embodied; it never comes up abstractly on Bradatan’s pages, flying around conceptually, being thirsty for a definition. Instead, from Simone Weil’s failures, to Ghandi’s, to Cioran’s, to a people’s, or to Kimitake Hiraoka’s, failure flares up in its multitude. For “failure is boundless, and its manifestations legion.” Failure is the shadow from which we all run, but also that which gives substance to our lives: what kind of beings would we be if we were not governed by failure? Even “from God’s point of view, the existence of the world is an embarrassment.” Perhaps this is what the point of failure is: if it is part of who we are, running from it is a fight against one’s nature.

The fact that we cannot escape it stems from our eternal search for meaning. And since modernity has left God in the shadows, “people will flock to the charismatic politician who gives them even an illusion of meaning. They will swallow up anything from him, even the silliest bilge, and imagine him a savior.” Isn’t it spectacular that anytime we run away from failure we end up in an even bigger one?

Sure, the question comes: if we cannot run from failure, why don’t we embrace it? Why don’t we embrace our ultimate reality, the scariest of them all, the one that says that we are limited beings? Much more difficult to do it than to think about it.

Be that as it may, life may turn out to be quite boring if failure were not part of it. Failure allows us to be new: to see life with new eyes. For the one who experiences failure, the world is born again. “Old presumptions are shattered, certainties fade away, reputable truths are put to shame.” This does not mean that you should encourage others to fail. You cannot ask them to do what they cannot escape doing. And you should not even encourage them to accept their fate. Accepting the humility coming from failure can only be a lesson that you make yourself listen to.

Of course, being proven wrong may bring you in the situation of the earth (humus), so may make you humble. The earth… “always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, al we don’t need,” as Anthony Bloom describes it in Beginning to Pray. But the earth did not need failure to be humble: it was “born” this way. “It’s there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold out of every seed.” When was anyone capable of doing this because of failure? Ask Socrates, who offered plenty of occasions to his interlocutors to humble themselves. The only fruit of his seeds was the hemlock that he had to drink himself.

When he said that philosophy is preparation for death and dying, Socrates may have meant that philosophy makes you humble because it gives you awareness that human knowledge is incomplete. Just like failure, philosophy may cure from what Bradatan calls “the umbilicus mundi syndrome, a pathological inclination to place ourselves at the center of everything, and to fancy ourselves far more important than we are.” Even so, philosophy, just like failure, remains a medication that one can prescribe to oneself only. This is what makes Simone Weil great: she administers her own medication, or she preaches what she is willing to do herself. She doesn’t tell others that they should join the ranks of the poor; instead, she witnesses what people go through, and she takes their burden upon her shoulders. She works in a factory, assuming what she sees as the condition of a slave; she takes “death as a matter of philosophical conviction and personal conviction.” For a person who is already physically weak, as Weil, working in a factory can only increase daily difficulties. Everything about her can be deemed personal failures. They lead you to humus and, like Weil, to Christ, was but they cannot be prescribed. If you give them to others as solutions, either on an intimate level, like Socrates does, or on a social level, like dictators who believe they are the world’s saviors, you create monsters and victims.

This is especially the case in the political realm. The Nazis and the communists, the two regimes that produced the humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century in Europe, began with the desire to transform a failed humanity into a new, better one. The idea of the new man imposed from above can only be murderous. Perhaps there is no better example than the French revolution, that ended in the Reign of Terror, “born ironically out of a great love of humanity.” The Bolsheviks wanted to create a society in which they would eliminate the failures coming from inequality. The Nazis wanted a superior human being. They all left behind them millions of dead bodies. Human beings cannot be transformed in a different kind of being; the only aspect in which they may be perfect is failure.

Still, there are always people who fall in love with political approaches that want to cure humanity of its essential imperfection. The attraction that dictators of all flavors bring before the simple masses is the promise that they would escape them from themselves. A Lenin resolves all problems, because he helps you bring to light a new man. A Hitler redeems you because he renders dignity back to your people. Fascinated by their powers and their promises of a heavenly but still earthy humanity, you dance with them in the drunkenness produced by the bottles of promised perfection. When you wake up, you realize that the earth under your feet is still moving, covered by bodies who take their last breath, and you cannot realize why your bloody hand holds a gun.

The political failure belongs to those who fought against failure: the Nazis and the communists, the so-called enemies of the darkest age of the 20^th century, fight against what they define as failure. Their approach is identical; the details differ. Any totalitarian regime defines the mightiness of the nation, creating boundaries for it and eliminating the elements that do not belong to it, internal or external. Regardless of what perfect ideas we create as idols, we will always leave behind us a pile of dead bodies. Bradatan’s warning is accurate: “Be careful what you wish for!” Think of anything: classless society, ideal state, equality, “they are all admirable, as lofty as they are well-meaning, but we should never lose sight of what they are: political fictions. Not some mended version of the real world, but a wild act of imagination—a world unto itself, almost completely cut off from political reality.”

The mirage that political extremes had over intellectuals, be them on the left (think France) or on the right (think Romania), has to do with the hope of recreating a humanity free of failure. Among them, Emil Cioran’s case is particularly attractive. Despaired by Romania’s perennial failure, he has no problem to be a failure himself. On the contrary: he delights in it as if it were the only virtue to obtain on this earth. Strange thing being despaired about the failure of the nation to which you belong but delighted in your own failure. Bradatan doesn’t miss the paradox: he writes about Cioran in a section on social failure.

Cioran lived and wrote in Romania between the two wars of 20^th century. If Blaga was fascinated by the eternity experienced in a Romanian village, Cioran was despaired by it. The strength manifested by extremist movements came in direct contrast with a space where nothing used to take place. Cioran was ready to give up eternity for a glorious moment, regardless of its violence. Villages have no place in history. They are repetitive, like eternity. Think of an old man in a village of Transylvania, Cioran’s birthplace, looking at the birds in the sky and judging that rain comes tomorrow. He would wake up in the morning, feed the chickens, and go light a candle at the tomb of his parents. He may then work his garden and quarrel with his neighbor. In the evening, he would kneel before a candle, pray for his children and for his good departure from this world, and thank God for the blessings of the day. The following day he would start again, following the seasons of the year, but also the cyclical seasons of the church in his village: great Lent, Pascha, Ascension, Pentecost… And again the following year. How do you become a perfectionist in failure after you are surrounded by such an atmosphere? Perhaps you must be the son of a priest, like Cioran, and play with skulls in cemeteries as a child.

A book about failure must end with death: our ultimate failure. But why would it be our failure since we share it with all living things? Perhaps death is not a failure; our approach to it makes it so. Cioran is not the hero of this chapter. He “berated the universe all his life, and sang lavish praises to self-annihilation, but he forgot to kill himself when the time came.” Yukio Mishima and Jean Amery did not. They even attempted it several times, failing at the act of ultimate failure; when they succeeded, failure was no more.

One may wonder: why would a book on failure end with suicide, this attempt to end all humiliating failures and us as humans at the same time? Why not return to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who accuses Christ of the failure to provide meaning to an entire humanity? Or to the death on the cross and his disciples’ failure to initially recognize in it the ultimate redemption of failure in the renunciation of the will? You fail because you want to avoid it. Failure does teach humility. But genuine humility is not the opposite of success; it is the embracing of one’s nature and being delighted in it.

It may be because animals do not dispose of their own being. Our capacity to commit suicide is exclusively human. Cioran reminds it, and Bradatan does not fail to point it out. The ability to fail and the ability to kill oneself: what kind of species are we that we distinguish ourselves from others by the capacity to evaluate our capacities and to end any capacity? One that remains what it is only if it embraces failure. In Praise of Failure praises our humanity, the way it is. It shows that if we run from failure, we run from what makes us humans, and we become beasts. If we embrace it, we transcend it.

Ageless Youth and Deathless Life

This is the translation in English of the old Romanian folk story “Tinerețe fără bătrânețe și viață fără de moarte” collected and popularized by Petre Ispirescu in the 19th century. The translation was done by Elena Gabor, and it was published as an appendix in Constantin Noica’s The Romanian Sentiment of Being.

Once upon a time, when poplars made pears, when bears had tails, when wolves hugged lambs like brothers, when you could put ninety-nine horseshoes on a flea’s legs and it could still jump all the way to the sky to bring us stories, when flies used to write on walls… only liars won’t believe the story I’m about to tell you.

Once upon a time, there were an emperor and an empress, both young and handsome. They wanted to have children and tried really hard. The empress visited healers and philosophers, to search into the stars and to divine whether they will have children. Finally, the emperor heard about a wise old man in a nearby village and sent for him. But the wise old man refused to visit the emperor and told the emperor to come to his village instead. And so he did. The emperor, his wife, a few soldiers and servants visited the wise old man. The sage saw them coming and went out to welcome them.

“Why are you here, emperor? What are you looking for? Your wish will bring you sadness.”

“I came to ask if you have some medicine to help us have children,” said the emperor.

“I do,” said the old man. “You will only have one child. He will be Făt-Frumos and loving, but you will not enjoy him.

The empress took the medicine, they returned to the palace, and, in a few days, she was pregnant. Everybody rejoiced at the news. Before being born however, the child started crying incessantly, and no wise man could make him stop. Seeing this, the emperor promised him all the goods in the world, but nothing could make him stop crying.

“Be quiet, my son, and I’ll give you this and that land. Be quiet, my dear, and I’ll give you a beautiful princess to marry.”

Finally, seeing that he wouldn’t stop crying, the emperor said, “Quiet, my son, and I’ll give you Ageless Youth and Deathless Life.”

Then the baby turned silent and was born. All servants and the palace celebrated for a week.

As the baby grew, he became smarter and braver every day. They sent him to schools, and he learned in a month what other children learned in a year. The emperor died and resurrected out of joy. Everyone in the kingdom was proud because they would have a wise and skillful king like King Solomon. Recently, however, the prince was pale and sad, deep in his thoughts. On his fifteenth birthday, the child went to his father who was celebrating with his nobles and servants and said, “Father, the time has come to give me what you promised me at birth.” The emperor turned gloomy and told him, “But how can I give you such a thing unheard of? I made you that promise just to get some peace.”

“If you cannot give it to me, I am compelled to roam the entire world until I find the promise under which I was born.”

All nobles and servants kneeled and begged him to stay. They told him, “Your father is old by now, and we will place you on the throne, and we will bring you the most beautiful queen under the sun as wife.”

But nothing could stop him. He remained true to his word, inflexible like a stone. When his father saw his stubbornness, he allowed him to leave and gave orders to prepare him for travel with everything he needed.

Făt-Frumos went to the royal stables that housed the best horses in the kingdom to choose a horse. But, as he pulled their tales, all horses fell down. When he was about to leave, he noticed a thin, sick, old horse in a corner. When he pulled his tail, the horse turned, dug his heels in the ground, and said, “What are your orders, master? Thank God I get to see a brave young man’s hand touching me once again.”

Făt-Frumos told the horse his plan and the horse said, “To get your wish fulfilled, you need to ask your father for his sword, spear, bow and arrows, and the clothes he wore when he was your age. And you must care for me with your own hands for six weeks, and you must give me barley after you boil it in milk.”

Făt-Frumos asked his father for all the things the horse mentioned. Then he called the emperor’s butler and asked him to open all the closets so he could choose his clothes. After searching for three days and nights, at the bottom of an old trunk, Făt-Frumos found the rusty weapons and clothes of his father’s youth. He started cleaning them and after six weeks they were as shiny as new. He also cared for the horse, as instructed. He worked really hard but succeeded in everything.

When the horse heard that the clothes and weapons were ready, he shook really hard, and all the pustules and wrinkled skin fell off. What was left was a strong handsome stallion, with four wings. When he saw the horse, Făt-Frumos announced, “We leave in three days.”

“Yes, master! I’m ready today if you so please,” said the horse.

On the third day, the whole palace was deploring his departure. Făt-Frumos, dressed in his father’s old clothes, with his father’s old sword, on his chosen horse, said goodbye to his father and mother, the nobles, the servants, the soldiers, who, with tears in their eyes, begged him to give up this journey so that he wouldn’t end up going toward the ruin of his life. He rode out of the gates like the wind. Following him were two hundred soldiers and a car full of food arranged by his father. Once he was outside the kingdom’s borders and reached the wilderness, Făt-Frumos sent the soldiers back, kept only as much food as he could carry and divided the rest among the soldiers. He faced east and rode for three days until he arrived at a large flat field where he saw many human bones. He stopped to rest, and the horse said: “You know, master, here we are on the land of Gheonoaia, who is so evil, that anyone who sets foot on her land gets killed. She used to be woman like all others, but she was cursed by her own parents because she disobeyed them, and they turned her into Gheonoaia. Right now, she is with her children, but tomorrow she will come to kill you in this forest. She is huge, but don’t get scared. Just ready your bow and arrows, as well as your sword and spear if you need them.”

They made camp and took turns as lookouts.

Early next day, they were getting ready to cross the forest. He fastened the saddle a little tighter than usual. Then he heard a terrible noise. The horse said, “Hold steady, master. It’s her, Gheonoaia.”

The trees were falling in her path, she came so fast. The horse flew above her and Făt-Frumos pierced her leg with an arrow. Right when he was aiming the second arrow, she said, “Wait, Făt-Frumos, I won’t hurt you. I promise with my blood.” She paused. “You got a great horse there, Făt-Frumos. If it weren’t for him, I’d have eaten you roasted. But you won. To this day, no mortal dared to cross my land. The few crazy ones who dared to come left their bones on the field you just saw.”

They went to her house where she cooked for him and treated him kindly. When Gheonoaia cried in pain from her injured leg, Făt-Frumos put it back together, and it healed right away. Happy, Gheonoaia celebrated for three days and invited Făt-Frumos to choose one of her daughters as his wife. They were all beautiful like fairies. He declined and told her straight what his goal was. She told him, “With this horse and your bravery, I think you’ll succeed.”

After three days, they started on the road again. They rode for a long, long distance, beyond Gheonoaia’s land. They arrived at a beautiful field with green grass on one side and burned grass on the other side.

He asked the horse, “Why is the grass burned?”

“Well, we are on the land of Scorpia, Gheonoaia’s sister. They can’t live together because of their bad tempers. They were both
cursed by their parents, that’s why they became animals, like you saw them. They want each other’s land and fight over it all the time. When Scorpia is upset, she throws fire and tar. She probably just had a fight with her sister and burned the grass under her. She’s meaner than her sister and has three heads. Let’s rest a bit, master, and be ready tomorrow morning.” Next day, as they were getting ready, they heard a terrible rattling sound.

“Stay alert, master, Scorpia is coming.”

Scorpia rushed towards them swallowing dirt and throwing flames through her huge mouth. The horse flew high above her at an angle, so Făt-Frumos pierced her with an arrow and took one of her heads. Just before cutting another head, Scorpia begged him to spare her and promised peace with her own blood. She welcomed Făt-Frumos into her home and treated him kindly, even better than Gheonoaia. He glued her head back together and healed her. Three days later the prince and his horse were on the road again.

After crossing Scorpia’s lands, they traveled for a long, long distance. They arrived at a field full of flowers, where spring ran eternal. Every flower was more beautiful than the next, carrying suave perfumes. The wind was blowing gently. Here they stopped to rest, and the horse said, “We managed to get here, master, but we have one more challenge, a big danger. If we can conquer this too, we’ll be ok. A little ahead of us is the palace where Ageless Youth and Deathless Life resides. That palace is surrounded by a thick and tall forest, housing the wildest beasts in the world. Day and night, they’re on guard. There is no way to fight them. We can’t go through the forest, so we’ll try to fly above it. They rested for two days and then got ready. Holding his breath, the horse said, “Tighten the saddle as much as you can, hold on to me tight and don’t touch my wings.” He flew up and close to the forest. “Master, now is the feeding time for the wild beasts in the forest. Let’s go!”

They flew up high and saw the palace shining in the sun. They passed the forest, came down to land on the steps of the palace, and Făt-Frumos barely touched the branch of a tree. Suddenly, the whole forest shook, and the animals started hollering in a most frightening way. Luckily the lady of the palace was outside feeding her “babies” as she called them, and all was alright. She gladly saved them because she had not seen human soul there. She tamed the beasts and sent them away. The Mistress was tall fairy, thin, delightful, and most beautiful!

Făt-Frumos was stunned. The lady of the palace looked at him with pity and said, “Welcome, Făt-Frumos! What are you doing here?”

“We are searching for Ageless Youth and Deathless Life.”

“If you’re searching for what you said, it is here!”

He entered the palace and found two more women, each as young as the other, the older sisters. He thanked the fairy for saving him, and they cooked for him in golden dishes. They let the horse roam and eat grass wherever he liked and introduced them to the beasts so they could walk in the forest in peace. The women asked Făt-Frumos to live with them because they got tired of being all alone. He didn’t need to be asked twice and he received gratefully, since this is what he wanted anyway.

Slowly, they learned each other’s ways, and he told them his story and what happened to him until he arrived there, and not long after, he married the youngest sister. When they got married, the other sisters showed him the other parts of the land and told him he can walk anywhere but to avoid one place, the Valley of Tears.

Făt-Frumos spent immemorable time there. He stayed as young as he was when he arrived. He walked through the forest without a care. He enjoyed the comfort of the palace, the love of his wife and his sisters-in-law, and the beauty of the flowers and the sweet, clean air. He was happy. He hunted often. One day, as he was chasing a rabbit, he threw an arrow, then two, but missed. Frustrated, he chased it further and finally hit it with his third arrow. Without noticing, he had passed into the Valley of Tears. With the rabbit on his shoulder, he returned home, when he was hit suddenly by a terrible longing for his father and mother. He didn’t dare tell the fair women, but they could tell he was sad and restless.

“Unfortunate one, you passed through the Valley of Tears!” they told him utterly scared.

“I did, my dears, unintentionally. I am melting because of the longing for my parents, but I cannot bring myself to leave you either. I’ve spent several days with you here, and I’ve been very happy. I will go visit my parents one last time, and then I’ll return never to leave again.”

“Do not leave us, our dear one. Your parents have not been alive for hundreds of years, and, if you go, we are afraid that you will not return. Stay here with us. We have a feeling that you’re going to perish if you leave.”

Despite the women and the horse pleading with him not to leave, his longing for his parents was inconsolable, and this was withering him completely. Finally, the horse told him, “If you won’t listen, master, know that whatever happens it’s your fault. I’ll tell you something and if you accept my covenant, I’ll take you back.”

“I accept gratefully. Tell me.”

“When we get to your father’s palace, I’ll drop you off and I’ll go back, if you decide to stay even for an hour.”

“Alright. So be it,” said Făt-Frumos.

They made their preparations, hugged the women, and said their goodbyes, and left them behind sighing and with tears in their eyes. They arrived at the land of Scorpia, where they found cities instead. The forests had changed into plains. He asked around about Scorpia and her house, but they told him that their grandparents heard such stories from their ancestors.

“How is this possible? Only just a short time ago I passed through here.” He told people everything he knew and did, but the locals laughed at him and thought he was crazy. Upset, he traveled further, and without his noticing, his beard and hair turned white. He arrived at the land of Gheonoaia, where he asked the same questions that he asked in the land of Scorpia, and he received similar answers. He was baffled. How could things have changed so much in just a few days? Disturbed, he kept on riding. His white beard was now all the way to his waist, and his legs became weak and trembled. He arrived at his father’s kingdom where he found different people and new cities and the old ones were so changed that he could no longer recognize them. Finally, he arrived at the palace of his birth. He got off the horse, and the horse kissed his hand and said, “Be well, master, I’ll now return to where we came from. If you want to come, get back in the saddle and let’s go.”

“Go in peace, I also hope to return soon.”

The horse darted out of there as fast as an arrow.

When Făt-Frumos saw the abandoned castle with wild plants and weeds all over it, he sighed and, with tears in his eyes, tried to remember the glory days of his childhood, the rooms and halls filled with light. He toured the palace two or three times, looking in every room and corner that reminded him of the past and the stable where he had found the horse. He went down to the cellar, which had its entrance occluded by the rubble.

Looking around, with his white beard all the way to his knees, he had to lift his eyelids with his fingers, and he could barely walk. He found an old trunk. He opened it and saw nothing. Lifting the lid, he heard a weak voice saying, “Finally, you’re here. Welcome! If you had been late just a tad longer, I would have died myself.”

It was his own Death, who had shriveled so much that she was bent like a hook in the small chest, who slapped him hard. He fell down and turned into ashes on the spot.

Now I’m getting on my saddle, ’cause I’m done telling this fable.

The One who waits

When you wait for someone else, it feels as if your life has been placed on a hiatus. You cannot begin whatever the two of you (or three or more if you wait for a party) have to start together, and your agency has also been taken away from you, since you cannot really begin anything else while you wait. You’re in a limbo, someone from whom time has been stolen; what is even worse, with your own accord. For none can make you wait unless you desire something in connection with that person. No one would even dare to make you wait unless that person knew that you are the “waiting kind,” someone who wouldn’t “mind” or someone who would accept to wait even if he “minds.” Have you actually noticed how “tough” people are treated better and with more respect, just because they make it clear how people must treat them? Can you imagine a mean person being made to wait? Be nice to others, show them that you are not “tough” or that you’re there for them, and they will forget that you also have numbered minutes on this earth.

Still, if there is something that is taken from you, you are the only one responsible for it. Your will brought you there, and the frustration stemming from ill-placed expectations takes you away from the One who waits for you from the beginning of times, without complaints, without frustrations, without expectations.

After all, isn’t this “stolen time” an occasion to render it back in thanksgiving to the One who waits for you to return the embrace? The 5 minutes, the half an hour, or the hours that you wait are moments when you have nothing to do, so moments when you can search for yourself and find someone who waits just like you. How can you still be frustrated when your waiting is faced with a waiting from eternity?

*

Anytime my Romanian mama mare wanted to say that something I was waiting for will never happen, she used this phrase, “Da, da, vin Americanii.” “Sure, the Americans are coming.” I was a child, and Romania was still part of the communist block. My mama mare grew up with the hope that the Americans would not leave Eastern Europe in the Soviets’ hands. It was an unfulfilled expectation. My mama mare and her generation had an appointment with the Americans, but the Americans didn’t know about it (or, rather, never agreed to it). Of course, it was naïve. The entire world was exhausted after the war, and Western powers didn’t genuinely consider to “save” Eastern Europe from the Soviets.

Some may say that this waiting was for nothing. Since the phrase is now used ironically, to mean that something would never happen, it seems to indicate a failed attempt of something waiting at the doors of being. My mama mare’s hope did not come into existence. Nevertheless, many other things came into existence because of that hope: people continued to fight against an oppressive regime, for example.

Perhaps is good to have “appointments” and wait for them to take place, even if the one with whom you have an appointment knows nothing about it. Appointments move you from the couch: they bring to action. And you may end up saying, paraphrasing Constantin Noica (and Ion Creangă), “The Americans (or whatever you are waiting for) may have already come, since they no longer came.”

Mercy and Pity

The primary difference between pity and mercy is the source of each.

In pity, it is I who have pity on another. Thus, I situate myself above him, judging him and his situation, and so taking from him human agency and even human dignity.

In mercy, the source is God. I remain on the same level with the one on whom I have mercy. I acknowledge that both of us are under the mightiness of the Creator, and I have mercy on him who is my brother because he is made of the same human flesh that I am made of.

Pity stems from a world of separation, in which I detach myself from the other, see him outside of me, and even rejoice that I am not him. The pharisee has pity: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11). Someone who has pity doesn’t see persons, but categories to which people belong.

Mercy stems from perceiving the other’s wounds as manifestations of my sins and thus from being ready to be with him in his pain and sorrow. Someone who has mercy sees the person suffering beneath wounds.

Have mercy on me in my pity.

Suffocation. A poem by Demostene Andronescu

Here’s a poem by Demostene Andronescu, who was a political prisoner in communist Romania for 12 years.

There’s so much life in me, in whirl I dwell,
As if I am a tower where a bell
Has rung for an eternity, denied,
And all its sounds have multiplied inside.
Having no place from where to gush out, rather
They brawl together and they kill each other,
And in the tower overlap, up to the beam.
Becoming mad they scream, they scream, they scream.

An inner hurricane I am, a storm,
The bell in me always resounds, same form,
It rings dementedly, as in the tower,
A crazy ringer found his hanging hour.

I’d cry, I’d cry, but I cannot, as if I never knew…
I’d swear, but how? And why? And who?
I’d overflow so to escape and to be emptied.
But how? In what? How can it be attempted?
For I am locked, hermetically, abrupt,
And I can’t trickle, nor can I erupt.

For those who know Romanian, here’s the original:

Sufocare

E-atata viata-n mine, atata clocot
De parca sunt un turn in care-un clopot
De-o vesnicie-ntreaga-ntruna bate
Si sunetele lui multiplicate,
Ne-avand pe unde sa tasneasca-afara,
Se-ncaiera launtric, se omoara,
Se-ngramadesc, se suprapun in turla
Si-nnebunite urla, urla, urla.

Sunt uragan launtric, sunt furtuna
Si clopotul din mine-ntruna suna,
Suna dement de parca sus in turn
S-a spanzurat un clopotar nebun.

As plange, as plange, dar nu pot, nu-mi vine…
As sudui, dar cum? De ce? Pe cine?
M-as revarsa sa scap, sa ma golesc,
Dar cum? In ce? Pe unde sa tasnesc?
Ca-s ferecat, inchis ermetic si
Nu pot nici ma prelinge, nici tasni.

The Two Old Men

There is a short story of Leo Tolstoy that is predictable and moralist at the same time: The Two Old Men. Two old friends decide to go to Jerusalem. From the first lines of the story, you know that one behaves righteously, while the other is in need of a lesson. The story reads like a Sunday school lesson and ends in a moral statement: “And now he understood that God has commanded each of us to keep our vows in this world, so long as we live, by loving others and doing them good.” If it were not written by Tolstoy, I gather that the story would have been forgotten in the ocean of poor writing.

Nevertheless, there’s one passage in it that redeems it; perhaps it is the way geniuses work: they plant jewels even behind poorly assembled words.

The story goes this way (just a short account). Elisei and Efim decide to go together to Jerusalem in pilgrimage. They leave together, but they get separated for a moment, when Elisei stops in a poor village to get some water. The people in the house are sick and close to their death, which makes Elisei remain with them to help them. He responds openly and genuinely to all the needs he perceives they have, but doing so makes him spend much of his money, so he is no longer able to continue his journey. After the family seems to get better, Elisei returns home. Efim, after waiting for Elisei for some time, continues his journey and finally arrives in Jerusalem. His pilgrimage, though, seems to be to no benefit. Another pilgrim tells him that his purse was lost, and this produces in Efim “sinful thoughts.” He either judges that the pilgrim lied, so that he could benefit from the goodness of the others, or he is afraid that someone may steal his own purse. Three times, Efim sees Elisei in Jerusalem, at Christ’s tomb, always in front and always in a divine light. He’s never able to reach him, although he tries to do so. Finally, Efim returns home where his family seems to be in disarray and where he finally understands that “going to Jerusalem” is actually “loving others and doing them good.”

In the midst of all of these predictable events, one little moment of good literature appears. Efim is on his way back home, and he happens upon the house where Elisei had stayed and where all people seem to have improved: the grandmother, the two parents, and the two children. Nothing surprising for the story so far, perhaps even too predictable, like in a bad Hollywood movie: Efim had to arrive at that house, so that the readers know the outcome of Elisei’s good deeds. But then Tolstoy gives details of the conversation. The grandma remembers how the stranger, “as soon as he saw us, took off his bag and put it down right here and untied it.”

Notice the detail: he put the bag down right here.

The little girl joins in and says, “No, grandma, first he put his bag down on the floor in the middle of the hut, but then he put it up on the bench.”

Two different accounts of a most extraordinary event, one so extraordinary that you would rather consider it a phantasy. For who would think that a stranger who is on a mission, to visit Jerusalem, would stop and spend his travel money to help some dying people? In a court of law, jurors would be entitled to say that witnesses are not trustworthy as long as they cannot agree to small details.

And Tolstoy continues: “And the people began arguing and remembering everything he had said and done; and where he had sat, and where he had slept, and what he had done, and what he had said to them.”

They remembered all of this arguing, not being able to reach an agreement about how things really took place. But this is precisely the beauty of it: the truth of the events doesn’t consist in the event itself, but in the Truth that was poured into their lives. Through love, they were given life, and so they were able to argue about what really happened. And even if they quarrel about it, they all quarrel from within it. If you look at the family from the outside, you may judge them, thinking that none of them could be truly sane, since they cannot even agree about really important things for them. For them, however, it is good to remember and talk about it, because in this remembrance they connect with a sacred moment of their lives.

Perhaps The Two Old Men is a moralist story about always loving your brethren. I think, however, that the story is also about something else: Truth and Love. This Truth can never be encapsulated in statements, but it can always be perceived in the renewed lives of the beloved.

In his Pray for Brother Alexander, Constantin Noica wrote about what he calls the spirit of exactness:

“In fact, the spirit of exactness is active everywhere, not only in the exact sciences. History, for example, can no longer be done without exactness. Man cannot bear to not know exactly what and how it happened. A French historian from last century, Ernest Renan, wanted to see exactly were and how Jesus Christ lived. He went to the holy places and proceeded scientifically to the reconstitution of the Event.
You know what happened to him? He found the traces of Jesus from Nazareth, but he no longer found the traces of Jesus Christ.”

Tolstoy’s story says something about the spirit opposed to exactness. But you cannot be exact about this spirit. Tolstoy’s account of it is masterfully accomplished in just a few lines, where he shows a family arguing about the exact story of an event that saved them from certain death. Their arguing, however, takes place in the light, during moments when they themselves take care of strangers and when they bask in the life that they had received through Love.

Medication against despondency

I read Ruta Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray with a group of Romanian high school and college students, and so what I say about it is influenced by my being together with them. Every tear that this book produced in me had within it a thought about them, children who, even unbeknownst to them, carry within their bodies the traumas that their previous generations experienced during years of communist regime.

Sepetys witnessed transgenerational trauma when she visited Lithuania, to see the part of her family that remained back in Europe. Her grandfather had left the country when the Soviets invaded it in 1940, following the secret pact between Hitler and Stalin, also known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact or the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. In his The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 (Basic Books, 2014), Roger Moorhouse reminds that the secret understanding between these two tyrants is not part of our collective memory, unless we come from Eastern Europe. We forget, as he says, that these “two regimes, whose later confrontation would be the defining clash of World War II in Europe, stood side by side for twenty-two months, almost a third of the conflict’s entire span” (xxiv). The pact divided Eastern and Central Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Baltic states were given to the Soviets. Ruta’s grandfather had been in the Lithuanian army, and he knew what fate was waiting for him if the Russians caught him, so he fled, together with his family. An American born in Michigan, Sepetys went back to encounter her roots. She asked for photos with her grandparents or with her father. “And suddenly the room became very quiet,” she remembers in her promotion video for the book.

Silence. One always finds it in the background of stories with deportations or with political imprisonment. Part of it is due to pain: survivors avoid bringing upon themselves unbearable suffering. Part of it is also due to the conditioning through which people have gone: it was dangerous to mention those who had left, so you had to erase their memories, as if they had never existed. You don’t talk about those whom the regime labeled “enemies of the state” or “fascists,” the usual accusation that the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, placed on its enemies, having no interest in truth, but only in a labeling that equated condemnation to deportation or death. Among these enemies, there were children barely born, who had no other guilt than coming to life in the “wrong” family.

The silence that Ruta Sepetys experienced during her trip in Lithuania had to do with the departure of her family. Her relatives had to burn all pictures and forget their names, so they could no longer be associated with them and risk prisons or deportations. They had no pictures to share. Between Shades of Gray is thus also a trip on the memory lane to recover the stories of those who Stalin wanted to erase. The silence of her relatives gave birth to the idea of the book.

The book feels real. Even if all of the characters are fictional, except one who appears at the end of the story, they feel very much alive. Lina, the narrator of the story, a teenager who is taken together with her younger brother and her mother to Siberia, will remain in the hearts of all who will have the courage to experience her pain. Perhaps more than anyone else, Elena, Lina’s mother, will stay with you. She’s the one whose light penetrates through the various shades of gray that take hold of people’s souls in Siberia, regardless of whether they are deportees or NKVD soldiers. She is always present in the moment, always embracing others, and always trying to find the eternal person that is hidden beneath the darkness that Siberia builds around people’s souls. What is remarkable in Sepetys’ writing is that she creates characters that are so authentic that you expect to find them if you decided to go to Siberia to look for them. They are as full of life as any person you encounter, and their right to live is shouted from their chests as loudly as Stalin’s attempt to annihilate his real or imaginary enemies from the face of the earth.

Nevertheless, one wonders: how is it possible to live when death surrounds you? Where do you find human dignity when you are called a “fascist pig”?

Perhaps paradoxically, Sepetys’ story finds how meaning is often discovered precisely when you are on the brink of the abyss. First, the book gives birth to anger, similar to the anger you have when you witness injustices that cannot be solved. What justice can we expect for a few days old child who dies in a cattle train to Siberia? Or what kind of justice can his mother have, after she is shot in the head, because a grieving mother is a nuisance even in Siberia? If this question reminds you of Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion, who cannot accept a world without justice, you are correct: the story has awakened the Ivan side of my personality. But I think it can awaken such feelings in anyone of us. We know that there is always this aspect of human life that we cannot change: death. In a world of uncertainty, one thing is certain, that there will be a time when we will no longer be here. Before that time, there are many aspects of human life that we feel we can change and that we have the duty to do so; one such aspect is as universal as death: suffering. We all have experienced suffering and have desired in one moment or another to do something about it, to act in way that would eradicate or, at least, diminish it.

Perhaps we can call this desire to eliminate suffering a desire to beautify the world. Exhausted by the ugliness that surrounds us, by innumerable instances of violence, treason, or boorishness, we want to change our reality and the people belonging to it in the name of the good. This is, however, the feature of all self-proclaimed saviors, be them family members or politicians: they perceive the world must be in a certain way, according to their own criteria of beauty, and they don’t understand your “inability” to live in it. The communists wanted to beautify the world according to their principles, too. If you didn’t fit, you were an enemy of the people, and they sent you to Siberia.

But Sepetys does not write a moralist story, in which there are good and bad people and desires to rid the world of evil. Indeed, faced with this question, whether life has a meaning in the context of so much despair and lack of justice, she brings forward a person, Elena, who is able to remain human and embrace others regardless of her external circumstances and without wanting to change them. She loves people. She doesn’t proclaim herself as “humanitarian,” as communists do.

At the end of her memories from Siberia, Margareta Cemârtan-Spânu, who was deported when she was a child, says, “How many lives did the ‘humanitarian’ Bolshevism destroy! […] You, an innocent man, whether old or a child, had to suffer like this, for twenty years in Siberia? For what? […] If you did not do anything, why punish you? So many young people taken to mines in Siberia! They never returned from there! For what ideal?…” (in Monk Moise’s Do Not Avenge Us: Testimonies about the Suffering of the Romanians Deported from Bessarabia to Siberia Reflection Publishing, 2016, p. 124).

No idea is worth the life of a single human. Regardless of how beautiful it may sound on paper, if it requires the blood on an innocent person, we are obligated by our own humanity to step aside from it. Ruta Sepetys’ book has this virtue, that it does not fall into moralism. Instead, brings forward people, deportees and NKVD soldiers. Are we to judge them?

“But Mother, he’s a monster,” Lina said to Elena, her mother, referring to an NKVD soldier with whom Elena was speaking. She did judge him. But Elena answered: “We don’t know what he is.” It is so simple to fall in judgments when reading such books. It is easy to hate the communists, the NKVD soldiers and officers, and everyone who somehow participated in this terrible crime. But let us remember the voice of this Lady, Elena: “We don’t know. Do you hear me? We don’t know what he is. He’s a boy. He’s just a boy.”

Sepetys’ book is a witness against despair and against the loss of meaning, even if it describes events of the 20^th century that can lead one to cynicism and despondency. For what can humans do when nothing around them makes sense? What is that to which they can cling, so that they do not fall into the abyss of nothingness? One thing, perhaps: an embrace.