Thursday, January 05, 2006
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In Cormac McCarthy’s ALL THE PRETTY HORSES I read the following: “Those who have suffered great pain of injury or loss are joined to one another with bonds of a special authority.”
If only! I thought.
Further down: “What is constant in history is greed and foolishness…and this is a thing that even God seems powerless to change.”
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Speaking of foolishness, once in a while a reader takes it upon himself to inform me that I am not an Armenian writer because I write in English, as if my sole aim in life were to be mentioned or discussed in a future text on Armenian literature.
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If I write about Armenian problems, if I say what must be said, or if I say what matters, even if I take a fraction of a step in the right direction, does it matter if I am a member of this or that tribe?
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I write in English because had I chosen to write in Armenian I would have been ignored as well as starved. Because I write in English I was awarded a series of literary prizes and grants that allowed me to devote my full time to writing and to publish thirty books half of which are translations from the Armenian.
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What happened to Zarian who chose to write in Armenian? He was ignored in the Diaspora, silenced in the Homeland, and ended his days thinking, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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What happened to Baruir Massikian who also wrote in Armenian? How many Armenians read him today because he was an Armenian writer?
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On the subject of our problems, of which we have more than our share: one that I have discussed on several occasions is the academic or self-appointed pundit who operates on the assumption that he can cover his foolishness beneath a cloak of patriotism on the grounds that his readers are even more ignorant than he is.
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Friday, January 06, 2006
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ON A COMMON ABERRATION
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Arrogance is based on two fallacies: (one) that one knows better, and (two) that others know less. The first is based on self-assessment (a notoriously unreliable index), and the second on ignorance (no one is in a position to know with any degree of certainty what others know).
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Sooner or later arrogance is punished not because the gods feel challenged (as the Greeks believed) but because men hate to be short-changed by a self-satisfied bastard.
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The antidote to arrogance is the formula “from dust to dust.” We are all born with the certainty that we are the center of the universe, but gradually life drives home the realization that we are no better than inanimate particles at the whim of the winds.
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Saturday, January 07, 2006
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“Poverty breeds crime,” reads a headline in our paper today, and I think of Ken Lay, Koslowsky, Abramoff, and Co. I also think of Talaat, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin Dada, and Genghis Khan…
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Once upon a time I knew an Armenian so rude in argument and so eager to go down into the gutter that very few wanted to follow him there, so that after a while he thought of himself as a 20th-century reincarnation of the famous medieval Armenian philosopher David Anhaght (“Invincible”) so called because he is said to have been invincible in argument.
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To say that in one or two generations conditions will improve in Armenia is not just nonsense but Ottomanized and Sovietized rubbish, because it means only one thing: we will adopt a passive stance because doing so comes naturally to us after 600 years in the Ottoman Empire and 70 years in the Soviet Union.
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I am wide open to all arguments except ones that I would have voiced myself as a dupe.
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It has been said that forgiveness can be a spiritual victory. I am not sure about that. Forgiving commissars and fascists can also mean legitimizing criminal conduct.
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