Thursday, December 08, 2005
**************************************
In his latest book, THE DRAGONS OF EXPECTATION (London: Duckworth, 256 pages, 2005) Robert Conquest writes about a certain type of idealists or members of “an intellectually semi-educated class,” who become so engrossed in present evils which they can see that “their brains entirely fail to register the political evils – so much less easy to discern – of panaceas being peddled to replace them.” Thus it was that our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire, while clearly seeing the evil of oppression, chose not to recognize the probability of genocide.
*
It took courage to challenge the might of the Empire; it will take greater courage to admit it was a blunder.
*
Serial killers and crime lords are less dangerous to society than well-meaning and respectable political leaders who do not question their fundamental decency, logic, and infallibility.
*
Nobody is as smart as he thinks he is. I would have been a happier man had I assumed to be an idiot. Likewise, the world will be a better place if leaders assume to be fools.
#
Friday, December 09, 2005
**********************************
WRITERS
****************
There are writers that I love to read, and writers, like Dostoevsky and Simenon, that become obsessions.
*
SIMENON
**************
There are two things that fascinate me about Simenon: his profoundly human and universally accessible fictional characters, and the fact that he could write a book in a week. No one knows how many books he has written – some say 500, others 650 – because he wrote under several pseudonyms. His books may be divided into three distinct categories: detective stories (also known as “maigrets”), straight novels (also known as “simenons”), and autobiographical narratives and diaries, not all of which are available in English.
*
DOSTOEVSKY
************************
What I find fascinating about Dostoevsky’s fiction is the clash of contradictory characters and the ensuing fireworks. I began reading him as a teenager and by the time I was twenty I had read all his major works in Italian and Greek translations. Though I have tried to reread him in English I have never gone beyond page 3. I prefer to read studies of his life and work, of which there is a steady stream. Generally speaking, I find biographies of the major Russians (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev) more absorbing than their fiction.
*
MANN AND TOYNBEE
*********************************
Two other writers who became obsessions that lasted several years are Thomas Mann and Arnold J. Toynbee. What I value about them both is their thoroughly anti-establishment stance – though they were themselves products of the establishment. But this is true of all authentic thinkers, from Plato to Bertrand Russell.
*
ZARIAN
*****************
Among Armenians, the writer that has fascinated me the most is Gostan Zarian, but unlike the great Russians, so far he has had no biographer, which is a pity since his life on three continents and encounters with many major figures in world literature fully deserves several voluminous studies.
#
Saturday, December 10, 2005
***********************************
A VICIOUS CIRCLE
****************************
Q: Who suffers when politicians make a mistake?
A: The people.
Q: How do politicians react when told they made a mistake?
A: They silence critics, they brainwash the young, and they surround themselves with hirelings, yes-men, and brown-nosers.
Q: What happens when they do that?
A: The truth is buried, charlatanism is legitimized, and the press is prostituted.
Q: Who suffers when that happens?
A: The people.
#