At Home In The World
Why are some places, though we are strangers to them, made for happy geniuses?
I enjoyed reading The Spectator US’s Books of the Year round-up. This entry by Emily Esfahani Smith was perfect:
Days before the pandemic started, my husband and I finished listening to Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, a delightful novel about a Russian aristocrat, Count Alexander Rostov, who in 1922 is sentenced to house arrest by a Bolshevik tribunal in the Metropol, a grand hotel facing the Kremlin. The Count, an educated and convivial man — and a great connoisseur of wine and food — lives in an attic room in the hotel as the tumultuous decades of the 20th century unfold outside his window. Bound within the four walls of the hotel, his routine is the same day to day — yet his life is far from drab. In that enclosed space, he forms lasting friendships with the hotel’s regulars and staff — a French chef, a seamstress, a Red Army colonel and an American spy. And he finds meaning and purpose in acts of kindness and service to others, eventually becoming a waiter at the hotel’s restaurant. These things bolster his spirits, giving each day color. The days are all the same — but they’re different, too.
I thought about this novel a lot during the early months of the quarantine — and took inspiration from the Count’s example as I managed my own transitions to this new life we are all leading. Though our outer lives may be smaller and more limited than they once were, our inner lives are rich places of emotional discovery, a lesson that the Count learns as he ages and matures. And there is still meaning to be found in the routines that form the architecture of our lives, and purpose to be experienced in the smallest acts of kindness we can still perform for others. As someone tells the Count when he is a child, ‘adversity presents itself in many forms, and if a man does not master his circumstances, then he is bound to be mastered by them.’
Of course! It’s the perfect Covid book. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. It’s a book about how we can make an adventure of confinement. I loved A Gentleman In Moscow so much when I read it a couple of years ago that I decided when I booked a trip to Russia to research my current book, that I had to stay in the Hotel Metropol.
I hesitate to tell you that it disappointed me, because I don’t want you to think that the Metropol is disappointing. It’s not! But I loved that novel so much that I set in my imagination an impossible standard for the hotel. It is a big place, but not as grand in its lobby as I thought it would be. The Chaliapin Bar is elegant, but somehow chillier than I expected from the novel. (Turns out the bar itself no longer exists where it did in the era of the novel; it has been moved elsewhere off the lobby.) My room was lovely, but I was a bit let down by the drabness of the lighting in some of the public areas of the hotel — and then mad at myself for holding the place to an impossible standard. I expected it to be like entering into Rivendell, or something. In fact, it’s just a beautiful hotel.
(But not to everyone. In the seating area near the Chaliapin Bar, I interviewed Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian and dissident who had been tortured in prison for his faith, during the late Soviet period. His face is still partially paralyzed from the beatings he took. After he departed, my interpreter told me Ogorodnikov was nervous about meeting me there, because during the Soviet period, the Metropol was a KGB den.)
The one part of my Metropol experience that was consonant with the book were the breakfasts in the grand dining room, where Count Rostov met Nina by the fountain. Here is a photographic tour of the Gentleman In Moscow sites in the contemporary Metropol. That grand dining room is really something. Breakfast is a truly spectacular buffet spread. Every morning I had a plate full of blini with sour cream and jam. That experience alone made it worth the stay, though again, it’s a marvelous hotel. I must confess too that I have a bad habit of reading about a place, and building it up in my mind as Shangri-La. The real world rarely is.
The one time when I didn’t do that in advance was three years ago, when I spent a couple of days in Venice with my son Matt. Because everybody talks about how glorious Venice is, I had deliberately not read about it, nor had I ever wanted to go. It seemed like Disneyworld for cosmopolitans. But I had a conference in Italy in the summer of 2017, and had to fly into and out of Venice. I took Matt with me, because he wanted to see Munich after my event. Before catching our flight back to America, we decided we ought to at least spend a couple of days in Venice itself, since we were so close.
Well, it was heaven on earth, is what it was. As Jerusalem is to religious travelers, so is Venice to aesthetes. Everywhere you look there is beauty, and my God, is it ever something. There aren’t too many places in the world where one feels awe, but Venice will do it to you. I wonder, though, how my experience of Venice was enhanced by arriving without expectations. I think it is possible that had I done what I usually do about the places I visit, and read a lot about them first, I might have taken Venice as I took the Hotel Metropol: as a wonderful place, but not the paradise of which I had dreamed.
I can’t find the exact quote, but Truman Capote wrote once about the disappointment of sex. His line was something like, “We are rarely with the one we are with.” He meant that even when one is in the clutch of intimacy with a partner, one’s mind wanders. I suspect that says more about Truman Capote than it does about the phenomenon of sexual intimacy. Nevertheless, I think travel can be like that. In the Hotel Metropol, I was not with the one I was with, if you follow me. The real world is usually a disappointment. No kidding, I believe this to be a character flaw.
But this is how I am: my passion for travel is driven mostly, I think, by a search for home: that is, for a place where I feel utterly and completely a part of the place that I forget myself, my anxieties, and my failures, because I am part of this place. It annihilates you and raises you up simultaneously. I can’t really explain this, not even to myself. I have felt it in Jerusalem. I have felt it in Venice. I have felt it in Chartres. The only place on this earth I have felt it in a sustained way — I mean, day after day — is on the Left Bank of Paris, in the Fifth and Sixth Arrondissements, and especially in the Luxembourg Gardens. If I make it to heaven when I die, and God sees fit to reward me, he can make me a ghost wandering the streets of Saint-Germain.
Here’s the thing: I barely speak French, and even if I lived in Paris, I could only ever be an outsider. Why do I feel so at home in the world in those streets of Paris (and only those streets of the Fifth and the Sixth)? There’s this William Carlos Williams poem, Danse Russe, which goes like this:
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
One day in late October, 2012, I was walking across the Luxembourg Gardens, all alone, in my leather jacket, with a soft scarf knotted around my neck and a novel in my pocket, the sky gray and the autumnal air brisk, and it occurred to me that this was one of the happiest moments of my life. It could have lasted forever. I don’t suppose I could have been lonelier than alone, in a foreign city, where I can barely speak the language, but there I was, fully at home in the world, traversing the garden with the rightness of a thurifer processing up the nave, sanctifying the holy place with sweet incense.
Why there? Why that? I don’t know. It just was. Is. One way I understand my life is a pilgrimage in search of places where I feel that harmony.
Here’s a tragic thing, something I didn’t realize until the middle of the journey of my life: my home — the place where I was born and raised — isn’t my home. It’s something I learned when I was 16, and left for the first time, but it’s a lesson I have spent most of my life resisting.
I want to say something else about the Hotel Metropol. I wrote this in a blog post a couple of years ago, when I was reading A Gentleman In Moscow:
In real life, the Bolsheviks did their best to keep the Hotel Metropol a showplace of luxury, because they wanted to have a place to impress travelers from the West, and make them think that communism was working out. Prior to the Revolution, the Hotel had a spectacular wine cellar. In the novel, Count Rostov enjoys bottles from the cellar in his nightly dinners at the hotel’s Boyarsky restaurant.
At some point, the Count finds that an ignorant waiter from the hotel’s lesser restaurant has been moved to the Boyarsky. The reader has met this waiter before, and knows him as an example of someone incompetent who has been given a position because he is politically connected, and because Bolshevism generally regards expertise as an offense against equality. Earlier in the story, the Count was dining at the lesser restaurant, and spied a young couple out on their first date. The young man was desperately trying to impress his icy female companion, though he didn’t have much money. The bad waiter knew nothing about wine, and was trying to steer the young man towards buying a bottle he couldn’t afford, and that would have overpowered the entree the two had ordered. The Count, sitting at a nearby table, intervened to advise a different wine — one that the young man could afford, and that was suited to the meal.
The waiter regarded the Count’s intervention as an insult from an aristocrat. He gets his revenge later, when he’s moved up to join the staff at the Boyarsky. The waiter files a complaint with a Bolshevik official, alleging that the wine cellar of the Metropol — over 100,000 bottles — was counterrevolutionary. It was a monument to the aristocratic spirit, he charged. The Bolsheviks declared that henceforth, the hotel will sell all wine at a single price, and will designate them only as red or white. That’s it.
Andrey, the maitre’d of the Boyarsky, had to send a crew down to remove the labels from every single bottle of wine in the cellar. Now, there was no way to tell what was in any bottle, other than that it is either red or white. The wines of the Metropol had been turned into a single mass, undifferentiated except by their color.
Here’s what happens next:
The Count looked at Andrey in amazement. But then a memory presented itself — a memory of a Christmas past when the Count had leaned from his chari to correct a certain waiter’s recommendation of a Rioja to accompany a Latvian stew. How smugly the Count had observed at the time that there was no substitute for experience.
Well, though the Count, here is your substitute.
With Andrey a few paces behind him, the Count began walking the cellar’s center aisle, much as a commander and his lieutenant might walk through a field hospital in the aftermath of battle. Near the end of the aisle, the Count turned down one of the rows. With a quick accounting of columns and shelves, the Count determined that in this row alone, there were over a thousand bottles — a thousand bottles virtually identical in shape and weight.
Picking up one at random, he reflected how perfectly the curve of the glass fit in the palm of the hand, how perfectly its volume weighed upon the arm. But inside? Inside this dark green glass was what exactly? A Chardonnay to complement a Camembert? A Sauvignon Blanc to go with some chèvre?
Whichever win was within, it was decidedly not identical to its neighbors. On the contrary, the contents of the bottle in his hand was the product of a history as unique and complex as that of a nation, or a man. In its color, aroma, and taste, it would certainly express the idiosyncratic geology and prevailing climate of its home terrain. But in addition, it would express all the natural phenomena of its vintage. In a sip, it would evoke the timing of that winter’s thaw, the extent of that summer’s rain, the prevailing winds, and the frequency of clouds.
Yes, a bottle of wine was the ultimate distillation of time and place; a poetic expression of individuality itself. Yet here it was, cast back into the sea of anonymity, that real of averages and unknowns.
The Count reflects on how he, like most people, had unconsciously assumed that his way of life would take generations to fade. That change would be gradual. But the Revolution showed that this was not so. That men who held power, and who were absolutely sure of themselves, could destroy it all in a stroke. More:
[T]he Bolsheviks, who were so intent upon recasting the future from a mold of their own making, would not rest until every last vestige of his Russia had been uprooted, shattered, or erased.
This captures why I loathe and despise our own cultural revolutionaries, who find this world so intolerably disappointing that they want to destroy every last vestige of it, and its past, to replace it with something that they believe will make them at last feel at home in the world. Their problem is not really with this world; the problem is within themselves. And you know, I could probably say the same thing about myself. If this world is not enough, maybe the truth is that I am insufficiently grateful. I can tell you that this spring, when I watched the great Tarkovsky film Nostalghia, I saw myself in the tormented Russian writer: so preoccupied with the world of his imagination that he was blind to the beauty all around him.
You have all been so kind, sending in thoughts about my old dog Roscoe, who is winding down his long life. He’s still here! My daughter Nora took this photo of him today. I tried to lift him off his dog bed tonight to let him rest on the couch while I wrote this newsletter, but he nipped at me. This means he’s in pain. He’s in pain, even though he has had his nightly pain relief medicine.
I hate this so much.
A friend in New Orleans who reads this newsletter sent me this John Updike poem, which he read as he mourned his old dog. It’s titled “Another Dog’s Death”:
For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her gravein preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,
such expeditions were rare, and the dog,
spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.
We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the
field.
The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;
I carved her a safe place while she protected me.I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;
she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up
earth.
Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,
but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he
injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;
we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.
In a wheelbarrow up to the hole, her warm fur shone.
A reader in Texas writes:
Your post about Roscoe took me back 16 years to the death of my dearly-departed gray cat, Dumpling. He was born to a feral mom in 1989, about the time of the birth of our second daughter. We gave him his name because as a kitten, he looked like a gray dumpling as he walked through the grass in the yard since his legs were hidden by the grass.
Dumpling and I bonded when he became trapped some way in the crawl space under the house next door while our neighbor was on a trip. The vent in the foundation had holes large enough to allow me to fit through a small plastic cup in which I could squirt water and through which I could give him kibbles to keep him alive for the week until our neighbor returned. After that, he would always run to me when he saw me outside. When he was almost a year old, we moved and took him with us to the new house.
As he grew up, it was clear that he was my cat, and I was his person. When I was home, he would wander through the house crying until he found me. If I were occupied with something else, he would jump up beside me and put his paw on my shoulder until I paid attention to him. He was easygoing and loved by all. Our daughters would tell sitters to be nice to Dumpling because “… that’s Dad’s son”.
In November, 2004, he began to decline. The vet examined him and told me that his kidneys were failing and that nothing could be done. I had hoped he would make it to Christmas, but that was not to be. On December 19, 2004, Dumpling passed away peacefully in my arms, and I would not have had it any other way. I wept (as I am doing now) and buried him in our backyard.
We’ve had other cats since then, but there will never be another Dumpling, just like there will never be another Roscoe. But this is something else that God gives us the grace to endure. The memories are sweet, and when I think of him now, it is not with sadness, but with appreciation and gratitude for having had that relationship for almost 16 years. May God bless you and your family as you go through this time.
Another reader:
Your posts about Roscoe are bringing back the still-fresh pain of losing our beloved golden retriever, Max, 18 months ago. The short version of his joining us is he was born and raised in the Korean countryside, and when his owner got divorced from her American serviceman husband and needed to take a job in Seoul...she needed to find a loving home for him. And somehow by God's grace that was us - and she flew with that 3 year old golden from Korea ALL the way to our home in northern Virginia.
She wept when she said goodbye to him, and so did he. Somehow he knew he'd never see her again, and for the first two years he was with us he would whine and grow anxious anytime he saw a suitcase come out. Max was my husband's dog from Day One, even though I was the one who had loved dogs my whole life and he was just getting on board with the idea.
That's not to say Max didn't love every member of our family whole-heartedly; he was the gentle soul to whom we brought home our first child, sniffing her carefully, peering over the edge of the cradle as she slept, and even moving away when we brought her close because he sensed this new family member was too delicate to be left alone with his four paws. Our daughter's first word was Daggy - a combination of Daddy and Doggy, her two favorite people in the world.
Our kids initially approached any dog we saw on walks the same way they did our sweet Max - ready for a full embrace, eager to poke eyes, tug ears, or pull a tail - without concern of any negative response because all they knew were gentle licks and long-suffering sighs. We had to teach them caution and respect, while recognizing the unique blessing of a dog's patience.
One Sunday morning in May 2019 our dear 12 year old boy slipped as he headed downstairs from the bedroom and couldn't get his back legs under him. We took him to the emergency vet who couldn't find anything wrong in an X-ray, so we brought him home. Over the next three days he showed little interest in food and slept all the time. We couldn't find him one evening and finally located him in our guest room tucked behind the bed. On Thursday I brought him back to the vet hospital on his bed as he was too weak to move and watched helplessly as they carted him off in an animal gurney. The final option was a CAT scan, and early in the afternoon we got the call as the vet looked at Max's brain and saw the tumor pressing against it. It was inoperable, and she was recommending we come as quickly as possible to say our goodbyes. They'd keep him sedated, but he'd be alive and we could say our thanks and hug him while he still breathed. And then they gave him the medicine that stopped his heart and we knew he'd slipped peacefully from this side of earth to an eternal heaven of squirrel chasing and no more thunderstorms.
I saw firsthand in all this how everyone processes grief differently. My husband had grieved and said his goodbyes in the week before Max passed, having spent hours those evenings cuddled on the couch watching movies. I found myself weeping on random nights when I felt only a cold spot where he had often curled in a ball at my feet, or feeling my heart sink when we'd return home to realize there would be no wiggling body whining with delight as he greeted us by racing around the house to find a toy to hold. My toddler grieved in his own way too: when he got tired or scared he cried out to ask when Max was coming back and demanded to know where we had taken him. It opened up opportunities to talk about death and suffering in a natural way with our kids. Our daughter was unfamiliar with the word suffering when I first said it and then as I began to describe it as pain, recognition flashed across her face and she said "Like Jesus suffered on the cross."
Losing Max in 2019 was a foretaste of 2020: holding grief and hope simultaneously. Grief at the reminder that death and separation are evidence of sin's brokenness. And hope because this is not the end, and I believe that Max is in heaven, telling my dad all about his grandkids and family and waiting in joyous anticipation for the day we will all be restored.
It was in the grief of losing Max that I ever felt an urge to write poetry. I'm a prose writer (and a verbose one!) so there's no shortage of words in my brain or fingers. I scribbled some lines down but ultimately discarded them - turns out I'm not a poet, and I already knew no paragraphs could express the exquisite combination of painful loss and joyful remembrance.
I did, however, re-stumble across a poem my husband composed several years earlier.
The Ideal Friend
Imago Dei, man’s unique gift,
Sets him high above his fellow
Creatures and is also his curse.
For it sunders him in essence
From the wonders of creation;
Of all God’s works, the only one
Lonely enough to fall.
But when man and man’s best friend are
United in disposition,
He reaches back across the void
To faintly glimpse through Eden’s mists
His intended calling.
Like all bonded souls, my dog Max
And I communicate best when
We’re silent. He rests his tawny
Head upon my knee, looks at me
With deep, brown eyes in wonder,
And wags his golden tail and smiles.
And I know that he knows.Praying for God's mercy and kindness on you and Roscoe as you walk these last days, weeks, or months together.
Another reader:
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have a dog at home. I’m 73 now and so far have lived a seven dog life. I know very well what you’re feeling and facing and I hope that Roscoe has so captured you that you will, when the grief subsides, invite another of his family into yours.
There’s one thing about dogs that sticks with me, and actually becomes more significant the older I get. Specifically that even in their final days dogs do what dogs do: continue to sniff and smell, remain alert for intruders, chase squirrels (as best they can) and present their heads and bellies for scratching. They aren’t paralyzed with fear and anxiety, and don’t wallow in self absorbed pity. As much as pain allows they remain in their God given nature and do what God made them to do.
I pray that when my last days are upon me I am able to do the same as Roscoe and all his kin.
Another reader:
I read your post yesterday about Roscoe and then the comments today with tears in my eyes. After my sister got married in August a year ago, they no longer wanted to keep her dog, Olive, so I took her in. Olive was a sweet, sweet dog, though she, like many dogs, had a serious case of dietary indiscretion and, in the end, that’s probably what did her in, though she was probably around 13 years old (she was a rescue) and was slowing down considerably already.
She got very sick at the beginning of the pandemic and right before lockdown here in Philly I had to put her down. It was awful. I grew up with dogs, but my dad always took care of that part of things. I was hysterical crying, not a usual thing for me. Even now, month later, I still get choked up thinking about her. I realized after putting Olive down that one of the reasons I hadn’t gotten a dog in years was because it is so painful to lose them.
Anyway, prayers for sweet Roscoe.
Here’s a poem I wrote about Olive...
The End of Your Days
For Olive d. 3/20/2020
The news from the world is grave and you,
at the end of your days, are slow to rise,
with an appetite only for what does you harm.
There’s no running in the woods, no wagging
tail, just the slow trek to the corner and back,
a long nap, your desolate eyes upon me.
A stream of western sunlight while you sleep
catches the colors of your coat, the ebony back,
the soft cream belly, the perfect auburn of your ears.
Despite the turn to spring, there’s a taut disquiet
in the air. We go for the day’s final walk, you weary,
me downhearted, stumbling on tree roots raised as welts.
The night sky, hooded in clouds, offers no light.
And I am charged with melancholy and the heavy
knowledge of what must soon and surely be done,
already lonesome from the long, lonely walks to come.
Finally:
Roscoe is very fortunate to have you and your family and you are fortunate to have him. He came to you through Providence.
It is unspeakably sad to see any loved one passing away. Some of my greatest pain has come with the passing of pets. And 2020 has been a horrific year all around. We have lost 4 pets this year. One of those was my daughter's childhood friend, Muffin, a basset hound. That dog had been with us from the time she was an eight week old puppy and my daughter was 4, until my daughter's birthday this August. Nearly 15 years.
It may seem heartbreaking that Muffin died on my daughter's birthday, at sundown, no less. It sounds fantastically sad. And it is in a way. But, my daughter's greatest hope was that Muffin would make it until her birthday. And she got that wish. I had told her that it might not be likely; the dog had been saying her goodbyes for a couple of weeks. Also, I told her that if the Basset makes it to that day, it would mean that Muffin wanted that connection with her, to be remembered. Muffin would always be with her. I truly believe that, and believe that she is now my daughter's guardian in some way. Muffin not only made it, but made it through the entire melancholy-sweet day. Muffin died just after 7 pm. My daughter noted that, "She went with the sun." Every time I think of that, I tremble and try to keep from just bawling. It doesn't always work.
We were due to go to a luthier in downtown Chicago the week before Muffin passed and would have been about a mile south from the shooting of the rapper in the shopping district in broad daylight, on the same day. I don't know that we would have been in that very location at that moment, it's possible. Anyway, we didn't go because Muffin was clearly leaving us. By the following week, she was gone and so we went.
Those last weeks that Muffin was with us, my daughter who is a cellist, was working on the Dvorak Concerto. For me this is Muffin's requiem; I can't hear it without seeing her. My daughter, an only child, grew up with this dog. They played dress up together, my daughter read to her, wrote stories about her and even won a costume contest by going as storybook Muffin Belle. Muffin was my daughter's cello practice coach too. If something was out of tune the dog would turn her back or leave the room. When that dog was leaving us, I felt like all of life was leaving. I still feel that way at times because with her went my girl's childhood. And something of myself. Or so it can seem. But she is with us in all those wonderful memories and maybe in spirit, somehow. She is with us in what my daughter became. Since we live in the country, she has a grave at the yard's edge where we put flowers and I intend to get a nice statue of St. Francis to put out there.
Here is Muffin and the reader’s daughter:
Keep them coming, readers. You lift my sagging spirit!
I received some very thoughtful correspondence about last night’s newsletter, “Why Does God Show Us Evil?”Here is one from a Muslim reader:
I've been reading your blog for about a year now and recently subscribed to your newsletter. Part of me writing to you is to let you know that your meditations on Orthodox Christianity and the role of the religious in the modern world are also incredibly meaningful and relevant to this headscarf-wearing Muslim-American immigrant from India. As you have mentioned before, those of us who worship have more in common with each other than we do with those who do not. I, and many of my Muslim friends, are living many of the same conflicts and struggle with the same challenges of being in the world but not of it. The headscarf helps create that separation, especially for someone like me who began wearing it later in life, and for that reason it evokes a visceral reaction in those who dislike Islam/Muslims. But at the same time it has become an empty token on the left -- a symbol of diversity and marker of identity, entirely stripped of meaning and spiritual significance; welcome as long as we wearers stick to our lane and don't talk about what the mainstream of our religion teaches about gay marriage or abortion.
Today's newsletter was deeply touching. I admire your courage in admitting your reaction to 9/11 and the strength it took to examine your own mind so closely and unsparingly. I try hard to subject my own biases to the same scrutiny and cannot claim to have been nearly as successful.
You may or may not know this already, so I apologize if you do, but I thought I would take this opportunity to share my thoughts on why Qutb's pernicious ideas found such fertile ground in parts of the Muslim world. Underlying the damage done by dictatorships (that were, in fact, propped up by the US and occasionally the Soviets) and colonialism is a deep-seated nostalgia and longing for an imagined Golden Age of Islam in the past. In the Arab world this longing is for the Umayyads, elsewhere for the Abbasids, in Turkey for the Ottomans, & in India and Pakistan, for the Mughal empire. This sense of "we once ruled the world and led in technological progress but now have lost control of our own destiny" is widespread and too often, unexamined. Students of history (and readers of insightful writers like Jared Rubin and Timur Kuran) know that these empires all declined from within due to the ossification of existing power structures long before they were toppled from without.
But nostalgia and sentimentality are dangerous emotions when used to frame an us v/s them mentality, which in turn is used to give the powerless a sense of belonging that can then be deployed towards an evil cause. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was not that different from Pol Pot and so many others. The ideologies are just packaging for the emotional core. As long as they are coherent and persuasive and tell their listeners what they want to hear, the details don't matter -- Bolshevism, Maoism, radical Salafi Islam, QAnon -- the important thing is that they provide meaning and belonging and the sense of a righteous cause to people who feel alienated, dispossessed, and humiliated.
Modernity may have unmoored us from the spiritual realm, but I would be careful with taking that too far. These rebellions of the dispossessed have been happening for a long time, in one form or another, going all the way back to the Roman empire at least. [Side note: in India, people are much more in touch with the supernatural than in the West, but there is a dark side to that too -- where spiritual power exists and people are aware of it, there will always be some people who will harness that power for evil. Black magic is still a thing; witch doctors, known here as tantriks or babas, still advertise openly and have even moved online!]
I think you are correct that virtue and holding on to your moral core relies on the small things, and getting those right. But in order to bind those small rituals like rosaries together, they all need to be suffused with the love and kindness of our Creator, or they are just empty rituals with no meaning.
Quran 107:4-7: "Ah, woe unto worshippers
Who are heedless of their prayer;
Who would be seen (at worship)
Yet refuse small kindnesses!"I can't believe I am about to quote both the Quran and the comedian Hannah Gadsby in the same paragraph, but here goes...
Gadsby, in her Netflix special Nanette: "We think it’s more important to be right than it is to appeal to the humanity of people we disagree with."
Kindness and humanity are key, at all times. Without those, even the Word of God is often used for evil purposes.
Osama bin Laden was able to persuade his acolytes that American civilian casualties were acceptable because the United States is a democracy and US civilians are therefore responsible for the actions of their government. The truth, of course, is that most Americans were entirely unaware of the extent of the government's support for oppressive Middle Eastern autocrats. He and his acolytes had lost the ability to see the humanity of an individual American. And Cold War & energy policy concerns meant the humanity of the individual Arab suffering under oppression was entirely irrelevant.
I don't know how we solve this problem at a macro level. But we can only hope to start at a micro level.
Another reader writes:
I watched the South Tower fall from an old skate park on the South Williamsburg waterfront. With my dog, who comforted a wailing stranger (this led to my decision to become a veterinarian, but that's another story). It sounds like you and I came to the same conclusions about evil via very different routes. For me, I was at that time so full of simmering rage, anomie, and a sense of alienation that it wasn't such a big leap for me to see that there go I but for the grace of God. The response of escalation by war hawks made me so angry--perhaps even angrier than the terror attacks themselves--that it was impossible not to recognize that evil within myself. The aftermath was a most spiritually fecund time for me and my path eventually turned out to be a Buddhist one.
Thank you for writing fearlessly about the problems of extremism on both the Left and the Right. It weighs heavy on my heart to think what the future may hold.
Indeed. Hard times for us all. We have books, and dogs, and music, and fireplaces. Let us cultivate thankfulness.
Well, we have reached the end of another week on this here newsletter. Thank you all for reading. As you know, I try to discipline myself by not writing on the weekends. I like hearing from you, though I get more mail than I could possibly reply to. If you write me and do not want me to consider posting your comments, please say so! Otherwise, I’ll think about it, though I won’t identify anybody by name unless they ask. I am at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com.
I really hope that some of you will write me with your own stories about places where you have felt most at home in the world. Please be detailed. If I get enough of them, I might do a special weekend newsletter.