Today, a heavy subject:
catastrophe, survival and regeneration.
Bear with me. My musings
sometimes veer toward the darker side.
We are reminded daily by newspapers of all the disasters
that Man and Nature can inflict.
As I write this, my newspaper reports the ongoing slaughter of thousands
and destruction of whole cities in the civil war in Syria; random suicide
bombings in Iraq; a huge forest fire that has destroyed a suburb of Colorado
Springs, mercifully killing only a few.
We scarcely need to be reminded of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan
last year. And some horrors have
become part of our vocabulary—Srebrenica, 9/11, and the cataclysms of the
Holocaust, Rwanda and Hiroshima.
We also read of and even know survivors of calamities who
have carried on—not just muddled through, but reconstructed their lives and
planned their futures anew. How do
they do it? When I lost my wife, I
was able somehow to come through that dark night. Yet what if one's entire existence and community were swept
away? How would one survive then?
For years, whenever I read about survivors of a catastrophe,
sayings from my youth popped unbidden into my mind: Cicero's "While
there's life, there's hope" and Pope's "Hope springs eternal in the
human breast." Even in my
youth, they were long-since clichés.
Thinking of them so automatically seemed cavalier, a shrugging off of the
survivors' pain with a nostrum.
On a recent such occasion, again finding those clichés just too
pat, I sought a more profound understanding by returning to a book I read many
years ago: Life and
Fate by Vassily Grossman, a
saga of the Stalin years in the USSR.
It stunned me with its window into a modern-day Armageddon, and I have
held it close to me since, ranking it with other great Russian epics like War
and Peace and Dr. Zhivago. I
decided to re-examine what it says about survival.
The torments faced by the characters in the book verge on the
incomprehensible, even given our latter-day knowledge of those dreadful
decades: the tyranny of Stalinism, with its constant terror, purges, imprisonments,
torture, executions, and an endemic atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal; the
Nazis' invasion of the USSR and their subsequent massacres of Jews and others
in occupied territories; and the apocalyptic Battle of Stalingrad, around which
much of the plot centers. Every
one of Grossman's protagonists has been either imprisoned in the Gulag at one
time or another, usually because of a false denunciation; or lost a parent or a
spouse or a child to the Soviet or Nazi camps or the war; or is currently in
trouble with the authorities for Kafkaesque reasons. Grossman himself suffered many of these agonies, including
the later destruction by the KGB of all copies of the manuscript of Life and
Fate. (Fortunately for the world, dissidents
had made two microfilm copies, which were smuggled to the West.)
By
the last chapter, the survivors of this Armageddon, although having endured
unthinkable misery, still clutch onto vital sparks of humanity. They are epitomized by the matriarch of
the main clan of the saga. She has
lost her husband to the Gulag, a son, daughter and grandson to the war, all of
her possessions on abandoning Moscow ahead of the German advance, and then
lived through the hell of the Battle of Stalingrad. Yet at the book's end, she is busily planning a move from
Stalingrad's ruins to a city further into the Steppe to create a new life for
her granddaughter and great-grandson.
So there's the mystery again.
How can a soul like hers be tortured and nearly broken, and still seize
on those remaining grains of life?
What makes some of us capable of survival and even compassion when,
rationally, we should throw in the towel, go crazy, commit suicide?
The sheer fortitude with which
Grossman's survivors have overcome each tragedy throughout the book doesn't
answer these questions, for fortitude is a surface manifestation of something
deeper. We have to ask, what is
its source? Devotion to ideals,
smoldering anger at injustice, desire for retribution? Maybe for some. But Grossman's answer lies in a passage
on the last page of the book:
" … you could hear both a lament for the dead and the
furious joy of life itself. It was
still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Soon the house would be filled with the
tears and laughter of children … "
I believe
Grossman is saying that hope for a better future is the all-encompassing source of survival, without which fortitude is an
empty display. Absent such hope,
he concludes, there's no life worth living.
Maybe Cicero's and Pope's "clichés"
were on the mark after all. Maybe,
as a response to disaster, they are as profound as can be.