Dream Textures A Brief Note On Nabokov

At the very beginning of Nabokov’s autobiography, programmatically entitled Speak, Memory, there is the story of a man who, we must assume, is still very young, and who suffers a panic attack when he first sees a home movie shot in his parents’ house a few weeks before his birth. All the images trembling on the screen are familiar to him, he recognizes everything, everything is right except for the fact, which disturbs him deeply, that he himself is not where he has always been, and the other people in the house do not seem to mourn his absence. The sight of his mother waving from one of the windows on the upper floor is felt by the distressed viewer to be a farewell gesture, and he is terrified by the sight of the new baby carriage standing on the porch—“with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; and even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.” Nabokov is here suggesting an experience of the anticipation of death in the memory of a time before life, something that makes the viewer a kind of ghost in his own family. Nabokov repeatedly tried, as he himself has said, to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence. Few subjects therefore, to my mind, preoccupied him more than the study of spirits, of which his famous passion for moths and butterflies was probably only an offshoot. At any rate, the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species, not yet known to any system of taxonomy, whose emissaries sometimes assume a guest role in the plays performed by the living. Just as they appear to us, Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose. They are most commonly encountered in dreams, “in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence,” and are “silent, bothered, strangely depressed,” obviously suffering severely from their exclusion from society, and for that reason, says Nabokov, “they sit apart, staring at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret.” Nabokov’s speculations about those who tread the border between life and the world beyond originate in the realm of his childhood, which vanished without trace in the October Revolution; despite the evocative accuracy of his memories, he sometimes wonders whether that Arcadian land ever really existed. Cut off irrevocably as he was from his place of origin by the decades of terror in Russian history, he must surely have felt that retrieving one of its images caused him severe phantom pains, even though he usually looks discreetly, only through the prism of irony, at what he has lost. In the fifth chapter of Pnin he speaks at length and in different voices of the price you must pay on going into exile: not least, besides the material goods of life, the certainty of your own reality. The young emigrants of the early novels, Ganin, Fyodor, and Edelweiss, are already marked much more deeply by the experience of loss than by their new and foreign surroundings. Unexpectedly finding themselves on the wrong side of the frontier, they are airy beings living a quasi-extraterritorial, somehow unlawful afterlife in rented rooms and boardinghouses, just as their author lived at one remove from the reality of Berlin in the twenties. The strange unreality of such an existence in a foreign land seems to me nowhere more clearly expressed than in Nabokov’s remark, made in passing, that he had appeared as an extra in evening dress in several of the films shot in Berlin at that time, which frequently included doppelgängers and such shadowy figures among their characters. There is no proof anywhere else of these appearances of his, so we do not know whether any of them may still be faintly preserved on a brittle strip of celluloid or whether they are now all extinguished, and it seems to me that they have something of the ghostly quality to be found in Nabokov’s own prose, for instance in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in the passage where the narrator, V., in conversation with Sebastian’s student friend at Cambridge, has a feeling that the ghost of his brother, whose story is on his mind, is moving around the room in the light reflected from the fire on the hearth. This scene of course echoes the ghost stories that were so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while a rational view of the world was making itself felt. Nabokov liked to make use of such clichés: dust swirls in circles above the floor; there are inexplicable drafts of air, curiously iridescent effects of light, mysterious coincidences, and strange chance meetings. In the train to Strasbourg, V. finds himself opposite a gentleman called Silbermann whose shape blurs to an indistinct outline in the evening light as the train goes on and on straight into the sunset. Silbermann is a traveling salesman by profession, one of those restless spirits who often cross the narrator’s path in Nabokov’s books. Silbermann asks whether V. is a traveler too, and on getting an answer in the affirmative wants to know exactly what he travels in. V. tells him that he travels in the past, a remark that Silbermann instantly understands. Ghosts and writers meet in their concern for the past—their own and that of those who were once dear to them. As V. tries to trace the real life of Sebastian, that vanished knight of the night, he feels a growing suspicion that his brother is looking over his shoulder as he writes. Such intimations occur with striking regularity in Nabokov’s work, perhaps because after the murder of his father and the death of his brother Sergey, who died of consumption in Hamburg in January 1945 while he was in a concentration camp, he had a vague sense of the continuing presence of those who had been violently torn from this life. As a result, one of Nabokov’s main narrative techniques is to introduce, through barely perceptible nuances and shifts of perspective, an invisible observer—an observer who seems to have a better view not only than the characters in the narrative but than the narrator and the author who guides the narrator’s pen; it is a trick that allows Nabokov to see the world, and himself in it, from above. In fact, his work contains many passages written from a kind of bird’s-eye view. From a vantage point high above the road, an old woman picking herbs sees two cyclists and a car approaching a bend from different directions. From even higher up, from the dusty blue of the sky, an aircraft pilot sees the whole course of the road and two villages lying twelve miles apart. And if we could mount even farther up, where the air grows thinner and thinner, we might perhaps, says the narrator at this point, see the entire length of the mountain range and a distant city in another land—Berlin, for instance. This is to see the world through the eye of the crane, as the Dutch painters sometimes did in painting scenes like the Flight into Egypt, when they rose above the flat panorama surrounding them down on earth. In the same way writing, as Nabokov practiced it, is raised on high by the hope that, given sufficient concentration, the landscapes of time that have already sunk below the horizon can be seen once again in a synoptic view. Nabokov also knew, better than most of his fellow writers, that the desire to suspend time can prove its worth only in the most precise re-evocation of things long overtaken by oblivion. The pattern on the bathroom floor at Vyra, the white steam rising above the tub at which the boy looks dreamily from his seat in the dimly lit lavatory, the curve of the doorframe on which he leans his forehead—suddenly, with a few well-chosen words, the whole cosmos of childhood is conjured up before our eyes as if pulled out of a black top hat. A large oil lamp on an alabaster stand is moved through the darkness. It hovers gently in the air, and gently settles in its place. The white-gloved hand of a servant, which is now the hand of memory, sets it down in the middle of the round table. We are attending the séance staged by Nabokov, and strangely familiar characters and objects emerge surrounded by that claritas which has always, since Saint Thomas Aquinas, been regarded as the sign of a true epiphany. Even for Nabokov, recording such visionary moments was a very arduous business. A short sequence of words often needed hours of work before the rhythm was right, down to the last cadence, before the gravity of earth had been overcome and the author, now as it were disembodied himself, could reach the opposite bank across his precarious bridge of written characters. Where that undertaking succeeds, however, one is borne along by the current of lines sweeping on and on into a radiant realm which, like everything that is wonderful, has a touch of the surreal about it, and finally seems to stand on the threshold of the revelation of an absolute truth, “dazzling,” as we are told at the end of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, “in its splendor and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity.” To set something so beautiful in motion, according to both Nabokov and the messianic theory of salvation, no gaudy show is necessary, only a tiny spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place. Nabokov has compared the shifts to which the writer must resort in composing such a sentence to the moves of a game of chess, one in which the players themselves are chessmen in a game played by an invisible hand. A steamer moves slowly away from the roadsteads of Sebastopol and out on the water. From the banks the sounds of the Bolshevist revolution still echo—shouting and salvos of gunfire. But on the ship’s deck, father and son face each other over a chessboard, already immersed in the looking-glass world of exile ruled by the White Queen where one easily becomes dizzy simply by living backward. “Life is a Chequer-board of Nights and Days / where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: / Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, / And one by one back in the Closet lays.” Nabokov would certainly have subscribed to the notion of eternal movement expressed in these lines translated from the eleventh-century Persian poet by Edward FitzGerald, one of his distant predecessors at Trinity College, Cambridge. It is not surprising that from the moment of his exile Nabokov never had a real home, not in his years in England or in Berlin, or in Ithaca where he famously lived only in rented accommodation and kept moving on. His final place of residence in Montreux, where he could see above every earthly obstacle from his front-of-the-circle seat on the top floor of the Palace Hotel and out into the sun setting above the lake, was surely his dearest and most appropriate home after the Vyra estate of his childhood, just as a visitor called Simona Marini, who went to see him on February 3, 1972, tells us that the cable railway, particularly the chairlift, was his favorite means of transport. “I find it delightful and dreamlike in the best sense of the word to hover in the morning sunlight on this magical perch between the valley and the treeline, observing my shadow from above as, in a seated position—a ghostly butterfly net in its ghostly hand—it moves gently down the flowery slope like a scissor-cut seen sideways among the dancing alpines and fritillaries. One day,” adds Nabokov, “yet subtler dream material will meet the butterfly hunter as he glides away upright over the mountains, borne aloft by a small rocket strapped to his back.” This image of an ascension into heaven with its final touch of humor evokes another such passage, in my opinion the finest he ever wrote. It is at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory, and is an account of a scene that often took place at Vyra when the peasants from the village came up to the manor house with some petition or other, usually at midday when the Nabokovs were in their first-floor dining room. Once the lord of the manor, Vladimir Dimitrievich, had risen from table and gone out to see the petitioners and hear their request, then if the matter could be settled to the delegation’s satisfaction it was their custom to throw him into the air three times by their united powers and catch him again as he came down. “From my place at table,” writes Nabokov,

I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

From: Campo Santo

By Sebald 

The Decalogue - Kieślowski

 

 Ten commandments, ten films. Krzysztof Kieslowski sat for months in his small, smoke-filled room in Warsaw writing the scripts with a lawyer he’d met in the early 1980s, during the Solidarity trials. Krzysztof Piesiewicz didn’t know how to write, the director remembered, but he could talk. For hours they talked about Poland in turmoil, and together they wrote the screenplay for No End (1985), which told three stories of life under martial law. The government found it unsympathetic, the opposition found it compromised, and the Catholic Church found it immoral. During the controversy, the collaborators ran into each other in the rain, and Piesiewicz, maybe looking for more trouble, shouted, “Someone should make a film about the Ten Commandments.” 

 They made ten films, each an hour long, for Polish television. The series ran in the late 1980s, played at the Venice and other film festivals, and gathered extraordinary praise. But the form was ungainly for theatrical showing (do you ask audiences to sit for ten hours, or come for five two-hour sessions?), and The Decalogue never had an ordinary U.S. theatrical run, nor was it available here on video. In 2000, at last, it was released in North America on tapes and DVD. 

 I taught a class on The Decalogue a few years ago, using tapes from England, and found we lost a lot of time trying to match up the films and the Commandments. There isn’t a one-to-one correlation; some films touch on more than one commandment, and others involve the whole ethical system suggested by the Commandments. These are not simplistic illustrations of the rules, but stories that involve real people in the complexities of real problems. 

 

 All the stories involve characters who live in the same high-rise Warsaw apartment complex. We grow familiar with the layout and even glimpse characters from one story in the backgrounds of others—sharing the lift, for example. There is a young man who appears in eight of them, a solemn onlooker who never says anything but sometimes makes sad eye contact. I thought perhaps he represented Christ, but Kieslowski, in an essay about the series, says, “I don’t know who he is; just a guy who comes and watches us, our lives. He’s not very pleased with us.” Directors are notorious for not pinning down the meanings of their images. I like the theory of Annette Insdorf, in her valuable book about Kieslowski, Double Lives, Second Chances; she compares the watcher to the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), who are “pure gaze”—able to “record human folly and suffering but unable to alter the course of the lives they witness.” 

 The ten films are not philosophical abstractions, but personal stories that involve us immediately; I hardly stirred during some of them. 

 After seeing the series, Stanley Kubrick observed that Kieslowski and Piesiewicz “have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them.” Quite so. There is not a moment when the characters talk about specific commandments or moral issues. Instead, they are absorbed in trying to deal with real-life ethical challenges. 

 Consider the heroine of Decalogue: Two, who wants a doctor to tell her whether her sick husband will live or die. The doctor, a gruff and solitary being, is almost cruelly distant with her; he resists being asked to play God. The woman explains why she must know: She is pregnant with another man’s child. Her husband is not fertile. If he is going to live, she will have an abortion. If he is going to die, she will have the baby. 

 The stuff of soap opera. But here it becomes a moral puzzle, solved finally only through a flashback to the doctor’s own painful past—and even then the solution is indirect, since events do not turn out as anyone anticipates. Kieslowski roots the issues in very specific performances by the doctor and the woman (Aleksander Bardini and Krystyna Janda), and a beautiful, subtle thing happens: The film is about their separate moral challenges, and not about the two of them locked together by one problem. 

 Or look at the moral switch in Decalogue: Six, which is about a lonely teenage boy who uses a telescope to spy on the sex life of a morally careless, lonely woman who lives across the way. He decides he loves her. They see each other because he is a clerk in the post office. He takes a morning milk route so he can see her then too. Almost inevitably, she finds out he is a Peeping Tom (and also an anonymous phone caller and a prankster), but we can hardly anticipate what she does then. 

 In one of the sharp but plausible dramatic twists that Kieslowski likes in all of his films, the woman invites the teenager to her apartment and uses his sexual inexperience to humiliate him. And that is still only the halfway point in their moral duel; what happens next, to him, to her, to them, shows right and wrong shifting back and forth between them as sinner and victim exchange roles. Their relationship shows “situational ethics” becoming fluid and confusing. 

 Kieslowski deliberately avoided everyday facts of life in Poland, because he thought they were a distraction—the rules, the laws, the shortages, the bureaucracy. He deals with those parts of life that are universal. In Decalogue: One, for me the saddest of all his stories, he tells about the love between a smart father and a genius son. Together they use computers to calculate the freezing rate of a nearby pond so they will know when the ice is thick enough to skate safely. But ponds and currents cannot always be studied so simply, and perhaps the computer is a false god. 

 None of these films are simple demonstrations of black and white moral issues. Decalogue: Five is about a murderer who seems completely amoral. To understand him is not to forgive him. But the story also focuses on his defense attorney, a young man trying his first case and passionately opposed to the death penalty. Decalogue: Nine is about a man who discovers his wife is having an affair. He hides himself to spy on them and eavesdrops as she breaks up forever with her lover—and then she discovers her husband in hiding. She did the wrong thing (adultery) and the right one (ending it); his spying was a violation of her trust—and then there is an outcome where pure chance almost leads to a death, which was avoidable if either had been more honest. 

 At the end, you see that the Commandments work not like science, but like art; they are instructions for how to paint a worthy portrait with our lives. 

 Kieslowski (1941–96) and Piesiewicz wrote the screenplays intending that each would be filmed by a different director. But Kieslowski was unwilling to give them up, and he directed all ten, each one with a different cinematographer so that the visual styles would not become repetitious. The settings are much the same: gray exteriors, in winter for the most part, small apartments, offices. The faces are where the life of the films resides. 

 These are not characters involved in the simpleminded struggles of Hollywood plots. They are adults, for the most part outside organized religion, faced with situations in their own lives that require them to make moral choices. You shouldn’t watch the films all in one sitting, but one at a time. Then if you are lucky and have someone to talk with, you discuss them and learn about yourself. Or if you are alone, you discuss them with yourself, as so many of Kieslowski’s characters do.

THE GREAT MOVIES

 Roger Ebert

The influence of solitude upon the mind

The true value of liberty can only be conceived by minds that are free: slaves remain indolently contented in captivity. Men who have been long tossed upon the troubled ocean of life, and have learned by severe experience to entertain just notions of the world and its concerns, to examine every object with unclouded and impartial eyes, to walk erect in the strict and thorny paths of virtue, and to find their happiness in the reflections of an honest mind, alone are free.

The path of virtue, indeed, is devious, dark and dreary; but though it leads the traveller over hills of difficulty, it at length brings him into the delightful and extensive plains of permanent happiness and secure repose.

The love of solitude, when cultivated in the morn of life, elevates the mind to a noble independence; but to acquire the advantage which solitude is capable of affording, the mind must not be impelled to it by melancholy and discontent, but by a real distaste to the idle pleasures of the world, a rational contempt for the deceitful joys of life, and just apprehensions of being corrupted and seduced by its insinuating and destructive gayeties.

Many men have acquired and exercised in solitude that transcendent greatness of mind which defies events; and, like the majestic cedar, which braves the fury of the most violent tempest, have resisted, with heroic courage, the severest storms of fate.

Solitude, indeed, sometimes renders the mind in a slight degree arrogant and conceited; but these effects are easily removed by a judicious intercourse with mankind. Misanthropy, contempt of folly, and pride of spirit, are, in noble minds, changed by the maturity of age into dignity of character; and that fear of the opinion of the world which awed the weakness and inexperience of youth, is succeeded by firmness, and a high disdain of those false notions by which it was dismayed: the observations once so dreadful lose all their stings; the mind views objects not as they are, but as they ought to be; and, feeling a contempt for vice, rises into a noble enthusiasm for virtue, gaining from the conflict a rational experience and a compassionate feeling which never decay.

The science of the heart, indeed, with which youth should be familiarized as early as possible, is too frequently neglected. It removes the asperities and polishes the rough surfaces of the mind. This science is founded on that noble philosophy which regulates the characters of men; and operating more by love than by rigid precept, corrects the cold dictates of reason by the warm feelings of the heart; opens to view the dangers to which they are exposed; animates the dormant faculties of the mind, and prompts them to the practice of all the virtues.

Dion was educated in all the turpitude and servility of courts, accustomed to a life of softness and effeminacy, and, what is still worse, tainted by ostentation, luxury, and every species of vicious pleasure; but no sooner did he listen to the divine Plato, and acquire thereby a taste for that sublime philosophy which inculcates the practice of virtue, than his whole soul became deeply enamored of its charms. The same love of virtue with which Plato inspired the mind of Dion, may be silently, and almost imperceptibly infused by every tender mother into the mind of her child. Philosophy, from the lips of a wise and sensible woman, glides quietly, but with strong effect, into the mind through the feelings of the heart. Who is not fond of walking, even through the most rough and difficult paths, when conducted by the hand of love? What species of instruction can be more successful than soft lessons from a female tongue, dictated by a mind profound in understanding, and elevated in sentiment, where the heart feels all the affection that her precepts inspire? Oh! may every mother, so endowed, be blessed with a child who delights to listen in private to her edifying observations; who, with a book in his hand, loves to seek among the rocks some sequestered spot favorable to study; who when walking with his dogs and gun, frequently reclines under the friendly shade of some majestic tree, and contemplates the great and glorious characters which the pages of Plutarch present to his view, instead of toiling through the thickest of the surrounding woods hunting for game.

The wishes of a mother are accomplished when the silence and solitude of the forests seize and animate the mind of her loved child; when he begins to feel that he has seen sufficiently the pleasures of the world; when he begins to perceive that there are greater and more valued characters than noblemen or esquires, than ministers or kings; characters who enjoy a more elevated sense of pleasure than gaming tables and assemblies are capable of affording; who seek, at every interval of leisure, the shades of solitude with rapturous delight; whose minds have been inspired with a love of literature and philosophy from their earliest infancy; whose bosoms have glowed with a love of science through every subsequent period of their lives; and who, amidst the greatest calamities, are capable of banishing, by a secret charm, the deepest melancholy and most profound dejection.

The advantages of solitude to a mind that feels a real disgust at the tiresome intercourses of society, are inconceivable. Freed from the world, the veil which obscured the intellect suddenly falls, the clouds which dimmed the light of reason disappear, the painful burden which oppressed the soul is alleviated; we no longer wrestle with surrounding perils; the apprehension of danger vanishes; the sense of misfortune becomes softened; the dispensations of Providence no longer excite the murmur of discontent; and we enjoy the delightful pleasures of a calm, serene and happy mind. Patience and resignation follow and reside with a contented heart; every corroding care flies away on the wings of gayety; and on every side agreeable and interesting scenes present themselves to our view; the brilliant sun sinking behind the lofty mountains tinging their snow-crowned turrets with golden rays; the feathered choir hastening to seek within their mossy cells a soft, a silent, and secure repose; the shrill crowing of the amorous cock; the solemn and stately march of oxen returning from their daily toil, and the graceful paces of the generous steed. But, amidst the vicious pleasures of a great metropolis, where sense and truth are constantly despised, and integrity and conscience thrown aside as inconvenient and oppressive, the fairest forms of fancy are obscured, and the purest virtues of the heart corrupted.

But the first and most incontestable advantage of solitude is, that it accustoms the mind to think; the imagination becomes more vivid, and the memory more faithful, while the sense remains undisturbed, and no external object agitates the soul. Removed far from the tiresome tumults of public society, where a multitude of heterogeneous objects dance before our eyes and fill the mind with incoherent notions, we learn to fix our attention to a single subject, and to contemplate that alone. An author, whose works I could read with pleasure every hour of my life, says, “It is the power of attention which, in a great measure distinguishes the wise and great from the vulgar and trifling herd of men. The latter are accustomed to think, or rather to dream, without knowing the subject of their thoughts. In their unconnected rovings they pursue no end, they follow no track. Every thing floats loose and disjointed on the surface of their minds, like leaves scattered and blown about on the face of the waters.”

The habit of thinking with steadiness and attention can only be acquired by avoiding the distraction which a multiplicity of objects always create; by turning our observation from external things, and seeking a situation in which our daily occupations are not perpetually shifting their course, and changing their direction.

Idleness and inattention soon destroy all the advantages of retirement; for the most dangerous passions, when the mind is not properly employed, rise into fermentation, and produce a variety of eccentric ideas and irregular desires. It is necessary, also, to elevate our thoughts above the mean consideration of sensual objects; the unincumbered mind then recalls all that it has read; all that has pleased the eye or delighted the ear; and reflecting on every idea which either observation, experience, or discourse, has produced, gains new information by every reflection, and conveys the purest pleasures to the soul. The intellect contemplates all the former scenes of life; views by anticipation those that are yet to come, and blends all ideas of past and future in the actual enjoyment of the present moment. To keep, however, the mental powers in proper tone, it is necessary to direct our attention invariably toward some noble and interesting study.

It may, perhaps, excite a smile, when I assert, that solitude is the only school in which the characters of men can be properly developed; but it must be recollected, that, although the materials of this study must be amassed in society, it is in solitude alone that we can apply them to their proper use. The world is the great scene of our observations; but to apply them with propriety to their respective objects is exclusively the work of solitude. It is admitted that a knowledge of the nature of man is necessary to our happiness; and therefore I cannot conceive how it is possible to call those characters malignant and misanthropic, who while they continue in the world, endeavor to discover even the faults, foibles and imperfections of human kind. The pursuit of this species of knowledge, which can only be gained by observation, is surely laudable, and not deserving the obloquy that has been cast on it. Do I, in my medical character, feel any malignity or hatred to the species, when I study the nature, and explore the secret causes of those weaknesses and disorders which are incidental to the human frame? When I examine the subject with the closest inspection, and point out for the general benefit, I hope, of mankind, as well as for my own satisfaction, all the frail and imperfect parts in the anatomy of the human body?

But a difference is supposed to exist between the observations which we are permitted to make upon the anatomy of the human body, and those which we assume respecting the philosophy of the mind. The physician, it is said, studies the maladies which are incidental to the human frame, to apply such remedies as particular occasion may require: but it is contended, that the moralist has a different end in view. This distinction, however, is certainly without foundation. A sensible and feeling philosopher views both the moral and physical defects of his fellow creatures with an equal degree of regret. Why do moralists shun mankind, by retiring into solitude, if it be not to avoid the contagion of those vices which they perceive so prevalent in the world, and which are not observed by those who are in the habit of seeing them daily indulged without censure or restraint? The mind, without doubt feels a considerable degree of pleasure in detecting the imperfections of human nature; and where that detection may prove beneficial to mankind, without doing an injury to any individual, to publish them to the world, to point out their qualities, to place them, by a luminous description before the eyes of men, is in my idea, a pleasure so far from being mischievous, that I rather think, and I trust I shall continue to think so even in the hour of death, it is the only real mode of discovering the machinations of the devil, and destroying the effects of his work. Solitude, therefore, as it tends to excite a disposition to think with effect, to direct the attention to proper objects, to strengthen observation, and to increase the natural sagacity of the mind, is the school in which a true knowledge of the human character is most likely to be acquired.

Bonnet, in an affecting passage of the preface to his celebrated work on the Nature of the Soul, relates the manner in which solitude rendered even his defect of sight advantageous to him. “Solitude,” says he, “necessarily leads the mind to meditation. The circumstances in which I have hitherto lived, joined to the sorrows which have attended me for many years, and from which I am not yet released, induced me to seek in reflection those comforts which my unhappy condition rendered necessary; and my mind is now become my constant retreat: from the enjoyments it affords I derive pleasures which, like potent charms, dispel all my afflictions.” At this period the virtuous Bonnet was almost blind. Another excellent character, of a different kind, who devotes his time to the education of youth, Pfeffel, at Colmar, supports himself under the affliction of total blindness in a manner equally noble and affecting, by a lifeless solitary indeed, but by the opportunities of frequent leisure which he employs in the study of philosophy, the recreations of poetry, and the exercises of humanity. There was formerly in Japan a college of blind persons, who, in all probability, were endued with quicker discernment than many members of more enlightened colleges. These sightless academicians devoted their time to the study of history, poetry, and music. The most celebrated traits in the annals of their country became the subject of their muse; and the harmony of their verses could only be excelled by the melody of their music. In reflecting upon the idleness and dissipation in which a number of solitary persons pass their time, we contemplate the conduct of these blind Japanese with the highest pleasure. The mind’s eye opened and afforded them ample compensation for the loss of the corporeal organ. Light, life, and joy, flowed into their minds through surrounding darkness, and blessed them with high enjoyment of tranquil thought and innocent occupation.

Solitude teaches us to think, and thoughts become the principal spring of human actions; for the actions of men, it is truly said, are, nothing more than their thoughts embodied, and brought into substantial existence. The mind, therefore, has only to examine with candor and impartiality the idea which it feels the greatest inclination to pursue, in order to penetrate and expound the mystery of the human character; and he who has not been accustomed to self-examination, will upon such a scrutiny, frequently discover truths of extreme importance to his happiness, which the mists of worldly delusion had concealed totally from his view.

Liberty and leisure are all that an active mind requires in solitude. The moment such a character finds itself alone, all the energies of his soul put themselves into motion, and rise to a height incomparably greater than they could have reached under the impulse of a mind clogged and oppressed by the encumbrances of society. Even plodding authors, who only endeavor to improve the thoughts of others, and aim not at originality for themselves, derive such advantages from solitude, as to render them contented with their humble labors; but to superior minds, how exquisite are the pleasures they feel when solitude inspires the idea and facilitates the execution of works of virtue and public benefit! works which constantly irritate the passions of the foolish, and confound the guilty consciences of the wicked. The exuberance of a fine fertile imagination is chastened by the surrounding tranquility of solitude: all its diverging rays are concentrated to one certain point; and the mind exalted to such powerful energy, that whenever it is inclined to strike, the blow becomes tremendous and irresistible. Conscious of the extent and force of his powers, a character thus collected cannot be dismayed by legions of adversaries; and he waits, with judicious circumspection, to render sooner or later, complete justice to the enemies of virtue. The profligacy of the world, where vice usurps the seat of greatness, hypocrisy assumes the face of candor, and prejudice overpowers the voice of truth, must, indeed, sting his bosom with the keenest sensations of mortification and regret; but cast his philosophic eye over the disordered scene, he will separate what ought to be indulged from what ought not to be endured; and by a happy, well-timed stroke of satire from his pen, will destroy the bloom of vice, disappoint machinations of hipocrisy, and expose the fallacies on which prejudice is founded.

Truth unfolds her charms in solitude with superior splendor. A great and good man; Dr. Blair, of Edinburgh, says, “The great and the worthy, the pious and the virtuous, have ever been addicted to serious retirement. It is the characteristic of little and frivolous minds to be wholly occupied with the vulgar objects of life. These fill up their desires, and supply all the entertainment which their coarse apprehensions can relish. But a more refined and enlarged mind leaves the world behind it, feels a call for higher pleasures, and seeks them in retreat. The man of public spirit has recourse to it in order to reform plans for general good; the man of genius in order to dwell on his favorite themes; the philosopher to pursue his discoveries; and the saint to improve himself in grace.”

Numa, the legislator of Rome, while he was only a private individual, retired on the death of Tatia, his beloved wife, into the deep forests of Aricia and wandered in solitary musings through the thickest groves and most sequestered shades. Superstition imputed his lonely propensity, not to disappointment, discontent, or hatred to mankind, but to a higher cause: a wish silently to communicate with some protecting deity. A rumor was circulated that the goddess Egeria, captivated by his virtues, had united herself to him in the sacred bonds of love, and by enlightening his mind, and storing it with superior wisdom, had led him to divine felicity. The Druids also, who dwelt among the rocks, in the woods, and in the most solitary places, are supposed to have instructed the infant nobility of their respective nations in wisdom and in eloquence, in the phenomena of nature, in astronomy, in the precepts of religion, and the mysteries of eternity. The profound wisdom thus bestowed on the characters of the Druids, although it was, like the story of Numa, the mere effects of imagination, discovers with what enthusiasm every age and country have revered those venerable characters who in the silence of the groves, and in the tranquillity of solitude, have devoted their time and talents to the improvement of the human mind, and the reformation of the species.

Genius frequently brings forth its finest fruit in solitude, merely by the exertion of its own intrinsic powers, unaided by the patronage of the great, the adulation of the multitude, or the hope of mercenary reward. Flanders, amidst all the horrors of civil discord, produced painters as rich in fame as they were poor in circumstances. The celebrated Correggio had so seldom been rewarded during his life, that the paltry payment of ten pistoles of German coin, and which he was obliged to travel as far as Parma, to receive, created in his mind a joy so excessive, that it caused his death. The self-approbation of conscious merit was the only recompense these great artists received; they painted with the hope of immortal fame; and posterity has done them justice. (...)

Johann Georg Zimmermann Solitude

Politeness

 

COURTESY AND URBANITY of manners have been noticed by every foreign tourist as a marked Japanese trait. Politeness is a poor virtue, if it is actuated only by a fear of offending good taste, whereas it should be the outward manifestation of a sympathetic regard for the feelings of others. It also implies a due regard for the fitness of things, therefore due respect to social positions; for these latter express no plutocratic distinctions, but were originally distinctions for actual merit.

In its highest form, politeness almost approaches love. We may reverently say, politeness “suffereth long, and is kind; envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, taketh not account of evil.” Is it any wonder that Professor Dean, in speaking of the six elements of humanity, accords to politeness an exalted position, inasmuch as it is the ripest fruit of social intercourse?

While thus extolling politeness, far be it from me to put it in the front rank of virtues. If we analyze it, we shall find it correlated with other virtues of a higher order; for what virtue stands alone? While—or rather because—it was exalted as peculiar to the profession of arms, and as such esteemed in a degree higher than its deserts, there came into existence its counterfeits. Confucius himself has repeatedly taught that external appurtenances are as little a part of propriety as sounds are of music.

When propriety was elevated to the sine qua non of social intercourse, it was only to be expected that an elaborate system of etiquette should come into vogue to train youth in correct social behavior. How one must bow in accosting others, how he must walk and sit, were taught and learned with utmost care. Table manners grew to be a science. Tea serving and drinking were raised to ceremony. A man of education is, of course, expected to be master of all these. Very fitly does Mr. Veblen, in his interesting book,1 call decorum “a product and an exponent of the leisure-class life.”

I have heard slighting remarks made by Europeans upon our elaborate discipline of politeness. It has been criticized as absorbing too much of our thought and in so far a folly to observe strict obedience to it. I admit that there may be unnecessary niceties in ceremonious etiquette, but whether it partakes as much of folly as the adherence to ever-changing fashions of the West, is a question not very clear to my mind. Even fashions I do not consider solely as freaks of vanity; on the contrary, I look upon these as a ceaseless search of the human mind for the beautiful. Much less do I consider elaborate ceremony as altogether trivial; for it denotes the result of long observation as to the most appropriate method of achieving a certain result. If there is anything to do, there is certainly a best way to do it, and the best way is both the most economical and the most graceful. Mr. Spencer defines grace as the most economical manner of motion. The tea ceremony presents certain definite ways of manipulating a bowl, a spoon, a napkin, etc. To a novice it looks tedious. But one soon discovers that the way prescribed is, after all, the most saving of time and labor; in other words, the most economical use of force—hence, according to Spencer’s dictum, the most graceful.

The spiritual significance of social decorum—or, I might say, to borrow from the vocabulary of the “Philosophy of Clothes,” the spiritual discipline of which etiquette and ceremony are mere outward garments—is out of all proportion to what their appearance warrants us in believing. I might follow the example of Mr. Spencer and trace in our ceremonial institutions their origins and the moral motives that gave rise to them; but that is not what I shall endeavor to do in this book. It is the moral training involved in strict observance of propriety, that I wish to emphasize.

I have said that etiquette was elaborated into the finest niceties, so much so that different schools, advocating different systems, came into existence. But they all united in the ultimate essential, and this was put by a great exponent of the best known school of etiquette, the Ogasawara, in the following terms: “The end of all etiquette is to so cultivate your mind that even when you are quietly seated, not the roughest ruffian can dare make onset on your person.” It means, in other words, that by constant exercise in correct manners, one brings all the parts and faculties of his body into perfect order and into such harmony with itself and its environment as to express the mastery of spirit over the flesh. What a new and deep significance the French word biensèance2 comes to contain.

If the promise is true that gracefulness means economy of force, then it follows as a logical sequence that a constant practice of graceful deportment must bring with it a reserve and storage of force. Fine manners, therefore, mean power in repose. When the barbarian Gauls, during the sack of Rome, burst into the assembled Senate and dared pull the beards of the venerable Fathers, we think the old gentlemen were to blame, inasmuch as they lacked dignity and strength of manners. Is lofty spiritual attainment really possible through etiquette? Why not?—all roads lead to Rome!

As an example of how the simplest thing can be made into an art and then become spiritual culture, I may take Cha-no-yu, the tea ceremony. Tea-sipping as a fine art! Why should it not be? In the children drawing pictures on the sand, or in the savage carving on a rock, was the promise of a Raphael or a Michaelangelo. How much more is the drinking of a beverage, which began with the transcendental contemplation of a Hindoo anchorite, entitled to develop into a handmaid of Religion and Morality? That calmness of mind, that serenity of temper, that composure and quietness of demeanour which are the first essentials of Cha-no-yu, are without doubt the first conditions of right thinking and right feeling. The scrupulous cleanliness of the little room, shut off from sight and sound of the madding crowd, is in itself conducive to direct one’s thoughts from the world. The bare interior does not engross one’s attention like the innumerable pictures and bric-a-brac of a Western parlor; the presence of kaké-mono3 calls our attention more to grace of design than to beauty of color. The utmost refinement of taste is the object aimed at; whereas anything like display is banished with religious horror. The very fact that it was invented by a contemplative recluse, in a time when wars and the rumors of wars were incessant, is well calculated to show that this institution was more than a pastime. Before entering the quiet precincts of the tearoom, the company assembling to partake of the ceremony laid aside, together with their swords, the ferocity of battlefield or the cares of government, there to find peace and friendship.

Cha-no-yu is more than a ceremony—it is a fine art; it is poetry, with articulate gestures for rhythms: it is a modus operandi of soul discipline. Its greatest value lies in this last phase. Not infrequently the other phases preponderated in the mind of its votaries, but that does not prove that its essence was not of a spiritual nature.

Politeness will be a great acquisition, if it does no more than impart grace to manners; but its function does not stop here. For propriety, springing as it does from motives of benevolence and modesty, and actuated by tender feelings toward the sensibilities of others, is ever a graceful expression of sympathy. Its requirement is that we should weep with those that weep and rejoice with those that rejoice. Such didactic requirement, when reduced into small everyday details of life, expresses itself in little acts scarcely noticeable, or, if noticed, is, as one missionary lady of twenty years’ residence once said to me, “awfully funny.” You are out in the hot, glaring sun with no shade over you; a Japanese acquaintance passes by; you accost him, and instantly his hat is off—well, that is perfectly natural, but the “awfully funny” performance is, that all the while he talks with you his parasol is down and he stands in the glaring sun also. How foolish!—yes, exactly so, provided the motive were less than this: “You are in the sun; I sympathize with you; I would willingly take you under my parasol if it were large enough, or if we were familiarly acquainted; as I cannot shade you, I will share your discomforts.” Little acts of this kind, equally or more amusing, are not mere gestures or conventionalities. They are the “bodying forth” of thoughtful feelings for the comfort of others.

Another “awfully funny” custom is dictated by our canons of Politeness; but many superficial writers on Japan have dismissed it by simply attributing it to the general topsy-turvyness of the nation. Every foreigner who has observed it will confess the awkwardness he felt in making proper reply upon the occasion. In America, when you make a gift, you sing its praises to the recipient; in Japan we depreciate or slander it. The underlying idea with you is, “This is a nice gift: if it were not nice I would not dare give it to you; for it will be an insult to give you anything but what is nice.” In contrast to this, our logic runs: “You are a nice person, and no gift is nice enough for you. You will not accept anything I can lay at your feet except as a token of my goodwill; so accept this, not for its intrinsic value, but as a token. It will be an insult to your worth to call the best gift good enough for you.” Place the two ideas side by side, and we see that the ultimate idea is one and the same. Neither is “awfully funny.” The American speaks of the material which makes the gift; the Japanese speaks of the spirit which prompts the gift.

It is perverse reasoning to conclude, because our sense of propriety shows itself in all the smallest ramifications of our deportment, to take the least important of them and uphold it as the type, and pass judgment upon the principle itself. Which is more important, to eat or to observe rules of propriety about eating? A Chinese sage answers, “If you take a case where the eating is all-important, and the observing the rules of propriety is of little importance, and compare them together, why not merely say that the eating is of the more importance?” “Metal is heavier than feathers,” but does that saying have reference to a single clasp of metal and a wagonload of feathers? Take a piece of wood a foot thick and raise it above the pinnacle of a temple, none would call it taller than the temple. To the question, “Which is the more important, to tell the truth or to be polite?” the Japanese are said to give an answer diametrically opposite to what the American will say—but I forbear any comment until I come to speak of veracity and sincerity.

1. Theory of the Leisure Class, N.Y., 1899, p. 46. 

2. Etymologically, well-seatedness.

3. Hanging scrolls, which may be either paintings or ideograms, used for decorative purposes.

From: BUSHIDO

The Spiritof the Samurai

Inazo Nitobe

On hikikomori

 6This pervasive distress is reflected in Japan's plummeting birthrate—which now ranks among the lowest in the world—and in the nation's diminishing population, which began to shrink, in absolute terms, in 2005, when the number of deaths surpassed annual births by some ten thousand. 7 This sharp decline can be attributed to women who marry later, if at all, because they don't want to give up their independence to raise children in an unhappy environment; or who, if married, decide that having children is a poor investment of their time and energies, and so refuse to bear them. Radical dissent is also reflected in the proliferation of suicide—Japan has the world's highest rate among wealthy industrial nations—as well as in the growing number of group suicides committed by complete strangers who meet on the Internet in order to die together. Alcoholism and depression are rampant, if seldom discussed, manifestations of adjustment disorder, while exhaustion and overwork claim thousands of casualties each year.

Frustrated and disaffected, many young Japanese just abandon their homeland. Hundreds of thousands of others wander like nomads outside the rigid traditional system, refusing to work, go to school, or accept job training. Even more disturbing—perhaps most disturbing—is the cadre of more than one million young adults, the majority of them men, who literally shut themselves away from the sun, closing their blinds, taping shut their windows, and refusing to leave the bedroom in their homes for months or years at a time. Thus, the anguish the Imperial Family discreetly confronts behind stone palace walls reflects a crisis now being visited on the wider family of Japan.

(...)

Also like Americans, Japanese face the paradoxical challenge that wealth creates. For only in societies blessed with unrivaled prosperity do people have the luxury to consider what it is that truly makes them happy. When the pursuit of material extravagance delivers emptiness rather than inner contentment, a people are forced to confront deeper, more existential questions about meaning, value, self-affirmation, and moral purpose that classroom training alone cannot teach. Exploring this inner dimension demands a different vocabulary, one that wealthy nations often deemphasize and deny amid their constant chase for expansion and greater prosperity. To pose such courageous and fundamental questions is, after all, to subvert the underlying mission by challenging its objective.

While wealthy nations share many common challenges, Japan's particular history, social institutions, and economic architecture also set it apart from others. Indeed, no other nation has more stubbornly defied the comprehension of outsiders. Experts in macroeconomics, for example, are frequently stunned that the models they devise for “normal” market economies simply don't work in Japan. Political scientists find it remarkable that in a nation that has endured fifteen years of bad economics, the political structure has not faltered nor have street protests broken out among its increasingly disaffected citizens. Likewise, Western social psychiatrists find it puzzling that inhabitants of a nation as wealthy as Japan score so low on global measurements of subjective well-being, or that the term “self-esteem” does not exist in Japanese.

I, too, often found myself puzzled and distressed, unable to explain Japan's palpable if inarticulate crisis coherently to outsiders, until I began to hear the stories of men like Kenji, thirty-four, who dares not leave his room, or angry Jun, twenty-eight, who bicycles through the darkened streets of Tokyo some nights to work through his frustration and fear. These are two of the more than one million young adults, fearful, isolated, intelligent, and alone, who barricade themselves in their rooms for protection rather than attempt to engage with a society they feel denies them any expression of self. As I entered their mysterious world and got to know some of these extraordinary men, I sensed that understanding Japan through their eyes could offer a whole new perspective on the nation's festering malaise.

In this book, rather than focus primarily on politics or economics, my aim is to unravel the unusual social, cultural, and psychological constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation and prevented change from bubbling up from within. First, I examine the plight of the hikikomori, the young men who lock themselves in their rooms and find little solace in the larger society. After looking into their lives and those of their parents and caregivers, I explore the history and culture in which their tragic stories are embedded to approach some explanation for Japan's contemporary social deadlock. Then I examine a cluster of behaviors that seem more familiar to Western readers: the fixation on consumerism and brand names in the search for identity; women's painful lives and their reluctance to wed and have babies; and, finally, the high incidence of suicide, depression, and alcoholism. Then, I broaden the view to see how Japan stacks up against its closest neighbor and rival, South Korea. Though these two nations share so much history and culture, I explain the underlying forces which allowed South Korea to rebound smartly from economic crisis while Japan still lags. I also assess how the United States, Japan's protector for the past sixty years, contributes to Japan's profound adjustment disorder, even as Japan permits the United States to prolong its own unsustainable course. Finally, I speculate on how Japan's own survival strategy may come to resemble those of the hikikomori who negate themselves and their adulthood, and shut out the sun of vigorous self-affirmation and moral purpose.

In dissecting this very different culture, my goal is to describe and analyze, rather than argue a narrowly focused point of view. I do this deliberately, for when it comes to the nature and pathologies of many of the syndromes I will try to disentangle, there is still a great deal we don't know—a testimony to the relatively shabby state of social science and psychological research within modern Japan as well as to the low status afforded to such inquiry. I also believe that as a Westerner, cast inevitably as an outsider looking inside a very closed world, it is imperative that I use as many Japanese voices as often as possible to elucidate behaviors and describe their own society.

Tragically these are not subjects the Japanese themselves normally choose to discuss. Indeed, they often likened their society to a duck pond, whose tranquil mirror-smooth surface hides the legs churning furiously below the waterline to keep their places in the flock. One day, over a beer at a fireworks-viewing party in a Tokyo suburb, I spoke of my concern about Japan's social dislocation with a journalist recently retired from a powerful Japanese newspaper. He confided that he, too, was deeply anxious about the nation's passive acceptance of failure; its bankrupt banks and corporate malfeasance, rampant political corruption, and the rising pessimism of its people.

“Half the people don't know how bad things are,” he told me. “The rest are in denial.”

Not just the Japanese live in denial, however. By exploring the deeper inner recesses a people keep hidden, I hope to show that shattering the smooth, glassy surface of a society's appearance represents the first crucial step toward its renewal.

(...)

Is this isolation, I wondered, simply these young adults' peculiar form of rebellion against their prevailing culture? Or are they too sensitive or inquisitive to accept such collective constraints, and flee to their rooms both for protection and self-preservation? Or are they—as Taka, one twenty-four-year-old, suggested—simply and unsettlingly “different” from the society that surrounds them? “I was raised to have a good career and be a good boy,” he told me. “My problem is that I can't go to work like other people. I'm different.”

I heard another point of view from the sixty-year-old white-haired mother of a hikikomori, a gentle and sympathetic woman who accepts and understands her son's plight, much as it grieves her: “Hikikomori are kids who value the intangibles,” Hiromi told me. I had met her for coffee to talk about the desolate isolation of her son who, now in his thirties, has for five years been living at home, confining himself to his room because he feels he has no other place where he can just be himself. “Hikikomori can see the intangibles, but cannot speak out because there is no place in Japanese society that allows them to …So,” she concluded, “a person who challenges, or makes a mistake, or thinks for himself, either leaves Japan or becomes a hikikomori.”

And, indeed, leaving Japan has been a partial solution for some like  Shigei, who has been hikikomori for the last thirteen of his thirty years. He told me that he was able to relax and meet others only when prompted by a friend to get out of Japan and visit Thailand on a trip his parents paid for. “I felt different in a country where the buses don't always run on time,” he told me. Jun found temporary relief from his anxieties during a visit to India. 3 Another hikikomori, thirty-five-year-old Yasuo Ogawara, went into hiding in his twenties after being badgered and rejected, often cruelly, by residents of the provincial town where he had relocated with his wife. “In this society, anyone can become a hikikomori,” he told me, describing how his in-laws had ostracized and bullied him to the point where the couple divorced. “It's the nature of our social system that is really the cause. It's a system operated by factions, and you have to understand the very nature of the social system to understand this problem.

“Today the values of parents and of young people are completely different,” he went on. “The post-bubble bills are coming due, and we have just started to pay for our decades of focusing only on the material.”

* * *

After listening to the tales and predicaments of dozens of these isolated men, I began to better understand the behavior of Jun and other hikikomori as their extraordinary but utterly rational indictment of a postindustrial monoculture. It isn't that these adults choose isolation out of indulgence, but that they see no other course. They need some “free space” in which to breathe, without the prying eyes of outsiders constantly judging them, forcing them to join the herd. The only space they can control is their own bedroom.

Hikikomori instinctively know that the world outside Japan—and the way that world works—has changed dramatically in recent years as Japan lags behind. They seem to perceive the nature of Japan's economic and spiritual crisis far more acutely than do the hundreds of bureaucrats and politicians I have met over the years.

Yet if what makes Japan seem so foreign and incomprehensible to  most Westerners is its insularity, homogeneity, and lockstep conformity, then it would seem logical that this syndrome—where the young try to escape that singularly compressed and restrictive life—may exist only in Japan. And since every social system is likely to foster its own unique afflictions, investigating this unusual behavior could lead me to deeper truths about Japan and its current malaise. My journalist's intuition was essentially confirmed by Satoru Saito, one of Japan's most prominent psychiatrists, who has practiced psychotherapy and taught psychoanalysis for years. An avuncular, gentle man who wears sweaters and smokes a pipe, Saito counsels dozens of hikikomori patients, as well as abusive husbands and troubled families, at the Institute for Family Function, his narrow concrete slab of a clinic in Tokyo's Azabu neighborhood. Saito is one of many specialists who also see Jun's and Kenji's and the other hikikomori s' social isolation as reflecting a rational, Japanese style of coping.

“Many Japanese kids don't express themselves. They would rather express themselves in a fantasy world and through passive-aggressive behavior,” he told me one afternoon when I visited him and asked him to analyze this syndrome. “They go on behavior strike, they go into emotional shutdown. This is one of the ways of expressing a Japanese way of life. But in acting this way, these children are simply mirroring the behavior they see among adult Japanese, especially those from elite or privileged backgrounds.”

Kenji's willful retreat into the bedroom, his unwillingness to fit in, can be sensibly explained, Saito told me. Japan's traditional family structure is splintering, he said. Its educational system, which emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking, is being questioned as never before. Young people now sense that the old rules don't work in a global age.

In the 1980s, when Japan's economy was still humming, no one had ever heard the term hikikomori. But after the economy began to sputter and misfire, the pistons began to fail and fluids began to leak, exposing the rigidities and social dysfunction that had finally made the gears seize up.

From Shutting Out the Sun ..

By Michael Zelenziger 

Fermi’s Paradox - Hermit Hypothesis

 Hermit Hypothesis: Intelligent beings never expand beyond their home planetary system, communicate, or in any other way become detectable over interstellar distances.

There are ways of making the Hermit Hypothesis more precise. Since we do not see—now, as well as in Fermi’s time—any physical reason why expansion (or just messaging!) over interstellar distances should be impossible, the Hermit Hypothesis actually means that they truly do not wish to expand or make their presence known. Under ‘physical reason’, I here subsume everything which would be universally valid for all places in the Galaxy and in all epochs. Counterfactually, if the Milky Way disc were full of marble-sized interstellar rocks in a density of about 1 per cubic kilometre, any interstellar travel (unless it were very slow) would be impossible; similarly, if interstellar space were filled with too much hot plasma, any long-range radio messaging would be impossible. We know such things are not true. And, while one should never be entirely dogmatic about the issue that some exotic physical effect may not lurk in the depths of interstellar space, the string of successes of galactic astronomy and astrophysics in the last century or so clearly makes it quite improbable, at least.

Another aspect of the problem is whether there is something universal in the cultural evolution itself and that it is this that makes the required tasks of interstellar travel and interstellar messaging impossible. That we do not know of and have not envisioned such a forbidding factor so far does not mean that such a factor does not exist. On the other hand, a mere glance at Figure 1.2 tells us that, to some extent, the complaint is vacuous: we have already, in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as in radio waves, announced our presence to the universe. The wavefront containing information about our existence expands at the speed of light throughout the Galaxy and there is nothing we can do about it.62 The same, by very basic Copernicanism, is true for other technological civilizations, at least in their immature phases analogous to our stage in cultural evolution. So, why don’t we perceive them—or is it just the size of our ‘eyes and ears’ which is insufficient for the moment? The latter would mean that we may expect the great discovery (and the resolution of Fermi’s paradox) any time a new and more sensitive astronomical detector comes online. This in itself has some important ramifications, to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.

By itself, the Hermit Hypothesis is nothing new, and not only has been mentioned in reviews,63 but also is a sort of the ‘default’ reaction to Fermi’s paradox, especially if it’s given in its SETI version:64Why, they just don’t want to communicate (with us)! It has been present in musings of the SETI ‘founding fathers’ on the Galactic Club of advanced civilizations.65 Like Sparta in Hellenistic times, like China under the Ming (after the Zheng He exploratory voyages in the fifteenth century, which were regarded as aberrations) and the Qing dynasties, like Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate, or like the totalitarian ‘hermit kingdoms’ of Albania (1945–90) and North Korea (1953–today), extraterrestrial societies do not wish to have any contact with the outside universe.66 An arguably extreme version of the Hermit Hypothesis has been described in science-fiction prose by Greg Egan in his novel Incandescence and his novella Riding the Crocodile:67The disk of the Milky Way belonged to the Amalgam, whose various ancestral species had effectively merged into a single civilization, but the central bulge was inhabited by beings who declined to do so much as communicate with those around them. All attempts to send probes into the bulge—let alone the kind of engineering spores needed to create the infrastructure for travel—had been gently but firmly rebuffed, with the intruders swatted straight back out again. The Aloof had maintained their silence and isolation since before the Amalgam itself had even existed.

In contrast to human historical experience, in which isolated societies usually lag behind their neighbours, Egan’s Aloof represent an example of technologically superior hermit sophonts.68

Note two important details about the Hermit Hypothesis, which are conveniently ignored in most discussions:

1. The emphasis on will. It implies that advanced technological civilizations, in spite of their wildly heterogeneous presumed evolutionary origins, have a unique will which could be enforced over all their individuals and groups. This is a rather strong constraint, for the following simple reason. By analogy with human history, the history of technological progress has been the history of empowerment of individuals and groups, in both a societal sense and in the sense of control over the natural environment. The average individual in Europe in 2018 has at his or her disposal resources comparable to or greater than members of aristocracy or even royalty did in, say, 1218. And in any case, the modern-day individual has much more time at his or her disposal to use such resources, taking the increase in life expectancy into account.2. The Hermit Hypothesis is not just the passive refraining from activities, such as colonization or communication. As discussed, the existence of a technological civilization, either a present-day human-level or an advanced civilization, causes detectable changes in its physical environment. Those changes are located at many levels but, for the sake of example, let us consider just Earthshine (Figure 1.2). It is a generic product of urbanization, ultimately resulting from the increase in human population and industrial activity. All this means that the Hermit Hypothesis implies active suppression of at least some generic aspects of advanced technology. It requires expenditure of effort and resources to maintain the hermit state through long periods of time. Unless the singleton state or any other way of total societal control of Point (1) is achieved, there seems to be no way how such a situation might evolve.69I have devoted much attention to the Hermit Hypothesis since it is a very important case study, not for research on Fermi’s paradox as such, but for its reception in both specialist and lay audiences. What is usually shrugged off as unanswerable (Why would they want to communicate/manifest themselves in the first place?) is, in fact, a quite specific scenario with a lot of additional assumptions, not satisfying most of the desiderata discussed in Section 1.5. It is quite reasonable to state that, taking all into account, the Hermit Hypothesis is already very unlikely, relative to many other proposed solutions. This shows how biased is the usual mundane perception of Fermi’s question.

Two sources of this particular bias exist, which again analysis of the Hermit Hypothesis clearly reveals. One is oversimplification. When people, upon hearing for the first time about Fermi’s paradox, invoke the Hermit Hypothesis in some form, it is because they think that the problem is much simpler than it really is. The simplicity of the idea that extraterrestrials do not want to communicate is quite appealing. The other is the anthropocentric concept of will and willingness. Since we all have experienced that some people do not wish to communicate with us, for reasons we often find mysterious, irrational, or inexplicable, we are likely to transfer this mode of behaviour to extraterrestrial intelligent beings as well. This is going to mislead us systematically more often than not.

The problem with ‘xeno-sociological’ hypotheses (e.g. the Hermit Hypothesis, or the Zoo Hypothesis or the Interdict Hypothesis to be described in Chapter 4, among others) is that they depend on the unknowable details of social organization of advanced technological civilizations. We know so little about the generic social organization of human societies, that any claim in the more general astrobiological context sounds preposterous and seriously decreases the credibility of any such hypothesis.

That said, the hypotheses are not all on the same footing. The degree of ‘xeno-sociological’ speculation obviously varies. It is one thing to postulate uniformity of behaviour over thousands of parsecs, millions of years, and the unimaginable diversity of evolutionary parameters, as in the Hermit Hypothesis, and quite another to postulate agreement between presumably a small number of independent agents required to ‘maintain the zoo’ in the Zoo Hypothesis.

(...)

Suppose that a sufficiently large fraction of Galactic civilizations is capable of overcoming both natural hazards and the urge for self-destruction and thus advances to technological maturity. Are they all possible SETI targets—and sources of the paradoxical conclusions with respect to Fermi’s puzzle? Not necessarily, since there are at least two problems which are likely to remain worrisome even after such a transition: self-limitation, and the threat from deadly probes, to be considered in this section and in Section 6.6, respectively.

Self-limitation means that a civilization decreases its detection cross section through some intentional process.39 Self-limitation can take many possible forms. One of them is the Hermit Hypothesis discussed in Chapter 1. ‘Self-limitation’ can be regarded as an umbrella term for many different scenarios. However, one of them is particularly worrisome: the establishment of permanent or near-permanent totalitarian control over all individual intelligent agents in the civilization, coupled with a set of goals leading to a small cross section for detection.Introvert Big Brother: If all Galactic civilizations, instead of self-destruction, slip into permanent totalitarianism, this will dramatically decrease the contact cross section, making them essentially undetectable. In addition, this circumstance will increase the civilizations’ susceptibility to other hazards, like those falling under The Gigayear of Living Dangerously category. Since permanently totalitarian civilizations are likely to be spatially small (in Galactic terms) and technologically stagnating, they are unlikely to leave traces and manifestations detectable over interstellar distances, so there is no Fermi’s paradox.

Since we obviously know nothing about the distribution of historical trajectories of different intelligent species, this hypothesis is extremely speculative—no less so than those of Chapter 4. However, given the overall gravity of its subject matter, as well as its extreme relevance to the future of humanity, Introvert Big Brother should not be neglected. The Orwellian state is quite disinterested in the external universe; even if it were willing to communicate, its inherently paranoid nature would have made any opportunity for contact orders of magnitude more difficult.40 Remember Comrade O’Brien’s solipsist geocentrism in 1984:41

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’

Historians have demonstrated how classical totalitarian systems like Nazism and communism undermined science and technology for ideological benefit.42 Robert Zubrin has argued that ‘bad memes’ could even destroy a large Galactic civilization which would otherwise be immune to all other natural and artificial threats; this is Introvert Big Brother taken to the extreme.43 Lem’s novel Eden paints another bleak picture of extraterrestrial totalitarianism.44

How could such a state of affairs emerge? Obviously, there are many possible ways of establishing a totalitarian state, but one is becoming more and more actual with time: in order to avoid self-destruction or other global catastrophic risks, the infrastructure for such a state could be set up, with broad societal acquiescence.45 Such an infrastructure would include global and detailed surveillance, advanced methods of data processing, genetic screening, and so on. All such measures—and other more intrusive ones, not considered today in this relatively benign, nearly totalitarianism-free moment in human history—may have entirely legitimate justification within a liberal governance; however, once in place, they might be subverted for totalitarian purposes much more easily than in the case of setting up totalitarianism ab initio. We have witnessed that even the most liberal and enlightened human societies can take illiberal measures, with broad acquiescence of the population, if sufficiently threatened. The relevant insight is that such a development will likely lead to the decrease of contact cross section, thus enabling the hiding of older intelligent communities, and the paradoxical conclusions of Fermi’s problem.

A particularly troubling feature of this type of hypothesis is that a single type of totalitarian state could arise as a consequence of many different sorts of crises (including preventing global catastrophic/existential risks), but there are few ways—if any—it could be dismantled if it is technologically sufficiently advanced. In other words, it could be regarded as an attractor in the space of the possible historical trajectories of civilizations. If that is indeed so, the disturbing Introvert Big Brother must play at least some role in the ultimate resolution of Fermi’s paradox, since it is hard to imagine that at least some sophonts in any sufficiently big sample manage to avoid falling into the totalitarian trap.

The hypothesis also faces serious problems, however. At leastas much as Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, it suffers from violation of non-exclusivity, since in contrast to, for example, Astrobiological phase transition, both warfare and totalitarianism on different Earth-like planets in the Galaxy are independent factors and are extremely unlikely to be correlated.46 However, while self-destruction is one endpoint of the historical trajectory of a civilization, totalitarianism does not mean extinction. No matter how advanced, a totalitarian government cannot have the same finality as extinction; even a very improbable event like the overthrow of a technologically advanced totalitarian government, can happen in the fullness of time. While this is good news for the enslaved populations of such a regime, it is rather bad news for Introvert Big Brother as an explanatory hypothesis. It has to explain the suppression of the detection cross section over much longer times than Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This automatically decreases our credence in it.

Again, totalitarianism might actually work in conjunction with other destructive process to suppress detectability. It is reasonable to expect that totalitarian regimes are more vulnerable to some kinds of natural or artificial disasters than more open societies are—even our limited human experience suggests it. (Consider, for example, the appalling inefficiency of Soviet response to the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident in 1986.) So, a mixture of the Introvert Big Brother and The Gigayear of Living Dangerously can be a potent suppressor of detectability over vast regions of space and time. There will be more on those synergistic solutions in Chapter 8.

A further line of criticism of Introvert Big Brother and similar scenarios suggests that, in fact, without a more extensive sociological and political theory, we cannot be sure that technologically advanced totalitarian regimes will not be extrovert and colonization oriented. At least, without any further specification, we cannot be more sure of that than we are in their long-term stability. The Orwellian vision encompassed the entire surface of the globe, but we can imagine totalitarian dictatorships willing to go much further. Philip K. Dick, in the most classic of all alternate history novels, The Man in the High Castle, has victorious Nazi Germany vaguely attempting to colonize Mars.47 Another canonical literary dystopia, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, even revolves around a protagonist who is constructing a spaceship for a totalitarian state.48 Perhaps a totalitarian regime in the Scutum-Crux spiral arm might wish to arrange local stars into an image—including details of the mandibles and pseudopodia—of the Beloved Leader?49 After all, most monuments of extinct human civilizations not only were created by oppressive social systems, but also were created for purposes intrinsically linked to the oppressiveness of such systems (pyramids, cathedrals, mausoleums, etc.). If, contrary to most of our intuitions and recent trends in our history, the current expansion of individual freedoms and human rights is just a fluke or a lull in the storm, and the future belongs to totalitarian ways of governing and social regimentation, could it be the case that human macro-engineering projects or artefacts will become likelier? While it is difficult to conclude either way in the absence of further insights into the social dynamics of totalitarianism, this very uncertainty ought to count as a weakness of Introvert Big Brother and similar hypotheses.

An Orwellian superstate governing through ‘Ignorance Is Strength’ is not the only form of self-limitation, though. Another is the (in)famous concept of ‘return to nature’: the either voluntary or involuntary relinquishment of technology, reversing the technological progress which on Earth has lasted for many centuries before suddenly accelerating with the Industrial Revolution. The latter is usually seen, according to ideologues of a return to a simpler, pastoral lifestyle, as the chief culprit for all of humanity’s problems. Of course, pastoral civilizations are, by definition, Hermits, since they have no means of communicating over interstellar distances, let alone leaving traces in the form of astroengineering. And, in contrast to totalitarianism, where stability is the ultimate goal of a system to be actively pursued, pastoral civilizations are unstable against both natural catastrophes and, ahem, progress.50 Preventing all members, everywhere, from engaging in science and technology tinkering would require efficient totalitarian enforcement—which is likely to be impossible in the absence of technology. So, without going into the merits and demerits of ‘return-to-nature’ pastoralism, we can say that, although some intelligent species may opt for it, there can be few more exclusivist and hence unlikely options around.

The opposite of pastoralism, namely rapacious industrialization and exploitation of natural resources, presents a more serious catastrophic threat. This is the subject matter of another of the ‘almost-default’ hypotheses discussed by Brin, Hanson, and others, and one which becomes more and more of practical interest for intelligent beings here, on Earth:51

Resource Exhaustion: Interstellar expansion by technological civilizations tends to consume the material resources of any planetary system on an exponentially short timescale. Thus, interstellar colonization creates a bubble of systems with exhausted resources, and eventually leads to the collapse of large civilizations. Within these exhausted bubbles, natural processes lead to slow, gradual replenishment—which, in turn, leads to the whole cycle repeating itself. We have emerged within one such bubble, at the ‘down’ part of the cycle (which is no coincidence, since it could be argued that no young sophonts could evolve in the ‘up’ part of the cycle), so there is no surprise that we do not perceive large Galactic civilizations around us. It is yet another observation-selection effect.

This explanatory hypothesis is related to neocatastrophic, as well as solipsist, and logistic options (to be considered in Chapter 7). Obviously, it presupposes sudden, catastrophic processes violating gradualism; but, at the same time, it subtly assumes that the ‘obvious’ absence of any traces of other Galactic sophonts from the Solar System is an illusion. If the Solar System had been colonized even in the very distant past, say 2–3 Ga ago, some traces of that event should, in principle, be found, most probably in the asteroid belt or possibly on the Moon.52 This should in no way be confused with the ‘ancient astronauts’ speculations discussed in Chapter 4: in sharp contrast, it is exactly the lack of apparent traces which makes Resource Exhaustion a functioning hypothesis. After so much erosion and local changes on the billion-year scale, there is hardly any chance of ‘archaeological’ evidence to be found on Earth; however, the question of the evidence in the asteroid belt (and other low-erosion environments) could be regarded as open, especially if it is of a purely geological nature, namely the traces of ancient mining activities.

There is no reason to doubt—and all reasons to suspect—that Resource Exhaustion could cripple civilizations, irrespective of their age or other parameters, up to some critical technological level. As long as we stick to the laws of physics as the only ultimate constraint and do not concern ourselves with the extreme timescales of physical eschatology (i.e. we consider only our astrophysical environment up to 1015 years in the future, the epoch in which galaxies remain as well-defined bound entities), Resource Exhaustion should not happen at all! Namely, the elemental composition of any particular material resource could, in principle, be replicated using nuclear transmutation, starting from any other chemical element, including hydrogen. After all, nature has created all isotopes heavier than helium (apart from a minuscule primordial abundance of 7Li) in exactly that manner, mainly by thermonuclear fusion in stars, with additional fission of unstable nuclides and occasional spallation reactions with high-energy cosmic rays. There is no fundamental obstacle to recreating all these reactions in a lab and even to perform them in bulk for industrial purposes, provided sufficient energy is available. The real question is not one of fundamental physics but is rather one of an economic nature: will bulk nuclear transmutation to create a particular resource X ever become cheap enough for a sufficiently advanced civilization to outweigh the costs of bringing the same amount of X from elsewhere in the universe?

If the answer is yes, advanced technological civilizations need not fear resource exhaustion, as long as they have any matter to work with and a sufficient energy supply. As previously argued, energy is plentiful both in the era of shining stars (when it can be captured via Dyson spheres and similar contraptions) and even later, in utilizing the gravitational collapse. On longer-still future timescales, exotic energy sources, like the bulk annihilation of CDM particles and antiparticles, or even Hawking evaporation of black holes, could be put to industrial use.53 Baseline matter also need not be too big a problem if the civilization is compact—that is, far from being a Kardashev’s Type 3; we observe a huge amount of unused matter in our astrophysical environment anyway. So, Resource Exhaustion will not really resolve our difficulties in this case.

If, for at least some vital resources, cheap transmutation always remains unfeasible, civilizations will really have an economic impetus to expand (which is the default position in many superficial treatments of Fermi’s paradox). In this case, the expansion might form a roughly spherical wavefront which will gradually turn into a sphere of mostly exhausted planetary systems, surrounded by a thin shell of ‘normal’ activity. If this were to occur with the full knowledge of other sophonts who were doing it in other parts of the Galaxy (knowledge which would be easy to get with miniaturized robotic interstellar probes), we could have a particularly nasty form of the Hansonian ‘burning the cosmic commons’ scenario.54 Considering the fact that there are some weak analogies in humanity’s history for how quickly this form of escalation can ruin otherwise prosperous cultures (e.g. Rapa Nui), we should take the lesson seriously.55So, Resource Exhaustion can, with some auxiliary assumptions, explain at least weaker forms of Fermi’s paradox. On the other hand, the very dependence on these assumptions of a sociological and cultural nature—and the fact that it utilizes disequilibrium conditions (although conditions that are very slow—on timescales of the billions of years necessary for the natural replenishment of resources—to relax)—count against it in comparison with those hypotheses which offer at least a prospect of explaining the equilibrium. To one of those, and a particularly disturbing one, we now turn.

From: The Great Silence

The Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox

Milan M. Ćirković

Remizov - Sisters of the Cross - Introduction

 INTRODUCTION

“There is a problem with you—you are untranslatable.”

(D. S. Mirsky)1

Alexei Remizov (1877–1957) was one of the leading figures in the Symbolist movement in Russian literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Sisters of the Cross (1910)2 is arguably his greatest fictional achievement, worthy to rank with such high points of Russian modernism as Andrei Belyi’s Petersburg (1913–1914) and Fiodor Sologub’s The Petty Demon (1907). At the same time, Remizov is probably the least well-known of the three great novelists of the movement, and unlike Belyi and Sologub, has been little translated into English. Three of his six novels did appear in English translation during the 1920s, it is true,3 but for some reason his masterpiece Sisters of the Cross never appeared in the language, either then or in more recent times. This may be because of the complexity of Remizov’s style, which is a singular amalgam of colloquial, literary, and folkloric Russian. Remizov himself was philosophical about the fact. “Sisters of the Cross has been translated into German, French, Italian, and Japanese,” he once wrote, “but you won’t find it in English; there was no Russian around to give the word, and the English themselves are too rich—they lack curiosity about other people’s literatures.”4

The plot of Remizov’s novel is universal in its resonance. The thirty-year-old Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin lives a contented, if humdrum, life working as a financial clerk in a Petersburg trading company. He is jolted out of his daily routine when, quite unexpectedly, he is accused of embezzlement and loses his job. The iron enters his soul as he gradually becomes aware of the indifference of the majority of people to the misfortunes of others. His change of status will bring him into contact with a number of women whose life experiences bear upon his own, and whose sufferings will lead him to question the justice of God’s universe. Three of the women share the name Vera (“Verushka” or “Verochka” in its affectionate forms), which means “belief” or “faith” in Russian, and this group of characters, which includes Marakulin’s deceased mother, are by implication the “sisters of the cross” referred to in the title.

In some ways Sisters of the Cross derives from what Donald Fanger has dubbed the “romantic realist” tradition in European literature,5 familiar to us from the work of such writers as Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. In romantic realist works, writes Fanger, “facts become symbols, revealing through the events of the temporal world a transcendent sphere of causes and effects.”6 Remizov’s hero lives in the Burkov flats in Petersburg, a tenement building not unlike the pension Vauquer in Balzac’s novel Le Père Goriot, and like old Goriot he is forced to move apartments and rent a room higher up in the building, an act symbolizing the decline in his financial and social circumstances. Burkov House—the building and the four-chimneyed electricity station overlooking it survive to this day—operates as a symbol of “all Petersburg” in a social sense, therefore, but, as it turns out, may also be the point of contact with metaphysical forces inimical to humankind. (There are plot links here with Andrei Belyi’s novel Petersburg, written a little later and almost certainly influenced by Remizov’s novel.)

A different intertextual link connects Marakulin with the depiction of the lowly clerk Akaky Akakievich in Gogol’s Petersburg tale, “The Greatcoat” (1842), and here, too, the similarities point beyond those of mere social typicality. Like Gogol’s hero—and like Remizov in real life, incidentally—Marakulin is a master copyist who, as the narrator tells us, for days and nights “traces out one character after another,…until he achieves such perfection that you could display his work in an exhibition.” Most of Akaky Akakievich’s colleagues attribute no significance at all to such a skill, preferring, indeed, to mock him as he immerses himself in the single aspect of his existence that approximates perfection. Marakulin’s devotion to calligraphy is presented as an attribute of freedom, possessing value in and of itself and associated perhaps with the “feeling of inexplicable joy” that the hero experiences at unexpected moments in his life, including that of falling in love.

Above all, however, Remizov’s novel is replete with social, psychological, and plot motifs reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s work, especially of Crime and Punishment (1866). The hero Marakulin resembles Raskolnikov in many ways, although he lacks the latter’s will to dominate others. The suffering of the women around him leads Marakulin to become increasingly fixated on the wife of the deceased General Kholmogorov, who inhabits one of the richer apartments of Burkov House. Nicknamed the “louse,” she comes to symbolize in his eyes the heartless nonchalance of a life focused entirely on its purely material, nonspiritual attributes. He wonders, however, in words that recall the figure of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), whether a life deprived of suffering, moral responsibility, and fear of mortality might not be the preferred choice of most members of the human race. Parallels with Raskolnikov’s victim—the grasping moneylender Aliona Ivanovna—are inescapable. She was also referred to by Raskolnikov as the “louse,” and although Marakulin does indeed consider various ways in which the louse might be disposed of, it is noticeable that, unlike Dostoevsky’s hero, he cannot bring himself to deny another creature the gift of life.

As already alluded to, a recurring semantic and stylistic presence in Sisters of the Cross are motifs taken from folklore, old Russian heroic poetry (byliny), and Orthodox Russian apocryphal texts. These convey both the notion of Christ’s suffering (participated in by “sisters [and brothers] of the cross”) and the possibility of forgiveness, the latter particularly embodied in the life of another of the main female characters, the peasant woman and “holy fool” Akumovna. One of the novel’s major stylistic tours de force, indeed, is the account given by Akumovna of her visit to hell, a nightmarish vision that is shot through with motifs from an apocryphal tale concerning the Virgin Mary.7

 Marakulin is particularly affected by Akumovna’s profound belief that whatever happens in life, “no one should be blamed.” Nevertheless, he rails inwardly against what he perceives to be his own submissiveness and that of others. Far from believing that self-abasement will bring people closer to God, he becomes more and more convinced that there is no God or that, if he exists, he is indifferent or evil. The “sisters’ ” very different experiences of suffering provide the backdrop against which Marakulin’s Karamazovian rejection of a world seemingly abandoned by God is played out. On the other hand, Sisters of the Cross is undoubtedly a post-Dostoevskian novel that belongs firmly in the Russian modernist tradition.

Sisters of the Cross is a rich and intricate novel, therefore, that successfully unites ethnographic depiction of the realia of Petersburg in 1910 with folklore traditions inherited from the Russian past—all coexisting with colloquial skaz narration à la Gogol and metaphysical speculation à la Dostoevsky.8 Remizov’s dense “ornamental” style is used to embody a plot that moves both metonymically—the life, sufferings, and dreams of Marakulin interspersed with descriptions of the trials and tribulations of seven “sisters of the cross”—and metaphorically—the complex web of cyclically repeated leitmotifs that imply the existence of another dimension beyond the world of our common interpretation.

Remizov and his wife left Russia in 1921, never to return. After a period spent in Berlin, they settled in Paris, and Remizov eventually became a leading Russian émigré writer alongside Ivan Bunin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Aleksandr Kuprin, and others. Like most émigré writers, with the notable exception of Vladimir Nabokov, he never found a large audience for his work, either in France or elsewhere, and he was reviled by the Soviet critical establishment until his death in 1957. Remizov’s work always attracted the attention of cognoscenti in the west, however, and his collected works in ten volumes finally appeared in Russia some fifteen years ago.9 He was also a talented graphic artist and illustrator of his own works; a book on this subject was published in the United States not long ago.10

Sisters of the Cross was regarded by Remizov’s fellow Symbolist writers and critics as among his best and most significant achievements, and the novel was one of the few works that Remizov—an arch-rewriter of his own œuvre—did not tamper with in subsequent years. This makes it all the more extraordinary, perhaps, that the novel has never before appeared in English translation. It was, in fact, not the case, as Remizov later wrote, that his work lacked Russian advocates in England. On the contrary, Dmitry Mirsky, the most gifted of Russian critics living in the west and the author of the greatest history of Russian literature in the English language, made valiant efforts on the writer’s behalf throughout the 1920s. Remizov had “created an entirely fresh style of Russian prose,” he wrote, one based “not on the logic of written language, but on the system of intonations of living speech.”11 Remizov’s intention, Mirsky argued, was to “de-Latinize and de-Frenchify the Russian literary language and to restore to it its natural Russian raciness.”12 By comparison with certain Western European languages, Russian’s highly inflected nature does indeed give it extraordinary syntactic flexibility, and this, together with Remizov’s predilection for obscure archaisms and unusual coinages, was bound to cause difficulty for translators. “He uses so many hard words,” lamented one potential English translator in 1916,13 a sentiment echoed by Mirsky in his letter to Remizov of March 11, 1924: “There is a problem with you—you are untranslatable. But we will see what can be done.”14

Roger Keys,Oxford, April 30, 2017

13.  The translator referred to is the Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, to whom Mirsky dedicated his A History of Russian Literature from the Earliest Times to the Death of Dostoyevsky (1881) (London: Routledge, 1927). She went on to edit and translate a collection of Remizov’s animal tales, entitled The Book of the Bear (London: Nonesuch, 1926). The quotation is taken from page 193 of Marilyn Schwinn Smith’s informative article “Aleksei Remizov’s English-Language Translators: New Material,” A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, ed. Anthony Cross (Cambridge: Open Book, 2012), 189–200.14.