Once again it’s the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nagasaki followed three days later, and Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945.

To date these two bombs remain—astoundingly enough, considering the nature of our oft-troubled and troubling species—the only nuclear warheads ever detonated over populated areas. (I’ve written at length on the subject of those bombs: see this, this, and this.)

Oliver Kamm wrote a while back:

Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.

This context always needs to be kept in mind when evaluating any “terrible thing”—and there is no question that the dropping of these bombs was a terrible thing.

But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty— whatever the dreadful adjective du jour might be—are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth. As Kamm writes, those who want to portray Hiroshima and Nagasaki as American crimes cite evidence of an imminent Japanese surrender that would have happened anyway.

Trouble is, available information points strongly to the contrary. It’s difficult to know whether those who argue that the bombs were unnecessary and the deaths that ensued gratuitous are guilty of poor scholarship, wishful thinking, or willful lying – but most likely it’s some combination of these elements.

Truth in history is not easy to determine (see this), although it helps greatly if conventions of scholarship (sources, citations) are properly followed. Oh, the main events themselves are often not disputed – except for fringe groups – although the details are often the subject of disagreement. But it’s the motivations behind the acts, the hearts and minds of the movers and shakers, the “what-might-have-been’s” and the “but-fors” that are so open to both partisan interpretation and willful distortion, and so deeply meaningful.

It’s hard enough to determine what happened. How many died in Dresden, for example? Do we believe Goebbels’s propaganda as promulgated by David Irving, or do we believe this work of recent exhaustive scholarship? The former “facts” have reigned now in popular opinion for quite a while, and although the latter mounts a far more convincing case, how many have read it or are familiar with the facts in it, compared to those who have been heavily exposed to the former?

There’s what happened, and then there’s why it happened—the meaning and intent behind the policy. A combination of the two is what propaganda is all about. It takes a lot of time and effort to wade through facts, make judgments about the veracity of sources, and be willing to keep an open mind.

Much easier to stand in a public square (as a bunch of nodding, smiling, waving, elderly peace-love Boomers regularly used to do in a town where I lived) holding huge banners declaring “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.” Repeat it often enough, and the hope is it will become Truth in people’s eyes.

Especially in the eyes of the young, and of future generations, who don’t have their own memories to go on. It’s much harder to convince a WWII vet that Hiroshima was an unnecessary war crime than it is to convince a young person of same; the former not only has the context, he has own personal memories of the context. World War II veterans are scarce these days and getting scarcer by the minute. And propagandists from the left are more numerous, with larger platforms from which to distribute their products. They are not just interested in changing opinions in the present, they’re interested in history and the future.

[NOTE: The definitive essay on the dropping of the atomic bomb by a contemporary and a fine historian is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” And for a good discussion of all the controversy about whether Japan was thinking of surrendering prior to Hiroshima, see this. For a discussion of the idea that Russia’s entry into the war against Japan rather than the atomic bomb was the cause of Japan’s surrender, see this.]

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Well, a couple of days ago we got some very good news related to all of this, but not many news outlets even reported it. I don’t see anything from Michelle Obama, either (I checked her “X” page). I guess over the years much of the virtue-signaling world has stopped caring about “our” girls.

They haven’t been forgotten in Nigeria, though; take a look [emphasis mine]:

Hundreds of hostages, mostly children and women, who were held captive for months or years by Boko Haram extremists in northeastern Nigeria have been rescued from a forest enclave and handed over to authorities, the army said.

The 350 hostages had been held in the Sambisa Forest, a hideout for the extremist group which launched an insurgency in 2009, Maj. Gen. Ken Chigbu, a senior Nigerian army officer, said late Monday while presenting them to authorities in Borno, where the forest is.

The 209 children, 135 women and six men appeared exhausted in their worn-out clothes. Some of the girls had babies believed to have been born from forced marriages, as is often the case with female victims who are either raped or forced to marry the militants while in captivity.

Note the use of the word “extremists” rather than “terrorists.” And I don’t know why the word “either” is in there; in such cases, marriage is rape.

More:

The army said the hostages were rescued during a dayslong military operation in Sambisa Forest, which was once a bustling forest reserve that stretches along the border with Cameroon and Niger, but now serves as an enclave from where Boko Haram and its breakaway factions carry out attacks that also target people and security forces in neighboring countries.

Some extremists were killed during the rescue operation and their makeshift houses were destroyed, the army said.

So the hostages were apparently being guarded and there was some sort of battle.

Finally the article gets around to explaining the Muslim jihadi origins of the group:

Boko Haram, Nigeria’s homegrown jihadi rebels, launched its insurgency in 2009 to establish Islamic Shariah law in the country. At least 35,000 people have been killed and 2.1 million people displaced as a result of the extremist violence, according to U.N. agencies in Nigeria.

The US campuses seem notably silent on the matter. They’re too busy championing other jihadi terrorists kidnapping and raping and killing other young women.

Here’s a reference to the kidnapped group that sparked the “Bring back our girls” campaign [emphasis mine]:

The majority of those rescued were women and children, many of whom had been abducted a decade ago.

Acting General Officer Commanding … Haruna revealed that the rescue operation was part of a 10-day endeavor named ‘Operation Desert Sanity 111’, aimed at eliminating terrorist remnants from Sambisa forest while offering surrender opportunities to willing insurgents.

… [In] the infamous Chibok schoolgirls abduction in 2014 … approximately 276 girls were forcefully taken from their school dormitory.

While some managed to escape captivity, others were rescued by troops during clearance operations, with the latest rescue occurring in April 2024.

Despite these efforts, approximately 90 of the Chibok girls remain unaccounted for, raising hopes that some may be among those recently rescued from Sambisa forest.

Let us hope so. This is really good news, in a time when we haven’t gotten too much of it, especially about raped and kidnapped woman taken into sexual slavery by jihadis.

Note also that the articles don’t mention the word “Christian,” but in the case of the Chibok kidnapping (and probably the others, as well, although I’m not 100% sure of that) the targeted girls were Christian. More:

Boko Haram has used the [Chibok] girls as negotiating pawns in prisoner exchanges, offering to release some girls in exchange for some of their captured commanders in jail.

Sound familiar?

The girls kidnapped in Chibok in 2014 are only a small percentage of the total number of people abducted by Boko Haram. Amnesty International estimated in 2015 that at least 2,000 women and girls had been abducted by the group since 2014, many of whom had been forced into sexual slavery.

Nigeria is a country that’s about half Muslim and half Christian, and in much of the country there isn’t much tension between the two groups. But in the north – which is predominantly Muslim – Boko Haram is very active and has wreaked havoc, especially with the Christian population in that area.

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Fairy tales are powerful because they often deal with nightmare scenarios that are then overcome. The hero meets the witch or ogre or troll or wild animal that wishes to kidnap or eat or kill, and the plucky little boy or girl has to call on cleverness, goodness, kindly spirit animals, fairy godmothers, or other benign forces that exist as well in the universe of the dream and manage to help the child counteract the evil.

The child knows, or senses, that vulnerability. Something might lurk under the bed or in the closet, something might come to get the child and snatch him or her away from the comfort and protection of home. But fortunately that happens very rarely.

And yet it happens. The Israeli children kidnapped on October 7 are examples of the horror of a nightmare come true. This also is true for any kidnapped child (or adult, actually), some of whom have become quite well-known. Elizabeth Smart, for example. Those three girls in Cleveland, Ohio – remember? – kept in captivity for about 10 years by the sadistic Ariel Castro. Steven Stayner. And many more.

All of those kidnap victims I just mentioned were sexually abused. You may or may not be familiar with the details, and yet that was a prominent part of what happened to them. Some managed to heal quite well after they were freed, and some did much less well.

Yet another kidnapped sexual abuse victim was Patty Hearst, whom I’ve written about previously in this post. Many people are unaware of that aspect of her kidnapping, perhaps because she was a bit older (19) when it happened and probably because she seemed to voluntarily join her kidnappers in their crimes later on. But she was tortured first: blindfolded, kept in a closet for weeks, and raped.

Now that almost all of the Israeli children Hamas kidnapped have come home, their stories are coming out. And it’s clear that they have experienced extremely serious trauma, on par with nightmare. Here is a discussion of some of what happened:

These children – and their families – were suddenly plunged into a truly nightmare world. I mean that in the literal sense, although of course they were awake and not asleep. Their real world because nightmarish. The protection and love on which children rely had disappeared, except for the slightly luckier ones who were with family or people they knew and loved. But they were all – including those adults – completely at the mercy of evil people. And as Patty Hearst herself said much later on (in a 2002 Larry King interview):

You know how when people have been held hostage, one of the first questions they get asked is, how were you treated? And the answer is almost always I was treated, you know, pretty well. And by that, they usually mean they weren’t killed.

I am very glad the children are back. I assume it will take most of them a long time to heal and attain a semblance of normalcy, but I also assume they never will be the same. But I hope they will – as Hemingway said – be strong at the broken places.

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I know it’s not a real cheerer-upper, but I recently read Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illych. Actually, you could say that I re-read it, since my first encounter with the novella was in a Russian literature course I took as a senior in college.

You may remember from Part 4A of “A mind is a difficult thing to change” that this was the year my boyfriend was fighting in Vietnam. Consequently, it was very hard for me to concentrate on anything. But that Russian lit course, and a history course I also took that year entitled ‘Russian Intellectual History,” grabbed me and caught my attention with tremendous force.

Both courses focused on works from the 19th century, which at the time I considered to be more or less ancient history. That’s why I was so amazed at the immediacy and relevance of both courses. Clearly, the Russians didn’t mess around when they wrote; they went for the jugular, the Big Issues, and they didn’t let go. The meaning of life, good vs. evil, that sort of thing. Perfect for a college student, and especially perfect for me at the time because I had no patience whatsoever with anything that didn’t deal with those Big Issues, since I was dealing with quite a few of them myself.

The history course was sobering. It turns out that those old Russians (Bakunin, Herzen, the Slavophiles are the names that now come to mind, although the details have become very fuzzy) had been wrestling mightily with questions such as what sort of society would be best for humankind, and how best to create it. Hmmm. In the 60s, that’s what we were doing, too.

So it seemed that we college students of the 60s were not nearly as unique as we thought we were, after all. Even I could see that, from reading these Russians. Their voices sounded suspiciously like those of the young firebrands who spoke at the local SDS meetings. Since I already knew the endpoint of the path those long-ago Russians had taken, often with great idealism and hope, this made me a lot more skeptical of the modern variety. This was actually the sort of thing that kept me a liberal rather than a leftist in those days.

But back to Ivan Ilych, which I also read that same year. Unlike the others, it’s not about politics, although Tolstoi can’t resist putting in a noble peasant (the only idealized character in the book), and mocking the bourgeousie. The story achieves greatness as a feat of psychological imagination, a relentless study of an “unexamined life.”

Tolstoi himself was an incredibly complex and contradictory man, a titanic figure, and one of the first literary superstars. He could be supremely idealistic and maddeningly cruel all at the same time (read about his treatment of his long-suffering wife, if you want to get an idea of the latter). But boy, could that guy write! Much of his writing in Ivan Illych has an immediacy and an almost brutal honesty, as well as a dry humor, that seems startlingly original and quite modern.

Here’s one of my favorite passages from the work; I recall it from college, and I noted it with a flash of appreciative recognition on my recent re-reading. Just as we students of the 60s had some trouble accepting that we resembled countless others who had come this way before us; so, also, does Ivan Illych have great difficulty giving up his belief in his own exceptionalism:

In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”

Such was his feeling.

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You get to thinking a blogger is someone you know, and although the conversations are a mite one-sided, they’re not totally one-sided because many bloggers interact in the comments as well. And then there’s always email contact, which makes the blogger much more easily accessible than the olden-day columnist.

The writing voices of bloggers are highly idiosyncratic as well. It’s not newspaper reporting, after all, with its pretense of objectivity and impersonality. Also, there’s no middleman or editor. The blogger is all of that rolled into one.

Some bloggers are far more personal in their writing and disclosure than others. Gerard Vanderleun was that way, for example. I’m much more circumspect (remember that apple I hide behind). Then again, even what appears like openness is hardly full disclosure, and bloggers intentionally shape the personae they project. That’s why meeting a blogger in the real world usually causes some feeling of surprise, because the writer is not the person although the person is the writer.

So when a writer dies and that writing voice is stilled, it’s extra-noticeable for the readers. There’s often a pang very much like losing a good friend in real life, a friend with a major daily presence. The blogger has been churning out copy like a machine, usually every day and probably several times a day, often for years or decades. And then suddenly: silence. Utter utter silence.

It’s a very dramatic reminder that death is an abrupt and reluctant parting as far as our lives on earth go, and how powerless all of us are in its face.

[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know the story of why I’m writing about Gerard Vanderleun, please see this.]

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Old magazines, old newspapers, old medical records, every piece of artwork our son ever created, and old letters.

Recently he’s been going through the stacks and trying to weed a lot of it out. Good luck. But one of the results of that activity is that he periodically shows me some old letters he thinks might interest me. Some of these are around fifty years old, and none of them were written later than thirty years ago.

It turns out I remember none of them – nor does he, by the way. Some of them I may not even have ever seen in the first place, since many were written to him by members of his family, my in-laws. I’ve found reading them to be an emotional and sometimes revelatory experience.

There’s the humor, wit, and warmth of some people who’ve died, and the act of missing them anew. That’s bittersweet.

Some of the letters to my ex from one particular sibling of his, and his mother, somewhat stunned me. I saw two things in those letters that I would have liked to have known at the time. The first is that one relative, who hasn’t always been the friendliest in real life, always closed his notes by saying to say hi to me. So much friendlier and more thoughtful towards me than I ever knew! The same for my mother-in-law, who mentioned me in every letter with great warmth and praise although in person we had our differences and problems. The whole thing just about brought me to tears, not tears of upset but of a complex of feelings that came down to: if only I’d known. She’s been gone almost twenty years.

A few from my mother, who was a good writer. And although I don’t remember these particular ones I certainly remember her letters, a few of which I’ve saved in my own archives over the years.

And one from a friend I thought had never written me a single thing. Perhaps that’s all she ever did write me – just the one – but it shocked and pleased me nevertheless to see it.

I often tease my ex about his propensity for saving so much. At least now that we don’t live together, I don’t have to open closets and see the stacks, or encounter them in random places out in the open (I have my own stacks, of course, but most are in a file cabinet and the rest are relatively small). But I can hardly criticize him at this point for saving these letters. They seem very precious all these years later.

The post Reading old letters appeared first on The New Neo.

Last night I was musing about the changes in dance in my lifetime, a topic I’ve written about many times and which boils down to the sacrifice of art to gymnastics. Three of the most astounding ballet dancers I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen many – are Violette Verdy, Carla Fracci, and Galina Ulanova, all of whom I’ve written about and all of whom had a transcendent essence that could not be captured on film. Verdy was the most fleet and musical dancer I’ve ever seen, Fracci the most charming and other-worldly – like an old ballet lithograph come to life – and Ulanova the best at naturalistic believability with a gossamer and fluid technique to support it. There’s no one today anything like them. The entire aesthetic that trained and elevated them is gone.

But I remember, and so do a lot of other people who aren’t young.

Which brings me to a dance teacher I’ve known: Natasha Boskovic. At the ages of fourteen and sixteen I attended an arts camp in Canada at which she was the ballet mistress. I spent many hours under her tutelage every day but Sunday, and even some Sundays when extra rehearsals loomed. She was a colorful old-world figure, with a cabin of her own that included a trunkful of memorabilia and old costumes, and many scrapbooks with wonderful clippings from around the world and marvelous photos of her with famous people in the ballet world of the 1930s.

Natasha had a Slavic accent (it turns out she was originally from Yugoslavia, although I was unaware of it at the time). Her favorite phrase when exasperated was German, however: “Gott in Himmel!” – and considering her task, which was to teach nearly every day and organize a huge end-of-summer dance production with students whom it would be kind to call amateurs, she had plenty of cause for exasperation. But most of the time she was wonderful to us all, although demanding.

Natasha was somewhat crippled, like so many of my early ballet teachers. She wasn’t young but she wasn’t very very old, nor were the rest of them. Dance had injured them way back when, and the injuries never quite healed. This was the case for Natasha, whose partner had dropped her several times (that’s what I recall her saying, anyway), and she had danced through the injuries and paid the price. Now she couldn’t really demonstrate steps but instead indicated them – and of course used the French nomenclature that every ballet student must learn. Sometimes she had one of the more advanced students demonstrate. But her own legs never went higher than a couple of inches off the floor, if that, and she walked with a limp.

One day she was engaged in teaching a friend of mine the Russian Dance from Act III of “Swan Lake,” the ballet we were performing that summer. The third act features dances from around the world, and the Russian variation is one. My friend was having trouble learning the style, which should appear effortless but was hard to pick up, and Natasha got out of her chair to demonstrate.

She hardly bothered with the feet, which didn’t feature pyrotechnics (and the dance was not on pointe; it was meant to be a character dance of the folkish variety). She was showing the arms, head, position of the body, and style.

But first she did the most extraordinary thing. I remember it still, very vividly. She turned on a spotlight inside herself.

I have never seen anyone do that before or since. Suddenly she glowed, although nothing external to her had changed. She radiated some tremendous power that was charismatic and enchanting and made you forget whatever was missing with her feet, or her considerable age. It was riveting, and no one – including the near-professional dancers in our midst – could begin to imitate it.

I have searched online for a video or photo of Natasha and can’t find even one. I doubt photos could capture what I’m talking about anyway. I did find some videos of more recent dancers performing that Russian Dance, but they’re not worth watching. They’re stiff and strange – at least to me – and they dance on pointe which I’m pretty sure was not the original way the dance was done. They strike pretty poses and wave their arms around, but it is nothing – and I mean nothing – like the transcendent artistry I saw in that room on that day.

Here’s the best one I’ve found. This is probably from the 1980s – I see Princess Diana is in the audience – and the dancer is Russian and not all that young. So it’s a bit more old-fashioned than other renditions you’ll see. Some even eliminate the obligatory handkerchief.

Please note the little hand waves that begin at 1:38. They were incredibly hard to perform naturalistically, and Natasha was especially masterful at imbuing them with charm. At around 2:58, note the funny hand rolls that make little sense; in Natasha’s version this was a forceful clap with the hands a la folkdance tradition:

Some years later when I was in my early 20s I attended some weekend classes at Natasha’s New York City studio. The classes were large and featured everyone from the likes of me to professional dancers, attracted by her knowledge and in particular the fabulous combinations she gave in the last half of the class, more like little ballets. I recalled that she had a notebook full of them to which she sometimes referred, but usually she did it completely from memory.

I was there in the summertime, and summer in Manhattan can have heat that’s brutal. Summer in Manhattan in a dance studio could be especially brutal – no air conditioning, ventilation only on one wall, and a room full of sweaty dancers. One day it was so hot that even before the class began we were all sweating. I took a moment, while we waited, to go into the hallway for a little more air.

As with many New York dance studios, this one featured a long long climb “up a steep and very narrow stairway.” At the bottom, I saw Natasha, but she didn’t see me because I was partially hidden by the door. She climbed very laboriously, a few steps at a time, looking alarmingly worn and tired. She frequently stopped to rest and get her wind back, and I believe she may have muttered “Gott in Himmel!” a few times.

I stepped back even further but I could still see her. But then, not many steps from the top, I saw her turn on the floodlights within again, just as I had years earlier. I ducked back into the entrance to the studio as she swept in, a huge smile on her face, looking twenty years younger and glowing from within, as the students applauded. Only I had witnessed the spectacular transformation.

Natasha Boskovic died just a couple of years later. Here is her obituary in the New York Times; it’s short. But in my memory she looms large.

The summer we did “Swan Lake,” I danced a few roles and among them was the Neapolitan Dance, another ethnic offering in Act III. She loaned me an old costume of hers for the occasion, a beautiful thing and easily the most wonderful costume I’ve ever worn, with satin appliques on a wide skirt. Here I am at sixteen:

RIP, Natasha, and thank you. You were rare and wonderful.

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This made me smile, because the theme of the novel is – among other things – an elderly man’s search for the brother who left the family in young adulthood, never to be heard from again. So it’s about an effort to find someone lost, and the symmetry of the lost-and-found book appealed to me.

I won’t spoil it by telling you anything else about the plot, in case you want to read it. But I will say that, at the time I read it so long ago, I remember thinking it was enjoyable, although I’m not keen on most contemporary novels.

What’s more, the book had come to my mind even before its reappearance in my life, because during the past couple of years I’ve had my own experience – not with a sibling who disappeared, but with a lost great-uncle whose existence I only knew about because of a story my mother told me around 50 years ago. At that time she merely said (to my great surprise because our family is so small) that her father (my maternal grandfather) had had a brother who “disappeared” (her word), and that no one knew a thing about what had happened to him.

I knew he must be dead by now, because if alive he’d clock in at around 140 years of age. When my mother told the story I also assumed that his disappearance had occurred in his early adulthood, which would have been some time during the early years of the 20th Century, the same general time frame as Caleb’s disappearance in the book (which I hadn’t yet read because it hadn’t been written yet when my mother told me the tale of the missing great-uncle).

And since my usually very talkative and non-secretive mother seemed to know nothing more about this person, I assumed she knew nothing more about the story and I didn’t ask her any more questions. I assumed that she’d never met him.

Big mistake, but I didn’t know that at the time.

About two years ago I decided to do some genealogy research, something that had never interested me before. One motive was definitely to attempt to crack the mystery of this disappearing great-uncle of mine. I didn’t really expect to get anywhere, but I was going to try anyway. The story had stuck in my mind all those years.

The research took me a long time, with a lot of work and many twistings and turnings along the way, one problem being that he had a very very common name. I’ll skip the details, but it took a lot of skill and some creativity but finally I found out more about his life, which had included a bunch of marriages and even some illegitimate children or at least suspected illegitimate children, plus one legitimate child (and one legitimate child that actually wasn’t his, but that’s a whole nother story). And that legitimate child who was his also had had a very very common name, and I didn’t even know his birthdate or his mother’s name.

I even hired a genealogist to help me, but she only got so far, too. My big breakthrough was finding the great-uncle’s step-granddaughter (again, I’ll skip the details of the story), and she gave me a bunch of anecdotes about my great uncle (she had known him well), plus a small piece of information about his son: the name of the large city she thought my great-uncle’s son (her mother’s stepbrother) had lived in for at least a little bit.

And that in turn helped me to find his most recent address.

I figured this great-uncle’s son (who was my first cousin once-removed) would have been 94 at the time I found that address for him. What were the chances that he was still alive? And if alive, what were the chances that he was cognitively capable of understanding what I was saying and who I was? I thought they were slim, but I wrote him a letter anyway in which I explained the situation very carefully. I didn’t want to jar him and cause undue alarm or upset, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t try to phone. I thought a letter would be gentler, plus it might reach someone else who might know something about his story.

I never expected to hear another word.

But – as you may by now have suspected – about a month later I got a letter in the mail. I stared at it in joyful but gobsmacked disbelief. It had a return address sticker with his name on it and the address, and my address was written on the front in the neatest, clearest hand I’ve ever seen. His letter was handwritten, too, and that clarity continued throughout the missive, matched by a clarity of thought.

Astounding.

Since then I’ve not met him; he lives far away. And I’ll skip all the things he told me about what had happened with his father, and how certain tragedies occurred and then after his father’s remarriage he was ripped away from the only family he’d ever known till then – which had happened not at the beginning of the 20th Century (when he wasn’t even born yet), but around 1940.

1940! That meant my mother knew about his existence, and knew him well, and he knew her, which turned out to be true and I received proof of it from him. Why hadn’t she mentioned him to me? He was her first cousin (she only had two others, so it wasn’t as though there were so many).

That’s another mystery and it will almost certainly remain unsolved.

And let me add that no one else in the family – neither my brother nor my own two second cousins on that side – had ever even heard of the existence of this great-uncle and certainly not of his son. They were flabbergasted by the whole story. Of the entire family, only my mother had mentioned it, and only to me.

Maybe she thought I’d figure it out some day, if anyone would. She probably knew what a bulldog I could be. And I’m pretty sure that after the 1940s she really didn’t know much about him or his father – but she obviously knew quite a bit about him prior to that. And afterwards, once I had seen photos of this great-uncle and his new wife and I had learned what they really looked like, I was able to see that they in fact had attended my parents’ wedding in the early 1940s. There they were in the photos, big as life.

My newfound first cousin once-removed is still going strong in his late 90s now – knock wood – and who knows, maybe some day I’ll actually meet him. He lives far away in a part of the country I almost never visit, so it would take a special trip.

But it’s extraordinarily satisfying to me to have located him. I can’t even explain the joy I felt when I got that letter from him, and it still makes me smile when I think of it – a mystery solved, an open circle closed. Not that such things are ever solved – including the grief and isolation he experienced as a child – but I hope there’s some healing there, and for me it’s been very satisfying.

I like to think my mother would have been pleased.

The post The return of the lost: searching for… appeared first on The New Neo.

Commenter “Ymarsakar” once made an interesting observation:

When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.

Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.

I have a slightly different take on it. I’ve long conceptualized the whole thing as a hierarchy of evil and the resistance to it, a sort of ladder with many rungs. Here they are, in order from most evil to most dedicated to fighting evil:

–Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.

–Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.

–Some people will support it but not actively participate.

–Some people will be indifferent (or even unaware) unless it directly reaches them or their family.

–Some people will be somewhat disturbed by it, but manage to put it out of their minds most of the time and go on with their lives.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and contemplate various forms of resistance, but will be too frightened to act.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to act in small ways to resist it, ways they consider lower risk.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).

–Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.

An example of the latter would be those Poles who continued their rescue efforts and resistance despite this type of retribution from the Nazis:

Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.

When we talk about the prevalence of evil in humanity, and whether people are “good at heart,” this is what I think we’re actually discussing. What percentage of the population belongs to each group? I don’t know, but if I had to guess at the shape of a graph, it probably would be a normal distribution—that is, the biggest bump would be in the middle groups, with much smaller numbers for the beginning and ending rungs of the ladder of evil.

So what causes the difference among the groups? Why is a person in one rather than another? Darned if I know, but I have ideas. Some of it probably has to do with devotion to something beyond oneself, which could be religion (in certain circumstances it could even be Communism—in Poland, for example, many of the resisters to the Nazis were Communists). This can lead to good or to evil (such as the 9/11 terrorists, for the latter).

Many of the differences among groups almost certainly involve personal traits that are some combination of nature and nurture, such as the extent of the devotion to liberty. And although psychopaths/sociopaths (the ladder’s first couple of rungs) are often born, certain societies in certain times can be especially effective at fostering and encouraging and promoting them, and using them most fully to further goals of the group rather than just goals of the individual psychopath/sociopath.

In the end, though, there is something mysterious about it all: the problem of evil, with which humankind has been wrestling for aeons.

The post The ladder of evil appeared first on The New Neo.

Delmore Schwartz was a mid-20th-century poet with a tragic life but a wonderful gift. In fact, Saul Bellow wrote the novel Humboldt’s Gift based on Schwartz, who was a literary sensation at a young age but who faded with time and alcoholism and mental illness, dying alone in a New York hotel at the age of 52.

Schwartz looked the quintessential poet, too:

And he wrote some beautiful poetry that contains an air of mystery and awe.

One of my favorites is “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day“. I suggest you follow the link now and read the poem in its entirety to get the feel and flow of the whole before I discuss bits and pieces of it.

The poem begins somewhat slowly:

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now…

Although it’s poetry, this beginning is rather pedestrian, in both senses of the word. The poet is talking to someone (“we”) as he walks—maybe a girlfriend or wife? Or maybe he’s using the universal “we” as in “this is how we all stroll around in the park on a nice spring day.”

The poem is also very specific. Its specificity is in the designation of a certain time: April, 1937. Poets don’t often pin their creations to such an exactness of date unless they are speaking of some great historic event. But this is not a great historic event. It’s an ordinary spring day in an ordinary New York park. And this “we” is walking very calmly (in fact, that’s the first word of the poem).

So nothing special is happening.

But then there’s a turning that takes the reader by surprise, maybe even by shock. The setup of the ordinary day is peeled back and is revealed as transcendent, as all days are, and the poet speculates on the deepest questions of existence. Here’s the next line, right after “Number provides all distances/It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now”¦”:

Many great dears are taken away,…

Whoa! Yes, they are, for all of us. And then he follows with this:

What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

So within this most ordinary day in the park—a sort of cliche, really—we have the presence of death and its seeming (possible, questionable) obliteration of the self. And the mechanism for that is the passage of time—which is the school in which we learn and the fire in which we burn, because each moment dies as it is born.

I don’t know about you, but that transition passage hits me like a ton of bricks every time I read it. I never quite expect it even though I’ve read the poem many times. And the transition would not be as forceful without the specifics that precede it (those numbers do indeed “provide distances”). Perhaps we, the modern readers, feel it even more strongly, because it’s been over eighty years since that April day to which the poet is referring, and just about everyone who was around him on that day in the park (except some of the babies and children) is dead.

I’m not going to discuss every line of the poem, but here’s another excerpt in which the poet returns to the very specific, naming some of the people who are gone:

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?…

Five lines and four question marks. Good questions, too.

This is the last stanza, which never fails to give me goosebumps:

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Schwartz is caught up in a great rush of feeling that I think can rightly be called cosmic—as he calmly walks through that April day in 1937. And now, perhaps, the strangeness of the word “through” in that sentence has more meaning.

The poet was a mere 23 years old when he wrote that poem. I think of him as a human tuning fork, vibrating too sensitively (and almost unbearably) to the harmony of the spheres.

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