Re: **Crucial** quote from Solzhenitsyn, culled from comments to a JMGreer post - Archived Message
Posted by dovetailjoint on April 4, 2019, 12:41 pm, in reply to "Re: **Crucial** quote from Solzhenitsyn, culled from comments to a JMGreer post -"
I didn't have much time for Solzhenitsyn when I was young. I thought he was too pessimistic. I suppose one has to appreciate that he'd 'lived' a bit more and longer than I had and seen what horror looked like, close up. Living in a nice house, down a leafy lane, with a lovely garden that sloped down to the gentle Thames, coloured my childhood and outlook. A sheltered garden and a sheltered life. Solzhenitsyn was a deeply religious and deeply conservative individual, who didn't have many illusions about life or what people were capable of, though he still had his faith, and a belief that brutality wasn't all there was. Decency and Christian love would, one way or another, someplace or another, prevail. A good seed sown would, rise from underneath the ashes. Now, decades later, I'm right there with Solzhenitsyn and my bigges fear is the rising tide of barbarism and lies that's swelling around us. Like him I've become increasingly sceptical about the possibility of 'socialism', in practice, though, in theory it still has certain merits. Like him, I'm now far more willing to protect and conserve old-fashioined values than I once was. As a dyed-in-the-wool European, the Evil unleashed by the great evil twin-headed monsterous wars of the twentieth century which cost the lives of more members of my own large and extended European family, than I care to remember, and the massive material loses, the shear waste of it all; have made me look at 'conservatism' differently and religion too to a great extent, and I'm much more sympathetic to Solzhrnitsyn, view of the world and the people in it.
|
|