Tuirgin

:: from an e-mail to a friend on 2002.9.30 ::

J—, I left work today with a headache. But instead of staying at home I went to the library to pick up my reserved copy of Battleship Potemkin and a video series on the Byzantine Empire. I got to the library before they opened and so went to Barnes & Noble for some coffee. I sat and read Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”.

Reading Doctor Zhivago I feel that awakening sensation, wherein I see things differently, feel them more alive, but as a subject, an art, and not merely machinery.

I am realizing that I have been mostly dead, and that the sign and cause of death is didacticism. It is so easy to choke out the life which Christ offers us. DZ is an important work for me at this moment.

LD struck me deeply, too. Have you read it? Why is adultery such a common topic? It is a fearful one. It is one which threatens me with madness. There is something to this—I feel it but it has not come to surface, yet—it is still too deep, too much in the subconscious. I feel almost as if God and Satan are at once whispering the same words to me–it is the tone of voice which makes the difference, which holds completely different implications.

We cannot judge. To judge is to damn ourselves. The Gospels say as much. But I think I’m learning this at a more personal level. It is not just that we are guilty of hypocrisy, but that our judgement causes us to commit that very thing.

I cannot say what this passage does in me. Just read it and perhaps you will know it, too.

At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

And then, the end…

In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with any arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared for arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender…

“Don’t cry, my darling,” he said. “You’ve had your cry; that’s enough… Let us talk now, let us think of some plan.”

Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from this intolerable bondage?

“How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

Do we torture ourselves to remind us how miserable we really are? What person is really convinced that some affair will bring happiness? As with Tristan and Iseult, it is Death… a sickness which we do not want to let go of. And yet, somewhere, somewhere here I sense Christ working in His infinite mercy and love.

Have you ever thought that all the truly great characters who live out a life of charity—I’m thinking of Les Miserables, Tarkovsky’s Rublev, Crime & Punishment—debase themselves in some way, realize their wretchedness and their response is to do good. I was thinking today that they do not do good in the hopes of saving themselves, or of making up for what they have done, but that to them there is nothing left for them to do but either destroy themselves in death or to become a living crucification of love… not a work nor a necessary task, but that it becomes the only breath given them.