E-Mail to Dorie, a Literate Friend & Book Club Member

Dr. Williams

Yesterday I was pleased to meet and hear the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s Lt. General. Ghazala Hashmi who served for six years as a State Senator from a district in Richmond. She related yesterday that in her life she never envisioned politics in it. An English teacher, her graduate thesis was on William Carlos Williams, the famous American poet and physician from Patterson, New Jersey. You might remember, Dorie, that my hero, Dr. Robert Coles, did his Harvard thesis on Dr. Williams. Then based on the doctor’s advice, Coles went to medical school and became a psychiatrist & writer.

Dr. Robert Coles

Yesterday after candidate Hashmi’s speech, I found myself beside her in a photo shoot. Cheeky me… whispered the name Robert Coles, adding that he was something of a mentor for me. She responded with a knowing and welcome smile. “Oh, you and I must talk.” Not then and there, obviously. But I am speaking now in this e-mail, about one of those literary moments of connection that help sustain me, as you already know.

The setting yesterday was a private home in Northumberland County.  Across a vast green field was a white Romanesque temple (or Greek). Far from it was the historic home: a red-brick colonial with steep steps that led to a portico with an enormously high roof. The entrance to the house had the intelligent design of the past: a hallway open at both ends for circulation of ‘real’ air.  On one side was the traditional parlor, and on the other a dining room. Its long table was laden with food and made me wonder if the setting were more appropriate for Republications!  Then my friend Ilona and I sat at a table on the portico, awaiting the candidate’s arrival. The purpose was a ‘meet and greet’, and then later, beneath a white tent with white chairs, everyone gathered to hear Ghazala Hashmi speak.

She had impressed me in 2024, when Democratic candidates spoke at a local gathering on Good Luck Road, months before the primary. The Senator’s good luck prevailed when she won the election and became the Democratic nominee for Lt. Governor. She was, as she reiterated yesterday, an unexpected victor years ago for State senator, given she was an immigrant from India, a woman, and a Muslim.

On Saturday before this gathering on Sunday, I read a long piece in the WSJ Review, on the Baptist preacher Douglas Wilson. At least three members of the President’s cabinet are devotees of this religious firebrand. One of those on the cabinet gathered 800 military brass this past week and lectured them on attire, physical conditioning, and more.  A Dr. Strangelove performance, as I think of it, given the photo you sent me this morning of the War Secretary. I saw the doctored photo and thought of Peter Sellers in the Stanley Kubrick film, trying to control his arm from automatically jerking upward and saying two German words that begin with H.

Yesterday I heard inspiring and impassioned words from Ghazala Hashmi, spoken in the language of a devoted English teacher and lover of literature. Just now I recalled the claim William Carlos Williams made: “No meaning except in things.” His famous sixteen word poem shows this.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

I add, so much depends on Virginia’s election on November 4^th.

Now, leaping back to Resurrection (no pun intended), Tolstoy asks, as did Etty Hillesum (see earlier blog): “What is wrong in all our lives?” Both Leo and Etty came to the same conclusion: “To change the order of the world, humans must change themselves.”  The converse of self- awakening is the Baptist preacher.  He wants men to rule, women to bear children and be home, and Muslims to be expelled from our Christian nation. The seeker turned prophet, then becomes the zealot, followed by the command: “Thus shall you live.”

Okay, Dorie, book club members, and other readers:   I will be back on October 20th with more on Leo Tolstoy’s world.  He is, as graphic designer Ilona says, as captivating as Thomas Mann.

What is the Animal I, according to Leo Tolstoy in Resurrection?

It’s a catchy three-word label. But what does “the animal I” mean?

For Tolstoy’s character, an aristocrat named Nekhlyudov, it  means to feed his horse. Which is to say, to live without a spiritual saddle on his back, thus free to be dissolute, decadent, and unburdened by moral principles.

The reign and reins of ‘the Animal I’ are certainly evident in our times. Coincidently, Everyman Press has re-issued Resurrection in hardcover for $34.00. Considering the novel is 552 pages, and Everyman uses cloth binding and acid-free paper, that’s a bargain.

I doubt anyone on the current CABINET or White House team will be reading this novel. With the image of ‘cabinet’ in my mind, I just thought of Abe Lincoln’s Team of Rivals. They were oak-like persons, not those made of plywood.  And I’m fairly certain that Christian Nationalists are re-reading the Left Behind series and not Tolstoy.

Leo, by the way, was excommunicated for his truth-telling about the Russian Orthodox church. Call this an ironic literary prize for Resurrection.

“Toward the Light” is a recent review of Resurrection by the WSJ’s reviewer, Sam Sacks. This, too, was timely. The RCC-RILL book club decided last December to make this novel one of the eight we read this year.  We’ll discuss Tolstoy’s last novel in early November, along with Bulgakov’s The White Guard set in Kiev in 1918.

Why am I so enjoying Tolstoy’s last novel, despite the small print in my Penguin edition?  Because Leo was writing when there were no movies, no television, no Internet.  He describes everything in detail. A reader deeply experiences what is seen, what is heard, and what is felt. This novel took Tolstoy a decade to write. It was not published until 1899, thirty years after War and Peace.

Next week:   Katerina Maslova in Resurrection

Remembering Etty Hillesum as I read Tolstoy’s Resurrection

While cleaning out decades of collected paper, I came across four-thin-lined pages on which I’d typed quotes from Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life.

I typed the notes because I had borrowed the book and bracketed what I wanted to copy and remember. The time frame was 1984, when I used an electric typewriter before our first Apple computer. Remember those times?  No cell phones, no social media. Was there even 24-7 news?

Etty’s last words were a postcard thrown from a train in transport to Auschwitz in Germany, where she was murdered on November 30^th, 1943. An Interrupted Life is a collection of her diaries from 1941-43 while in Westerbork in the Netherlands. This was where the Dutch Jews were held until their transport to concentration camps. Etty wrote the following in a diary during this period. This is one quote from those four-typed pages, which I am mailing to the old friend who loaned me the book in 1984. The words in Hillesun’s diary speak for our current times, which are more disturbing each day. And I hear these particular words, as if a command has been given to me, who often visits mean-spirited roadhouses.

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the lesson to be learned from this war.

This was also Tolstoy’s belief, as shown in Resurrection, his last novel, published in book form in 1900.

My Penguin Classics edition has 510 pages in small print.; and I have to limit how much I read of it each day out of kindness to my aging eyes. I will note this: Resurrection is one-third the length of War and Peace! In his final novel, Tolstoy creates Dmitri Nekhlyudov, who lived by the belief that life had been given to him purely for his enjoyment. How can Dmitri find redemption? Well… at least Dmitri realizes that he needs it, unlike so many seen and heard on 24-7 news.

Etty was a reader and she must have read Tolstoy, who died in 1910, four years before Etty’s birth. Her death was almost six months before my birth in June 1943. But I did not learn about Etty until after three years of living in West Germany, a divided nation then, with its Berlin wall.

I stopped just now and put on “Ode to Freedom,” Bernstein in Berlin, conducting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. 

Beethoven, who chose art instead of death and darkness. So did Etty, so did Tolstoy, and so must I.  To be continued…