Men Have Forgotten God

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a
number of old people offer the following explanation for the great
disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why
all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years
working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read
hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have
already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of
clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked
today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the
ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I
could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten
God; that's why all this has happened."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

(anti)social networking...

I've been playing around with Twitter for a day or so, and now I *think* I have things fairly well-integrated. We'll see just how much of a feedback loop this produces once it gets propagated.

Road Trip

I'm on my way out the door now, for a weekend road trip to Galion OH via Buffalo. I'll have sporadic access to email, but my phone will be off most the time.

War and Peace and Zombies

Well actually, there were no undead in Tolstoy's masterpiece. Nor have I read the 2009 mashup I reference in this post title. (I'm curious, though, and a big fan of the Austen original so I may pick it up one of these days.)

A few months ago, several bloggers decided to do a summer reading of War and Peace, using the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. There was a schedule, and bloggers being bloggers I'm sure people also wrote as they read. Me being me, I read it through in several fairly intense sessions.

In actual fact, I haven't quite finished it. I began reading Part Two of the Epilogue, but after four or five pages of Tolstoy's maunderings about fate and the destiny of nations and the soul of the people, I gave up on it. I skimmed through the last twenty or so pages, searching for any type of narrative but in the end it was just too much for me. Much like the excursuses in Les Miserables, the political and historical questions being addressed were too far removed from my interests. Ah well.

Anyone know of a good English translation of Don Quixote?

memory and identity

After far too much wasted time on Wikipedia, I wound up at the statement that "in the process of forgetting, memories fragment and gist and verbatim traces can become independent." Time to revisit Augustine of Hippo, perhaps. The latter part of his Confessions address the relation between memory and identity.

This is of particular interest to me, as over the past four years I have witnessed my grandfather's descent through Alzheimer's. His physical sufferings came to an end in June.

I believe that ultimately, each person's identity is a mystery, known fully to God alone. This is why the Orthodox chant of "Memory eternal" at the death of a person resonates so deeply with me. Even as the body decays and the brain is eaten by worms, the full identity of that person is preserved in the love of God. In the eschaton, we will finally be revealed for who we really are, each person clad in the glory of God to the extent each has participated in it.