sept/5

Sunday, September 03, 2006
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In Voltaire’s play MAHOMET OU LE FANATISME, the Prophet says, “Whoever dares to think for himself is not born to believe in me. Silent obedience shall be your only path to glory.” One of Voltaire’s many biographers points out that MAHOMET is not a Christian’s attack on a false religion, but an attack on all organized religions, which “are an imposture in the service of political oppression.” See Roger Pearson, VOLTAIRE ALMIGHTY: A LIFE IN PURSUIT OF FREEDOM (New York, 2005).
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Napoleon didn’t like men who could think for themselves either. He once said, “A man with an idea is my enemy.”
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Most of my so-called critics attack not my ideas but my freedom to express them, that is, my fundamental human right of free speech. But like all born and bred fascists, they are not aware of this.
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Nothing enhances wisdom or the appearance of it than silence. But fools being fools are driven by an inner compulsion to confess who and what they are.
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I am not afraid of being wrong. Why should I be? Am I not human? I leave infallibility to imams, commissars, and my critics. What I am afraid of is turning into a fool. Because, according to Nietzsche, that’s what happens to people who make it their business to deal with fools.
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I have been a source of disappointment to many people, beginning with myself. If I knew how to pray I would go down on my knees and say, “O Lord, give me the strength to say ‘A plague on all your houses!’ and fall silent.”
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Samuel Beckett once said that his ambition in life was “to sit on my ass and do nothing but fart.” A line and an ambition worthy of a Zen master.
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Monday, September 04, 2006
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Since everything is connected with everything else, no one is equipped to know and understand everything about anything. Only god (if he exists) may know and understand everything. We miserable mortals are condemned to know and understand only a fraction of reality.
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All conflicts and disagreements are results of partial understanding and knowledge. Religions are popular because to believe in god means to follow the guidance of one who knows everything and is never wrong. But since “of the gods we know nothing” (Socrates), all assertions made in the name of god are based on total ignorance.
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Perhaps the most useful kind of knowledge is that which reveals to us the depths and breadth of our ignorance.
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Voltaire and Tolstoy saw no merit in Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky loathed Brahms, and Nabokov didn’t much care about “Faulknermann” and “Tolstoevsky.” Great men are poor judges of other great men. So are gods of other gods. And when gods disagree, massacre is sure to follow. Hence the dictum: “Since it was a religious war, there were no survivors” (Voltaire).
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A wise man once said, “I am willing to worship a man who is searching for the truth, but I would gladly kill him if he said he found it.”
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Tuesday, September 05, 2006
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Speaking of the mindset of drunk drivers caught on the scene of an accident, a policeman is quoted as having said in today’s paper, they begin with a “sense of invincibility” and end by trying to “blame it on somebody else.” Overconfidence followed by the blame game: it explains so much about human nature, or life as we experience it, reality as we perceive it, and history as we write it.
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You want to learn from history? Examine your own heart.
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There are those who see nothing questionable in being subservient to an imbecile with more money. There are others who find the prospect unspeakably degrading and unbearably repellent.
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Unmasking a lie does not necessarily mean the destruction of the lie. That’s because what motivates most men is not love of truth but loyalty to self-interest. Where self-interest enters, black lies and white truths turn into shades of gray.
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The crimes of capitalism are many – no doubt about that. But so are the crimes of Christianity, Islam, and Communism. Where power enters, abuse of power is sure to follow.
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Wednesday, September 06, 2006
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Armenian literature is a riskier racket than the mafia, and the only way the survive it is by dying young. Organized crime has two enemies: the police and rival families. Armenian literature has many more, among them tuberculosis (in the 19th century), Talaat and Stalin (in the 20th), and (in the 21st) censorship, audience apathy on the part of the majority, verbal abuse on the part of a faceless and anonymous minority, and last but far from least, the doubletalk of bosses, bishops, and benefactors, and their flunkies, who publicly deliver speeches in support of literature but the moment the sun sets they get their shovels out and start digging.
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I remember one of our bosses once delivering a speech in which he said, “Writers and poets have more influence in shaping the minds and souls of people than anyone else in the community.” Stalin once delivered a similar speech in which he called writers “engineers of the soul.” What happened next we know.
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I remember another one of our bosses saying in another speech, “My fondest ambition is to retire on a distant island and spend the rest of my life in solitude reading…” That one committed suicide, some say he was assassinated by members of a rival family.
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