(UPDATED BELOW)
Today’s guest blogger is our old friend Boris Pasternak, he who once caught the “echoes from the future,” and is today writing from the past — September 20, 1924, in fact — with insights about the present.
“There are times when you begin to feel you are breathing lies, universal and all-pervading, soaking through absolutely everything around you, beginning with the bricks and ending with people’s conversations … Here, the voices of the marketplace, ignorance, narrow-mindedness, racial hatred and the like, are freely and dazzlingly blended with their opposites. This is what allows these dark undertones to acquire a binding legitimacy which they have never possessed before, even in the gloomiest periods of our history.”
From Boris Pasternak: Family Correspondence, 1921-1960, translated by Nicholas Pasternak Slater
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A Version of Pasternak’s “Hamlet”
The hour is at hand: it calls the actor.
The crowd grows still as I step through the arch.
There’s the cue: an echo from the future.
I must come forth and give the fated speech.
A thousand eyes, in darkness, throng about me;
Like Roman swords, they’ll pierce me till I bleed.
O if it be Thy will, Abba, Father,
Then take the proffered cup away from me.
For I adore your rigorous conception,
And am content to play my given role.
But these new lines will scorch the throat that speaks them;
This once, I pray, remove me from the bill.
No: I see the acts have all been plotted;
The journey’s end already has been willed.
I’m alone, while the world drowns in falsehood.
Cross this stage, and you cross a killing field.
Translated by Chris Floyd
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UPDATE: On the subject of our inundation by lies, Arthur Silber and Paul Craig Roberts lay out some hard truths here. And I might add my own little gloss, originally published during the run-up to the first Gulf War: “I think we are living in a world of lies — lies that don’t even know they are lies, because they are children and grandchildren of lies.”