The American Spectator

“Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one’s nation’s defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: ‘everyone is entitled to know everything.’ But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.”

br> Solzhenitsyn clearly was no fan of consumerist American modernity. He said that it in its own way it was as dehumanizing — or, perhaps more accurately, as de-spiritualizing — as almost anything the gulag could engender. Yet in all of his complaining, in all of his cultural criticism of both the Free World and the communist one, this great Russian thinker’s underlying message remained redemptive. As truly awful, by ordinary standards, as Ivan Denisovich’s day in the labor camp had been, Ivan went to sleep thinking that “nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy.” After all, “he’d had a lot of luck today. They hadn’t put him in the cooler….He’d finagled an extra bowl of mush at noon….And he’d gotten over that sickness.”

With God’s help, human beings have a remarkable capacity to find hope in the thinnest gruel. We have the capacity, he believed, to get over our sickness.

p>Likewise, Solzhenitsyn concluded his address at Harvard with these words: br> /p>

“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

br> Upward, indeed. One imagines that such is the direction Solzhenitsyn himself has finally and eternally traveled.