Book of Ecclesiastes

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It is to Weep…

I thought I had said all I had to say in this space, but a holiday trip I have just completed, and other concurrent experiences, provided me with energy for what I offer below.

The first experience was to find a book in the Copenhagen central railway station, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, by R.F. Kuang.

It is a complex book, a fantasy involving the magic of translated words placed in juxtaposition on bars of silver. The setting of the fantasy presents a history of the slavery, oppressions and indignities visited upon subject peoples of the British Empire in the mid-19th Century, and upon the common people of Great Britain. Despite its large size, I finished the book before we reached our destination, Garda, Italy.

The book reminded me of the raw truths one learns as one ages; that the powerful are prone to act as gods and to treat others as lesser beings, even to torture and kill them with impunity. This ‘truth’ has been well formulated by Lord Acton:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. (Source)

With this book and these thoughts operating in the back of my noggin, I was nonetheless open to the pleasant experiences Eva and I reasonably expected from our nine-day holiday, including four days travel by train from and returning to Stockholm by a company that offers group tours.

The first full day of the tour was dedicated to a bus trip to Verona, an ancient Roman town with an amphitheater at the central plaza. Also in the plaza was this monument over which I paused and pondered for several minutes:

I translate this as “To the martyrs of the Nazi extermination camps”.

This encounter receded to my mental background as the tour continued, through many enticements to spend and eat, to visit other ancient monuments and places.

At the noon lunch break, we found ourselves seated with a couple we had become friendly with and engaged in a lengthy, intimate conversation, sharing life experiences including personal tragedies. We paused at one point to quietly weep. We then recited our blessings, noting that many other lives in the world had suffered and were suffering more greatly and continuously than we have suffered.

On the final day Eva and I wandered up the mountainous hill, at the foot of which our hotel perched, just to enjoy the exercise and the ambience of old, largely well-kept houses that overlook the large Lake Garda. We had been told by others to seek out ‘The Madonna’ as we ascended the steep path. We found her and learned that she was erected just after WWII to honor the fallen civilians and soldiers of the town of Garda.

Threatened by fire and sword in the Second World War, by virtue of a solemn vow, Garda, faithful to its promise, erects this sacred marble as a symbol of its faith and compassion so that the only Mother of the suffering humanity from above may watchfully protect and bless all her living and all her dead. (Translated)

 

I wept again.

This pleasant, peaceful, lakeside town, surrounded by dolomite mountains with vast vineyards sweeping through nearby valleys and up mountainsides, had its peaceful lives  interrupted and discarded by the ambitions of great men.

And it continues, throughout the world…

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Ecclesiastes 4      

The Evil of Oppression

1 Again I looked, and I considered all the oppression taking place under the sun. I saw the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter; the power lay in the hands of their oppressors, and there was no comforter.

2 So I admired the dead, who had already died, above the living, who are still alive.

3 But better than both is he who has not yet existed, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.

https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/

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Nothing New Under the Sun

When one is old, as I am, one learns to remain silent on certain things, except when in the company of close friends of a similar age.

One’s physical complaints, of course, are never to be mentioned, or only in a mildly joking manner. One often lives with constant pain, certainly with discomfort, in one or more joints or sinews, or perhaps in an organ or two, most of the time masked by one’s wonderful brain which commands, “carry on.”

An old person’s musings about: “yes, that also happened to me when I was younger, and this is what I learned…” evokes glassy eyes and body language signaling a yearning for escape. And, of course, the younger ones are right: experience is the master teacher, along with pain and suffering.

Recently, I have been musing, mostly silently to be sure, about the vast store of knowledge and experience I have accumulated and remember during the four score years since before the United States entered World War Two.

I met a man a few evenings ago, the husband of a writing colleague—a charming, engaging, and accomplished fellow. Our conversation was wide-ranging, chronologically, geographically, and philosophically, a real treat for me (and my poor hearing required my interlocutor to work hard for me to understand him in the noisy room). At one point in the conversation, he realized that I was much older than I originally appeared to him (a family trait) and interjected to remark that I must have been present or aware of certain well-known historical events. Yes, I was, and briefly gave details of a few.

This pleasant experience remains with me to savor for a while. But the rarity of such an experience reminds me that I and my cohort have knowledge, or at least information, largely untapped, which will expire with us.

I feel that the main motivation for my writing is to leave a record, necessarily incomplete, of what I have seen and learned, at least as interpreted through my biases and prejudices.

I remind myself of “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” which was more fully appreciated by later generations and stands currently as a valuable historical document.

My musings observations are not as important as those of Pepys, but I fancy (the word is based in the concept of fantasy) that there will be at least some minor value, perhaps entertainment, to people in later generations if they are made generally available (which, thanks to the Internet, already are). In addition, if they survive and are made available after I achieve room temperature, I have retained decades of correspondence with friends and family, both in digital and hard copy form. (Oh, yes, I am obsessive about certain things).

How full of myself I am to think, or at least hope, that my scribblings have and will retain value. As the wisdom contained in the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us:

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Scholars may learn from history, but it seems the rest of us do not. My father tried to impart to me what he had learned, which was much, and I did listen and record what he said. Nonetheless, I had to live a full life, making my mistakes, to fully understand what he was trying to help me learn and avoid in life.

Thanks for trying, Dad.

Me ‘n’ Dad