14 March 2024

"... Nature cannot be fooled," part two.


 Selfie on the train from Birmingham to London, last autumn.

Tomorrow I'll be on the train again, going to Klamath Falls, Oregon. This evening I have a pounding headache, so I'm taking the day off and not posting on this blog. As I said last week, "nature cannot be fooled."

I'm scheduled to give a message at Spokane Friends Meeting on March 24, and I am feeling a strong leading to speak on the theme of hope. It must be a leading; I don't actually want to address this them. Feel free to pray and advise!


07 March 2024

"...Nature cannot be fooled"

North Sea sunset.

Source.  
The dream is almost always the same. I'm out in the open country. There's a roar overhead, and I see a missile crossing the sky, and I instantly know it's carrying a nuclear warhead. It's on its way to a target somewhere behind me. I take off and run. There's a blinding flash and the dream ends.

Well, occasionally I manage to dive into a depression, feel the heat and shock pass by, shake off the dust, and realize that I've apparently survived. Then the dream ends.

I've continued to have these dreams since childhood. They're stored in my brain alongside memories of the Cuban missile crisis, air raid shelter signs, the air raid siren tests every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., and classroom instructions on what to do during a nuclear attack. 

On March 26, 1970, our high school classes were canceled owing to a snowstorm, but I was already at school. One class had scheduled a viewing of the British pseudo-documentary The War Game, portraying a fictional nuclear attack on the UK. The teacher decided to offer a viewing to anyone interested. Not really wanting to trudge two and a half miles back home in the snow, I joined the audience, and got many more searing images for my apocalyptic dreams.


We are not yet really free from the threat of nuclear warfare, but the shadow of another threat has become at least equally prominent in our times: global ecological catastrophe. The first threat may seem more vivid and immediate; some would argue that the second may be more inevitable in the long run. Has this second threat—climate change's worst scenarios—become our younger generations' version of nuclear dread?

Although both threats originate in a sort of shortsighted human arrogance, there are important differences between them. The decision to use nuclear weapons is in the hands of specific human beings who are, or should be, perfectly capable of choosing not to use them. (Of course I'm glossing over the possibilities of miscalculations, insanity, and equipment failures.) Nuclear war is not inevitable, whereas ecological degradation is already well underway. Human interventions to avoid catastrophe are possible at several points on the chart above ("Global warming and climate change"), and many scientists and activists have specified what those interventions should look like, but the track record of our species in acting at the required scale is not promising.

Sometimes I'm tempted to succumb to a doom mentality. For all we know, extinction might be inevitable no matter what we do. Countries and empires have come and gone, civilizations have perished, species have vanished. The planet itself will survive our misdeeds—as Richard Feynman reminded us in his famous appendix to the Rogers Commission investigation into the Challenger explosion, "... nature cannot be fooled." However, at some point even planets will vanish into their dying suns. Our loving Creator will archive us one way or another (I vote for "heaven"!) but, short of that, nothing about our long-term future is guaranteed.

Before I reject doom entirely (you knew I would, right?), I found this article in Scientific American intriguing: Beyond the Doom and Gloom, Here's How to Stimulate Climate Action, by Madalina Vlasceanu and Jay J. Van Bavel.

Not everyone is a fan of the doom and gloom messaging. Climate scientists like Michael Mann have warned against climate “doomerism,” messaging that can depress and demoralize the public, assuming that helplessness will simply lead to further climate inaction. And the title of a new book by Hannah Ritchie states clearly that it’s Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.

There is, however, some evidence that doom and gloom messaging can spur climate action, as long as it falls on the right ears at the right time. For example, research has found that climate distress, climate anger and climate anxiety are all associated with increased climate action under some circumstances.

[Links in original]


paper edition; digital edition
I'd like to recommend a better way. Cherice Bock, an environmental scientist and theologian, and Quaker minister, has an alternative vision—one that has two major advantages over the doom mentality. She describes this vision in her short, carefully organized and well-written book, A Quaker Ecology: Meditations on the Future of Friends

The advantages of her approach: 

First, her vision of an Eco-Reformation has great persuasive power. She anchors her vision in powerful biblical insights and the raw honesty of acknowledging the toxic effects of individualism, racism, and colonialism, even in our own Quaker histories. She writes beautifully about the healing effect of repentance and of reweaving ourselves into the ecology around us and within us through what she intriguingly calls "watershed discipleship." If a new, wider Reformation among people of faith adds to our united ability to reach the scales needed for crucial interventions, Cherice has made a valuable contribution toward that end.

Second, no matter how far we succeed in sharing this vision, no matter what the eventual outcome of our efforts to mitigate climate change might be, this is how we should live along the way. Cherice is blunt when she needs to be, but she personally models the power of honesty and a non-shaming repentance in describing, for example, the history of her own family on lands once inhabited by Indigenous nations. And her watershed awareness carries with it a sense of joy and embodiment.

Cherice subtitled her book, Meditations on the Future of Friends. Although I'm convinced that her theological and ecological insights have wide application beyond Quakers, the history and current state of Friends in the USA give an important context to her book—and give me a sense of positive urgency. As she says, "I was inspired by earlier generations of Friends; I want to be part of my own generation's faithfulness."


Nancy Thomas looks at the patriarchs, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes ... and old age. "The tree or the insect."

This link is hard to post. Ashley Wilcox tells us that ALS is likely to keep her from reaching old age.

More ripples, via Meduza, from the death and burial of Aleksei Navalny. Shura Burtin cautions us against unrealistic faith in the "beautiful Russia of the future." On the other hand, here is a Russian university instructor who is tired of being afraid.

The documentary film Butterfly in the Sky celebrates the legacy of the long-running television show Reading Rainbow, which I remember watching with our kids. Here's the trailer and context. (Thanks to Lithub.com for the link.)


Michelle Birkballe (Denmark) covers Solomon Burke's classic "Cry to Me." (Link to Burke's original.)

29 February 2024

Saying goodbye to Aleksei Navalny

Yulia and Aleksei Navalny (2015). Photo: Sefa Karacan, Anadolu Agency via Novaya Gazeta Europe.

Surveillance cameras, street patrols, and scaring students.

Security beefed up at Moscow cemetery where Navalny to be buried.

Rights group offers tips on avoiding police at funeral.

"They don't care about the optics."

Video stream of funeral, scheduled to start tomorrow (Friday) at 4 a.m. US EST.


By offering those links above, I intended to provide access to news coverage and commentary about the memorial events for Aleksei Navalny. I can't, and don't need to, compete with these sources.

Instead, I'd like to turn to one specific aspect of these events: their Christian context.

When I wrote about Al Sharpton, I framed my comments in our common identity as Christian ministers, which allowed me, as a commentator, to dare to cross lines and rush in where angels might sensibly fear to tread. My goodbye to Navalny is in a similar context. With all the differences in our social locations, political circumstances, and all that, we are brothers in Christ.

Maggie Phillips urged us, in her article in America, not to ignore Navalny's Christian faith, as the news media usually do. (Thanks to Faith on View for the link.) A fascinating sample of that faith came in the form of a statement by Navalny in a court hearing on February 20, 2021. Inga Leonova, in Public Orthodoxy, provides the full text of that statement. You can hear the original recording here, and read Leonova's article in Russian here.

These words leaped out at me:

This teaching—“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied”—appears somehow esoteric and odd, but in fact it is the central political doctrine in modern Russia. Your Honor, what is it, this phrase or slogan, the most important political slogan in Russia? Where does power lie? Power lies in truth.

The more that the principalities and powers try to distract us with lies and confusion and doubt and cynicism, the more persistent we need to be in our hunger and thirst for righteousness; the more determined we need to be to seek out truth; the more ready we need to be to admit (without wasting time shaming ourselves and each other!) when we fall short, and continue the pursuit.

This "central political doctrine" applies in this very moment in Russia, and in the USA, too. Where does it not apply?

If we Christians apply this doctrine consistently in our political involvement, we will bless our neighbors far and wide. But, for some of us at least, our first challenge may be to continue confronting the scandalous stink that too often surrounds the word "Christian" in the public arena. Where did that stink come from? Evidence suggests that some of us hunger and thirst for something else—dominance, privilege, the approval of the alpha figures of the moment. Maybe it takes the words of a contemporary martyr to recalibrate our values.

Thank you, Aleksei. Eternal memory!


Related: 

"The mere sound of his name will signal hope."

Is Christianity under attack?


Minute on the Ongoing Devastation in Palestine, adopted last Saturday by the winter gathering of Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting of Friends.

Rebecca Solnit on the perennial divisions of the American Left.

Rondall Reynoso (Faith on View) on being an evangelical Democrat.

Micah Bales at Berkeley Friends Church: The only way to life is through death.

The late Mariellen Gilpin's tribute to a meeting well-stocked with Quaker elders.

An interview with Gregory D. Smithers, author of Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal, and Sovereignty in Native America.


In memory of Aleksei, my favorite blues from J.S. Bach and Mstislav Rostropovich:

22 February 2024

Aleksei Navalny 1976 - 2024

This issue of Sobesednik, the only national newspaper in Russia that covered Navalny's death, was seized by authorities when it hit the streets. Cover photo caption: "Aleksei Navalny before his death: 'BUT THERE'S HOPE.'" Tagline at bottom of page: "When others keep silent, we speak!" Coverage of Navalny's death was also removed (or blocked) from the paper's Web site. Source.

Last Friday morning began with a terrible shock, a message on my Whatsapp account from a friend in Elektrostal:

Navalny has been killed in the prison today... 😔😔😔

Since that moment I've been spending far too much time in the Russian Internet, trying to understand the meaning of his death for Russia, and why I feel so much personal grief. A relatively small percentage of Russians actively supported him, but those who did were willing to take enormous risks to do so. The hope he gave them (and the feeling of hopelessness that many testified to in the first shocked hours after Navalny's death) reminded me instantly of nine years ago, the killing of Boris Nemtsov.

I can't deny my own fascination: I mentioned Aleksei Navalny 39 times on my blog over the years, not counting reposts and annual digests. The first mention was January 12, 2012.

It wasn't that Navalny was perfect. (Jeremy Morris reliably delivers his trademark mixed evaluation, which to my mind isn't entirely fair, but at least you know I've read it!) But, among other things, I loved the enthusiasm with which he did his political work, the care he put into being accessible, both on a personal level and in his unparalleled digital presence, his unquenchable humor, even in prison—and that energy and enthusiasm was clearly infectious. The Russian power vertical decreed his movement's total removal from the public arena, but those thousands of alumni/ae no doubt cannot forget how they felt serving the cause of "the beautiful Russia of the future," and what they learned, in the Navalny laboratory of hope.

Listen to their voices now, as they react to the news of his death: (source)

Ksenia: When he returned to Russia after being poisoned, I understood his decision: because being a brave person and a true patriot of our country, he couldn’t be torn away from it. But I felt very sorry for him and his loved ones: it was clear that years of tribulations lay ahead, with no apparent way out, and possibly with a tragic ending. He’d still have chosen this path. There are people who let themselves burn up, giving light and warmth to others. He was — and remains — such a person in my heart.

Now, I’m grieving. And I feel love for my country. If the best among us are ready to die for it, then it’s worth the price.

Anastasia: I’ve been having these horrible thoughts that there’s no point in a beautiful Russian future anymore because Alexey won’t see it. He deserved it more than anyone, and without him, it won’t be the same. It also seems like Russia was beautiful when he was free, could travel around the country and speak to us from the screen, and we didn’t appreciate it enough. I know he’d scold me for these thoughts, but I have them. I see no point in anything. I just have this pain that he’s no longer here.

Yulia, Dasha, Zakhar [his wife and children], I think of you every minute. There’s still the chance that he’ll see our country free through your eyes. And that keeps me going.

I could go on to describe some of the gratuitous cruelty with which Russia's propaganda machine has treated Navalny's widow Yulia (as if memos must have gone out to all those media outlets with the same trashy messages, so that a simple and heartfelt "we're sorry for your terrible loss" seemed beyond the realm of official possibility). I won't go into detail about the unseemly ways that the authorities have been playing hide-and-seek with Navalny's body and its proper Orthodox burial. I won't list all the ways his years in prison were made as vexatious as possible, including poor medical attention, and over 300 days in solitary. You can find all that in other places. I'll just end with one more tribute, a screenshot from Dozhd TV ("the optimistic channel")... with a supporter holding up a sign that used a common nickname for Aleksei: "Forgive us, Lyosha...."


A brief political biography of Aleksei Navalny from the USA's National Public Radio. 

"I will continue Aleksei Navalny's work."

Navalny's channel on YouTube. Many of his greatest hits have decent English subtitles. In this video, Yulia Navalnaya commits herself to continuing their work.

Russian authorities declare Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty an undesirable organization. (Story in Russian.)

The Carlson/Putin interview is apparently going to be an educational resource in Russia.

Martin Indyk on the "strange resurrection of the two-state solution" for Israel and Palestine.

Heather Cox Richardson warns that theocracy and authoritarianism go hand in hand. (Russia-related update: open letter from the Orthodox Christian Study Center and a growing list of cosigners, with a plea to the ecumenical world to hold the Russian Orthodox Church accountable.)

Micah Bales on a Transfiguration observation: reality can be hard to take.


"5-O Blues", Corey Harris. Not sure why, but this seemed appropriate.

15 February 2024

Christians calling for a free Palestine

Christians for a Free Palestine: screenshots from this evening's Zoom call. Clockwise: Erica Williams, Cole Parke-West, Rifat Kassis. Others involved in leading this evening's presentation included Margaret Ernst, SueAnn Shiah, Jonathan Brenneman.


We confess that Your message has been manipulated by those who claim Your name. Rifat Kassis (in prayer).

There are so many reasons to turn away, and we need you [Christians] to stay, Palestine needs you to stay. Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg.

This Lent we're not to GIVE UP anything, but to STAND UP. Rev. Erica Williams.


Just a short post today to report on this evening's interesting "mass mobilization call" on behalf of Christians for a Free Palestine.

I had found out about this call from friends who knew about my longstanding concern for Palestine. Having written on my blog last week about the use of "Christian civilization" as a justification for outright cruelty, I was relieved to learn about an effort to organize Christians to stand against one of the most blatantly cruel spectacles currently underway under the eyes of the whole world—the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

That campaign has reached a place of lethal absurdity in Israel's demands that Palestinians evacuate Rafah, where over a million of them have sought relative safety after being driven out of points further north. Among the actions we took this evening was to leave voicemail messages with our elected representatives and senators, using the calling facilities of Jewish Voice for Peace and a suggested script:

In the slightly longer term, we were given links to join a regional community-building program, and encouraged to spread the word on a Day of Action at senators' and representatives' offices, planned for March 18. The next mass call will take place on the previous day, March 17.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the hour is very late, and any credible campaign for Christians to rise up against the slaughter of Palestinians is worth considering. This evening's event had plenty of the signals I associate with the activist subculture, but my sense was that the prayer and the music and the appeals to mobilize were sincere, honest, and non-manipulative. For example, almost unbelievably, there were no images of the suffering and ruin to which we desperately desire to respond. The co-opting of our faith in the service of imperialism was very clearly denounced, but nobody aimed invective at any specific villains. Instead, we sang, "There is power in the Name of Jesus, to break every chain...."

I saw that this evening's call was recorded, and if a link to the recording is supplied, I'll update this post. Likewise, if I learn that my trust in this effort was misplaced, I'll also update. 

In the meantime, consider joining a regional group through this link, and judge for yourself. But, in any case, in addition to praying without ceasing, let's make some noise! In particular, let's confront the heresies of white supremacy and Christian Zionism that encourage and compound these outrages, and spread the genuine Good News with humility and boldness in the strong name of Jesus, and without glibness or denial in the presence of suffering.


One of the participants in this evening's call pointed out that there are more members of Christians United for Israel than there are Jewish people in the USA.

Do you think Len Gutkin is right about a hyperbolic style in American academe?

The hyperbolic style is marked by a cluster of generic traits. First, it emphasizes its speaker’s, or else some other potential victim’s, vulnerability to harm, up to and including murder. Second, it relies on distant historical analogies meant to heighten its urgency. Third, it is hortatory, alarmed, exigent: Something needs to happen, and it needs to happen now. Fourth (and this is its most “academic” feature) it makes large but ambiguous claims about the structural or systemic aspect of one or another threat.

Timothy Snyder on Vladimir Putin's genocidal myth.

Madeleine Davies, a senior writer at Britain's Church Times, reviews Karen Swallow Prior's The Evangelical Imagination.

What is needed, she suggests, is nothing less than another Reformation. If the first concerned the truth revealed in scripture, this one must confront “the way and the life revealed in Jesus—and how the Church has failed to follow and embody it”.

We need more Howard Thurman in our politics, says David Gowler at Religion News Service.

Mike Farley: Lent is a strange period in many ways.

Friends World Committee for Consultation, Section of the Americas, announces a new program of mutual learning and encouragement among Friends churches and meetings—Quaker Connect—and is seeking a new staff member to serve this new program. Note! Deadline for applications is March 1. 

Martin Kelley considers the new Quaker histories ... and how expensive they can be. Do we need a movement toward open access among Quakers academics and their institutions? (By the way, since Martin mentioned JSTOR: I found out when researching Fairhope, Alabama, and the Friends community in Monteverde, Costa Rica, that our public library here in Multnomah County, Oregon, makes JSTOR available without charge to cardholders.)

A self-serving PS: Since I'm among those who cannot afford those expensive books (thought I've bought some slightly older books at used book stores), I find these scholars' blogs a helpfui way to stay at least somewhat informed. And here's a sobering thought: I've now been a Quaker for fifty years, which means that my own lifespan as a Quaker already spans almost 15% of Quaker history!


Here's something a bit different: a Russian rock musician's approach to what I think qualifies as blues (at least as far as the lyrics are concerned)—Konstantin Nikolsky's "When you understand with your mind." The lyrics and a translation appear after the video. At first glance, it's a bit of a gloomy and ironic song, not qualities I usually look for, but it's probably my favorite of his many hits.

By some miracle of timing, I once heard Nikolsky live. It was during the financial crisis of 1998, and he appeared in a small Moscow club with an audience of less than 20.

Константин Никольский, "Когда поймешь умом."

Когда поймешь умом,
что ты один на свете,
И одиночества дорога так длинна,
То жить легко и думаешь о смерти,
Как о последней капле горького вина.
Вот мой бокал, в нем больше ни глотка
Той жизни, что как мед была сладка.
В нем только горечь неразбавленной печали,
Оставшейся на долю старика.
Бокал мой полон, но друзей не стану
Я больше угощать питьем своим.
Я их люблю, дай боже счастья им.
Пускай они пьют воду из под крана.
Для мира сделаю я много добрых дел,
Во веки вечные их не забудут люди.
И если выйдет все, как я хотел,
То, боже милый, мир прекрасным будет.
Послав страдания на голову мою,
Послав отчаянье душе моей правдивой,
Пошли мне веру, я о ней спою,
И дай мне силы,
Чтобы стать счастливым.
 
When you understand with your mind
that you are alone in the world,
And the road of loneliness is so long,
Then life is easy and you think about death,
Like the last drop of a bitter wine.
Here's my glass, there's not another sip in it
That life that was as sweet as honey.
Now there's only the bitterness of undiluted grief,
That remains as an old man's share.
My glass is full, but I won't make friends
I'll offer more of what I'm drinking.
I love them, God bless them.
Let them drink water from the tap.
For the world, I'll do many good deeds,
Forever and ever, people won't forget them,
And if everything turns out the way I wanted,
Then, dear God, the world will be wonderful.
Having sent suffering to my head,
Having sent despair to my truthful soul,
Send me faith, I'll sing about it,
And give me the strength to become glad.
 

08 February 2024

Time (Elektrostal, shameless nostalgia, and repost)

Sergey Kadyrov's "Elektrostal City" video with his own composition.

In the fall of 2004, I found out that McDonald's had established their first restaurant in Elektrostal, Russia. I confess that I had mixed reactions, as I recorded in Cures for homesickness:

McDonalds from my window (2004).
Although I'd heard rumors for years, I found myself unprepared for the mixed feelings I had when I saw, right from my eighth-floor $8/night hostel window, a McDonald's restaurant right there on Yalagin Street, "my" street in Elektrostal. On the one hand, I had to smile—leave it to McDonald's to find even this out-of-the-way industrial town. I knew that I would be welcome within its golden precincts, I would get polite service and predictable food, I could close my eyes, inhale the french-fry incense, and the miles (er, kilometers) separating me from home might briefly melt away.

There was another feeling, too. "They" had found "my" safe little city, "they" had violated its innocence, "they" were out to Americanize even this stolid, utilitarian, brick and cinderblock outpost of Soviet planning. I was no longer solely responsible for defining to the Elektrostal people what "American" meant.

Two weeks later, I felt that my description of this "stolid, utilitarian, brick and cinderblock outpost of Soviet planning" gave a somewhat inadequate picture of the city, so I filled in some details. (P.S. no. 2 in this blog post.)

Three years later, I began serving as an instructor at the Moscow region's first privately-owned linguistics college, a post that didn't end until November 2017. Judy and I and two cats lived happily in a warm apartment that became an extension of our educational work, a place where we fed and entertained students and offered our guest room to many wonderful visitors over the years. We were familiar figures at the local libraries, art exhibitions, poetry readings, not to mention the grocery stores, coffee houses, pizza and sushi restaurants, post office, computer parts stores, the fitness center, branch banks, the sports clinic, the immigration office ... and McDonald's. We knew many of the bus routes and stops by heart. In short, Elektrostal became a home for us.

It's a complicated time to express nostalgia for Russia. For me, Russia has been a massive paradox—encompassing what I called in this post "the warm heart of Orthodox heritage" with "centuries of relentless violence, conspiracy, invasion, aggression, suspicion, and mass-scale cruelty." And those negatives have been on blatant display since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

It's no comfort to me to say, correctly, that every nation, including the USA, has its ratio of high ideals vs cruel betrayals. As a patriotic American, I have a responsibility to defend our own high ideals in this particular season of danger. However, as a Christian I feel bound to challenge any time, any place, where "Christian civilization" serves as a justification for outright cruelty. Modesty, grace, and deep listening must be part of any such challenge, but blind denial and whataboutism are not options.

Given today's realities, I find it understandable that many people want to "cancel" Russian language and culture. (See Canceling Russia.) But I can't join them. The reason in some grand sense is my long acquaintance with Russia, starting with my first Russian class in high school, my first visit in 1975, and my travels to many parts of the country. But more concretely, my reason is: Elektrostal, period. This is the city whose artists and educators, students and grocers, doctors and bus drivers (and even the immigration office, usually!) welcomed us and gave us a home.

Tevosyan Square, Elektrostal. Celebrating the first day of school, 2016. The Sberbank branch bank mentioned below is just beyond the left edge of this picture.

I began this post with one of Sergey Kadyrov's videos that feature views of Elektrostal. This video includes a segment recorded from a bus driving along Mir Street, passing Park Plaza, the Crystal sports stadium, the Kazantsev School (at 2:20) where we taught, and City Hall. The memories flood back.


Stories are better than sentimental generalities. Here's one on life in Elektrostal (and a nice helping of Boris Pasternak), originally published April 7, 2011.

Sberbank branch where I read Pasternak.
Time.

The day before yesterday I went to the bank for a routine transaction, arriving about forty minutes before my appointment at the nearby hair cutting place.

I brought a book with me, knowing there might be a wait. As I entered, I took a number and glanced at the electronic signboard showing which number was being served. Number 37 was at window 6; I was number 83. Well, there was a chance, I thought.

Half an hour later, they were still twenty places away from serving me, and I knew I had to face reality. Off to the haircutter without finishing my banking. I took another number (117) on my way out, although I figured that, with my luck, they'd get to that number long before I was able to get back to the bank.

Well, no, they hadn't. They'd simply gone a little past my first number. So, no longer having a close deadline, I settled in for a wait. All the seats along the wall facing the bank tellers were taken; I folded myself into a child's seat next to the ATM. 

"It's a good thing to bring a book," said a woman a little older than me, sitting on the other side of the children's table and looking at my thick paperback of Pasternak's family correspondence. "Yes," I agreed, "and it's a good thing that this seat will hold 83 kilograms." A little further away, I heard a typical exchange among the elderly pensioners who make up the majority of the bank's midday customers. "What kind of transaction could be taking 45 minutes over at window 7?" "I have no idea. But that teller has been sitting at window 2 for most of the morning without taking any customers."

Meanwhile, an elderly man was trying to figure out the number system—another customer was patiently explaining that he had to push the machine's button for a number and then watch the signboard to know which window would be serving that number when it came up. Not every arriving person even bothered to find out the system—occasionally someone would walk into the branch and assertively step up to a window, standing just to the right of the customer being served. They were almost always noticed and reprimanded by other customers: "Wait a minute. You have to wait in line just like the rest of us."

On the other hand, those same customers, as I've seen more than once, might rise to the defense of an elderly man who's already been sitting a while, and who shuffles over unsteadily to a window and quietly asks whether the wait would be much longer. The crowd knows when to bend the rules and demand that someone be allowed to slip in.
Source.  

I was interested that, while I waited for the signboard to creep from number 88 to number 117, I came across this passage in the Pasternak book, in a letter to Boris Pasternak's parents and sister Lydia:
The house doesn't terrorize me, and I'm not scared of work or bother, although I have enough and to spare of all that. The reason I have no time is something entirely different.  As with money, and with objects I don't know how to value and am always glad to give away, I would probably be glad to share the most precious treasure that I know, which is: free time (perhaps that's the very thing that all religions have deified under the name of God). I mean the pure interval in which one can see the boundless fullness of real life, as real as the life of trees and animals. And incredible as it may seem, I would be able to find enough free time to share with anyone you like, because everyone always manages to get hold of and store up the thing he values most highly. But, more than anything else in the world, this is something reserved for the connoisseur. An understanding of art, however rare it may be, is much more widely distributed than a feeling for and understanding of free time. I'm talking about something that's far greater than mere 'leisure'. I'm talking about living time, in freedom.

This is something that I would be willing to share (as I have done on occasion), but only with someone who knew the meaning of the word 'an instant'. Why is there so much beauty in a thunderstorm?—Because it piles space upon space, making them flash, in other words it shows how fathomless the instant is, and what immense distances it can absorb and give forth again. But since there aren't many who know how inexhaustible and capacious an instant is, there's almost no-one to share it with—yet an instant is all that free time is. It's in this sense that I never have time—I don't have time for those who don't know what time is. [pp. 113-114]
There is beauty in a thunderstorm, and immense beauty in the moment people stick up for an elderly client, even though they will be "delayed" as a result.

On the one hand, I've never been bored at the bank.

On the other hand, I see on the bank's Web site that—contrary to what I was told when I opened my account—debit cards, usable at ATMs, are available to foreigners. I think I'll check into it again. [Indeed, I soon had a debit card, which saved many hours, and deprived me of time to spend reading in the warm company of other bank clients.]



[Continuing from 2011....] Having just observed another birthday, I was caught short by this passage to Pasternak's sister Josephine, written in 1927, more than thirty years before his death:
I haven't aged, and yet I've more than aged. I don't think I'm going to live as long as I should like. But there are other reasons too—I'll explain them below—why I've started behaving and feeling—in my consciousness, in my spiritual being, without reference to my biological self—as if I were in the final stage of my life. The main reason is this: that it's the only way to live in Russia at the present time without being a hypocrite, or wasting effort to no purpose,—or worse, provoking horrible catastrophes while achieving nothing whatsoever—wasting the explosively personal creative fire of mature middle age, these years so utterly and deservedly devoted to the love of freedom. I don't want to let myself go on this subject. I'll leave it at that. [p. 82]

Related: Boredom for dummies.


The Roys Report on the "Flashpoint" roster of Pentecostal prophets hitting the road for Donald Trump.

The Authoritarian Playbook, 2025 edition.

Christopher Harding on Alan Watts, for all his faults ... 

"Quakerism in Illinois Yearly Meeting will die in our generation, unless we as a Society stop saying, 'Ain't it awful'." From the late Mariellen Gilpin—one of the series of memorial posts in the online periodical What Canst Thou Say.

A frighteningly up-to-date quote (1845!) from Frederick Douglass on genuine Christianity and its peculiarly American counterfeit. (Thanks to Jim Fussell for the link.)

Clare Flourish on The Zone of Interest (film version). I consider myself warned.


Another helping of vivid memories: In December 1969, B.B. King made his break onto the Top 40 radio charts with this song, which he performs here not long after he received his first Grammy for that hit.