Hannah Arendt, Boris Pasternak and Us

The film Hannah Arendt dramatizes the controversy which raged around Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Though she lost friends and alienated family members, who misunderstood her reporting as lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, she continued to insist that individuals should be seen as persons, rather than members of “a people,” a tribe. Eichmann, the organizer of transportation for millions of people taken to concentration camps during World War II, was found in Argentina and taken back to Israel for trial for war crimes. He was hung in 1962.

Because Eichmann insisted he was simply obeying his superiors, Arendt did not see that he could be convicted in a court of law, though she wrote that he must hang because he had “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth” with others. Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe those who are simply thoughtless, who refuse to connect their actions with the consequences, who refuse to be persons.

I am currently reading the new translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This book helped set me on my path when I first read it in 1966, but some of it, especially the philosophical discussions, were fuzzy in the earlier translation. In this one they are extremely clear! The first time I read it, I gravitated to the powerful story of a man who remained a person in the face of the monumental pressure of the ideological revolution in Russia. In the first translation, the story was wrapped in thick romance about love and art. [The movie, of course compounded this!] In this translation the romance is pared away, revealing a story which is set not only in history, but is about all of us.

Here in the West, too, we’ve been buried in ideology. If you think you are free, have a look at the BBC production "The Century of the Self", a four part series on how corporations have used Sigmund Freud’s and his nephew Edward Bernays’ theories to subliminally affect your life. In order to be free, to be a person, one must look deeply into one’s reasons for doing things. Most of us, in order to work, to have friends, to contribute to society, make some compromises with our innermost beliefs. But, being a person involves drawing boundaries and acting on them. Our global economy and information system relentlessly inform us of the effects of our actions. Do we pay attention?

Doctor Zhivago is filled with moral quandaries and ideas, a long rumination on life and art. Tolstoy’s social doctrine of the Kingdom of God on earth was part of the huge ferment of revolutionary thinking at the end of the 19^th Century. Pasternak’s Tolstoyan character Misha Gordon, a childhood friend of Zhivago, believes that personhood began with Christ. For him, the Gospel began as a “naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? … In that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.”

It doesn’t matter where our personhood, our responsibility comes from. It is a gift which we must not refuse. Eichmann and Pasternak are good examples of the poles which may be lived out with relationship to one’s culture and society. “Life,” Zhivago tells the partisan leader who has imprisoned him, “has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle; it eternally alters and transforms itself; it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”

It was this trust in life which initially thrilled me about Pasternak’s book. Harrowing experiences awaited its characters, as they await us. That trust did not desert Pasternak, even as much that he loved was taken from him. It was a good thing for me to learn as I was setting off into the future.

The Zorba Method

In telling the stories of Line, Marty and Paul, I believe I’ve been quite brave, showing their sibling rivalry, their misery at being unusual as teenagers, their youthful passions and misconceptions. It seems now that as we go into their lives as adults, I must continue to be brave. Braver.

As the 1960’s became the 1970’s, the peaceful revolution went underground. People began to explore their inner selves, believing that if they raised their own consciousness, the world as a whole would benefit. A fair bit of self-indulgence went along with this!  Line, Marty and Paul are no exception. I am going to have to describe the part in their lives played by sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We were certain that “the body was the unconscious” [Wilhelm Reich], that the body expressed one’s innermost self. Everything one did, how one dressed, how one moved, what one said, was revealing. We were certain we could start with a blank page, express exactly what we wanted to be, that the potentials for being human had scarcely been scratched, that we could move further toward investigating their limits. Desire was, for each of us, an earnest of truth.

From the movie Zorba, the Greek

We developed what I used to call the “Zorba method,” named for Nikos Kazentzakis’ character, Zorba the Greek. The philosophy was: act freely, fear nothing, live in the moment. Trust your desires to show you yourself. Know that you will come to end of them. Don’t avoid or go around trouble. Go through it! In those early days in San Francisco, it could be considerable.

Like the young English teacher in Kazentzakis’ book, I arrived in San Francisco full of book learning, shy, disciplined. As the eldest in a large family, I was not indulged. I was sure that the only way to become who I wanted was to do what I was told and work very hard. And only as I served others would they love me. I needed to let go, get into trouble, trust myself and learn to dance.

I did that. Delight, beauty and awe seemed to be around every corner. The intensity and variety of the music took us there, as did unexplainable, diverse friendships, and as many experiences as we could pack into a weekend and still get to work on Monday morning! Exploring a town Herb Caen extolled every day in the newspaper as Bagdad by the Bay (at the time meaning a place of unimaginable splendor!), we reached a shining coastline in three directions. We had enough money to eat interesting things, buy second-hand clothes and indulge ourselves in many and various arts. The flip of a thumb took you far from the city into natural wilderness preserved for all of us by diligent men and women.

The young people I know today could not read Zorba the Greek without commenting on his attitude toward women. But political correctness is a poor substitute for passion, I believe.  And one learns from neither literature nor life if his or her tea cup is so full there is no room for more.

In exploring our desires, I doubt that we were worse than many others. Certainly the culture as a whole has slid into a prurient interest in each other’s darkness, which everyone assumes is there. Self-indulgence does have its consequences and I don’t want to shy away from describing them. Line, Marty and Paul now tremble in that early and dangerous time of openness between the ages of 20 and 30. I want to emphasize the bright sides of my characters, the astonishing beauty of each upstanding person, flowering in so many and various ways. Brightness and shadow make up the whole, helping them grow into real people.