*
CROSSING SAN ANDREAS
Frazier Park, California
Cosmo, my neighbor, who believed
that rocks have consciousness,
they are just slow,
showed me at last where lay
the San Andreas Earthquake Fault:
“Right here. It’s the river.”
He meant the muddy trickle
meandering through sagebrush —
the bridge that spanned it ran
a quarter of a block. Each time
I crossed the bridge, I crossed
from the Pacific Plate
among the piñon pines
The market was there,
the drugstore. I had to have
both tectonic plates.
earthquake hits,
toward San Francisco;
the other half will slide
down toward Baja.”
San Francisco or Baja?
I had to have both.
Isn’t everyone always
crossing
from world to world?
Ecstasy, or the laundry?
The soul too is a housewife
and requires both.
From parent to teacher
to artist, from I love you
to oil for the salad,
fissures, earthquake faults,
a bridge where you drop
your name like a lost coin —
knowing any instant
The last earthquake,
Cosmo explained,
took place two hundred
years ago. Great oaks
snapped like saplings,
“I built the house myself.
I put in the best
studs and bolts.”
from the Pacific Plate
overdue, but rocks
have a different sense of time.
Now and then one could spot
a seismologist up the slope
instruments, his metal
drunk with blossoms,
rocks thinking
their stone thoughts,
the pressure building up.
~ Oriana
Obviously
the continental plates of which our "self" is composed are always
shifting too. Shifting and colliding: "Ecstasy, or the laundry? The soul
is a housewife, and requires both."
Mary:
The poem meditates on the differences between geologic and personal, human time by framing each as always in a sort of suspended tension between significant events. Rocks are "slow," measuring time in a framework so much bigger than ours they seem to have no movement until they abruptly shift, sweeping us up in their catastrophic release of long , incremental pressures. Those earthquakes and eruptions are both as sudden and as long in the making as our own changes, and as much the result of building pressures that can lead to catastrophe when they demand release.
Both states, the stable, practical, ordinary, and the transformative, creative, and rare explosions, are necessary, and their dynamic relationship produces change. Without change there is no life, only a sterile and static, timeless desert. In the dance between the build of pressure and it's inevitable release lies all of creation...art, history, every human endeavor, and, to return to the rocks, geology itself, the shape and substance of the material world.
Change may bring either catastrophe or ecstasy, destruction or transformation, and nothing is possible without it.
Oriana:
Yes. The pressure is building up and up, sometimes so gradually that we hardly notice. And then a personal earthquake, like a quantum leap into a different life, a different world. I’ve noticed a similar process with insight. It may appear to come out of the blue, but careful analysis can discover all the little steps that preceded the breakthrough.
*
“WHOSE FAULT?” TOLSTOY’S WIFE’S RESPONSE TO THE KREUTZER SONATA
~ In Tolstoy’s 1889 novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” an aristocrat named Pozdnyshev tells a stranger on a train the story of his unhappy family. He married a much younger woman, provoked by her youthful beauty and sexy sweater; they had five children, but Pozdnyshev was disgusted by family life. The marriage curdled, and he became jealous of his wife’s relationship with a musician who kept coming over to play duets. In a rage, he stabbed his wife to death. Though there was no evidence that his wife was unfaithful, and although he feels guilty for his crime, Pozdnyshev argues that he and his wife were equal partners in their submission to lust, and equal victims of corrupt sexual standards that turn all women into prostitutes.
He concludes that “sexual passion, no matter how it’s arranged is evil, a terrible evil against which one must struggle.… The words of the Gospel that whosoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery relates not only to other men’s wives, but precisely—and above all—to one’s own wife.” The only righteous path is abstinence; if it leads to the end of the human race, so be it. In an afterword written in response to many letters asking him to explain the meaning of the novella, Tolstoy confirmed that he shared Pozdnyshev’s opinions. He added that he didn’t mean that no one should ever have sex—only that everyone should try never to have sex, because it is noblest to strive for an impossible ideal.
The novella had an especially powerful effect on the author’s wife, Sofiya. Friends sent their condolences, and she knew they weren’t the only readers who understood “The Kreutzer Sonata”as a personal attack on her. She decided to shake off the shame by petitioning the tsar (who loved Tolstoy’s fiction but felt very sorry for his wife) to lift the publication ban on the novella: by defending it, she hoped to persuade the world that it wasn’t really about her. When the tsar granted her request, she wrote in her diary, “I cannot help secretly exulting in my success in overcoming all the obstacles, that I managed to obtain an interview with the Tsar, and that I, a woman, have achieved something that nobody else could have done!”
The most well written of the counterstories and the most forceful rejection of Tolstoy’s thesis, “Whose Fault?” is the most intriguing part of “The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.” The heroine, Anna, is an idealistic young woman who is fond of writing, philosophy, and painting. The child of a happy family, she marries, in her late teens, Prince Prozorsky, a family friend in his mid-thirties. She hopes that, as a kind, well-educated older man, he will be her guide to artistic and intellectual pursuits. But just before the wedding, she learns of his premarital sexual adventures, and on their wedding night she is disgusted by his advances. The peasants on Prozorsky’s estate mock her, and she learns that one of them had a long affair with her husband. Of Anna’s response to this news, Sofiya writes, “Despair and horror couldn’t fail to leave their mark on a very young soul for her entire life; they were the sort of wounds that a young child experiences the first time it sees a decomposing corpse.” Anna is overwhelmed by jealousy, shame, and sexual repulsion. Her husband is disappointed by her sexual incompetence (an unfortunate side effect of innocence) and lack of enthusiasm. (All of this corresponds to Sofiya’s own experience.)
As in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” each episode of tenderness and physical intimacy between husband and wife is followed by a bitter argument. But in “Whose Fault?” this is not because sex itself is degrading but because Anna is angry and disappointed at her husband’s indifference to her feelings and needs. While Tolstoy writes that Pozdnyshev and his fiancée were so consumed by desire in the days before the wedding that they could find nothing to say to each other, Sofiya writes that Prince Prozorsky was so agitated “that he couldn’t think of anything to talk about; he kissed [Anna’s] hands in silence and sometimes didn’t even hear what she was saying.” Deeply unhappy, Anna returns to painting; now that they’re married, she finds that her husband no longer shows much interest in her work.
After being married for a decade and giving birth to several children, Anna, aware that she’s losing her husband’s interest, decides that sex is her only source of power. She resolves to be beautiful, charming, and seductive, to rejoin society, and she succeeds. But she’s unhappy, feeling that she’s betrayed her ideals by living a frivolous life in the city. During this period, she meets her husband’s old friend Bekhmetev, a physically unattractive, sickly man with whom she quickly becomes close. (He seems to have been modeled on a friend of Tolstoy’s who often discussed philosophy with Sofiya.)
Bekhmetev is also an amateur artist, and he praises and respects Anna’s work. Together, they paint, discuss literature, and spend time with her children. This, for Anna, is the ideal relationship. Prince Prozorsky, who’s been busy flirting with neighbors and ogling peasant women, soon becomes jealous; Anna is disgusted by his hypocrisy and violent behavior towards her. After she becomes ill, her doctor tells her that she shouldn’t have any more children; she learns how to avoid pregnancy. This angers her husband, as does her renewed interest in philosophy and religion, which has given her an inwardness that he finds offensive. In “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the husband stabs the wife in the stomach; in “Whose Fault?,” he throws a paperweight at her head. Sofiya takes the sex out of the murder and moves the action from the wife’s body to her head.
There are agonizing details, as when the prince thinks, after Anna rejects his sexual advances, “What a strange and incomprehensible woman.... And how plain she’s becoming: one of her side teeth has already begun to turn yellow.” This scene is especially painful when read alongside the moment in “The Kreutzer Sonata” when Pozdnyshev thinks, of his wife, “True, she’s no longer so young, she’s missing a tooth on one side, and she’s a little plump ... but what’s to be done?”
Like Tolstoy, Sofiya criticizes the sexual double standard, but she’s far more sympathetic to women, who are kept in ignorance until marriage, then expected to satisfy their husbands and remain beautiful and docile through a long series of pregnancies and betrayals. At one point, Anna wonders, “Wouldn’t it be better to have memories of some passionate love, even if illicit, but real and full? Wouldn’t it be better than this present emptiness and immaculateness of my conscience?” But she chases away the thought as soon as it arrives.
Tolstoy’s self-castrated Romanian fan nearly wept with disappointment when he visited his idol and found that he lived on a huge estate, surrounded by servants and children. More than anyone, Sofiya was the one who paid the price for her husband’s inconsistency, for his broken resolutions and self-disgust. He condemned her for her failure to follow him into Christian asceticism, but he left her to manage their estate and make purchases on his behalf. He preached celibacy, but he impregnated her sixteen times, even when she couldn’t stand the thought of having more children and a doctor had advised her not to become pregnant again.
In “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Pozdnyshev speaks bitterly about the doctors who “cynically undressed” his wife and “palpated her everywhere,” only to conclude that she should no longer breast-feed. Once she stopped breast-feeding, she became “a monster,” Pozdnyshev says, deprived of “the only means that could’ve spared her from coquetry.” His sick wife is advised by doctors, as Sofiya was, to use contraception. She insists on doing so, “with frivolous obstinacy,” and as she regains her health she comes to resemble “a fresh, well-fed, harnessed filly whose bridle’s been removed.” Her husband is disturbed by her renewed beauty, enraged at the thought that other men will desire her. His jealousy turns murderous when he sees that she and her violinist friend share “the bond of music, that most refined lust of the senses.” Tolstoy was frightened by music, which moved him to tears: perhaps, like sex, it reminded him of his own weakness.
Some years after the publication of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in despair over the death of her beloved youngest son, Sofiya found solace in the music and friendship of Sergei Taneev, a composer and pianist who became a frequent guest at the Tolstoy estate. (This episode was the inspiration for “Song Without Words.”) She later wrote that Taneev brought her back to life by opening her to an understanding of music, just as her husband had once led her to understand literature. Furiously jealous, Tolstoy put an end to Taneev’s visits. But music stayed with Sofiya for the rest of her life. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sofiya-tolstoys-defense
Young Sofiya Tolstoyfrom another source (warning: some readers may find the Slate article offensive because of the author’s animosity against Tolstoy)
~ Late in his life {Tolstoy] turned into a sex-hating crank who (seriously) argued that the extinction of the human species would be a small price to pay for the immediate cessation of all sexual intercourse. Everyone, everywhere.
And fewer still are aware of Tolstoy’s devastating “consolatory” response when it was pointed out to him that cessation of all sex would mean the rapid extinction of the human species.
He replied with what might be the single worst attempt at “consolation” in all of literature, perhaps all of life. What’s the problem with human extinction? Tolstoy asked. After all, science tells us the sun will eventually cool and all life on Earth will die off anyway. Sure, billions of years in the future, probably. But there’s actually a bright side to near-term extinction, he said: It will mean the human race will be spared billions of years of shame, billions of years of further degradation in what he charmingly called the “pigsty” of sex.
Seriously. Yes, it’s shocking, especially from a novelist whose works are known for their superb vitality, bursting with the love of life. And yet, far less well-known are his late anti-sexual novellas: The Devil, Father Sergius, and, most vicious, venomous, and sex-hating of all, the 100-page The Kreutzer Sonata. It’s a deceptively innocent title for the heartwarming story of a madman wife-murderer who delivers an interminable monologue on an interminable night-train journey across the Russian steppes. Who horrifies his captive audience—the passengers in his compartment—with a denunciation of men, women, and sex. Who thereby—in his mind—justifies the bloody murder.
Oh it must be ironic, said the Moscow-to-Petersburg Acela corridor chattering class of the time. He was portraying a character. True, his protagonist was a wife-murderer who’d been freed on judgment that he’d been driven to kill by justified defense of his “honor.” But Tolstoy himself was not justifying the murderer’s rationale for his act. Impossible!
No, NO! thundered Lev Nikolaevitch in a “Postface” he insisted be added to Kreutzer to clear things up: He stood behind every word of the madman’s rationale, if not his final bloody act. Lev converted to a radical form of “primitive Christianity” in the 1880s and found an affinity with an anti-sexual sect that advocated voluntary castration. (He did not volunteer.) He hadn’t gotten around to killing his own wife, but clearly he could understand, he could empathize with the logic of the deed. Human love and sexuality were irredeemably evil; women were sinister provocateurs of male murderousness. (I am generally opposed to biographical criticism, but it’s worth reading The Last Station, Jay Parini’s historically based novel about the last days of Tolstoy’s bitter marriage—just to see how emotionally murderous that marriage was in the decade before he died in 1910.)
None too surprisingly, Tolstoy’s wife, Sofiya, took his tale of a wife-murderer personally, especially since it seemed to her it was inspired by the “issues” in her own marriage. The Kreutzer narrator—a Tolstoy-like landowner—fantasized an adulterous tryst between his wife and the violinist she played duets with. Mad sexual jealousy. And then when he comes home one night and unexpectedly finds the two dining together, he imagines the worst and stabs her to death.
It was fair to say Sofiya was humiliated and incensed when the novella was published and her marriage to The Great Man became suspect, subject to nationwide speculation. (And yet such was her devotion she made a special plea to the Czar to allow its publication after Orthodox Church objections banned it. In an unusual moment in the annals of censorship, the church objected not so much to a surplus of sex in Kreutzer, but rather to its denunciation of even church-sanctified marital sex as legitimized depravity.)
For a long time, it had been thought Sofiya kept her dismay to her private diary. But now—and this is the revelation I first saw reported in the New York Times —it turns out she wrote an entire novella of her own that has languished unpublished and untranslated in the depths of the archives of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow for more than a century.
And what a novel it is! Just published for the first time in English in a translation by the scholar Michael R. Katz, it appears in a Yale University Press edition that includes not only Tolstoy’s original Kreutzer, not only Sofiya’s “answer novel,” not only a response document from Tolstoy’s son and from his daughter, but much more. The volume is called The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.
So now, 125 years after Kreutzer’s 1889 publication, Tolstoy’s wife gets to have her say. It will take years to assimilate all the variations in Katz’s volume, but I want to focus on the single most impressive thing I found on my first reading: Sofiya Tolstoy can write! I’m still puzzled by the Times story’s somewhat cavalier unwillingness to consider her novella’s literary merit and even more by the subhead’s sexist characterization of her work as nothing but “a scorned wife’s rebuttal.” In fact, I think she’s good. At times one could almost say she’s … Tolstoyan. And when it comes to love and sex, she shows her husband up for the demented fool he became.
Specifically, Sofiya pulls off a remarkable structural feat in mirroring Kreutzer’s wife-murder plot from the point of view of the murdered wife. And she does it with prose that (in English at least) comes across as graceful, emotionally intuitive, and heartbreaking.
Thematically, she counters her husband’s rage against sex and love with what is, cumulatively, a deeply affecting defense of love. A portrait of love from a woman’s point of view unlike any you can find (or I have found) in Tolstoy.
Wait, you say. What about Anna Karenina? I’m glad you asked. I hope you’re not referring to the thin-blooded, gluten-free-wheat-field love raptures of Levin and Kitty.
Well, what about Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky? Tell me this. Was Anna in love with Vronsky, or in some kind of erotic thrall? It isn’t easy to decide, perhaps, because Tolstoy didn’t know the difference, didn’t understand the spectrum of feelings “love” can mean for a woman. As for Vronsky, he quickly fell out of any love he might have had for Anna once he had his conquest under his belt.
Indeed I was prompted to look again at the question of love and sex in Anna K by a conversation with the writer and Russian studies scholar Elif Batuman, whose brilliant and delightful book The Possessed recounts her travels with Tolstoyans and investigates the mystery of his marriage and death. She had a rather sardonic view of the single sex scene in the novel: that there really isn’t one. Anna and Vronsky enter a room for their first assignation. And, and, that’s all we get to know. Next scene has Vronsky getting dressed again while staring down at the prone and shivering body of Anna “as if he were a hunter gazing at a slain deer,” as Batuman puts it. “It’s not a sex scene, it’s a murder scene.” Love? Forget about it.
In Anna Karenina, Vronsky’s only real love—almost sexual in nature—is for his horse. Seriously, reread the scene where he rides her to death in a steeplechase, for its almost scandalous description of the way the horse and rider, man and mare, merge into each other’s rhythmic movements. When he pushes her to jump too far, she dies from the leap, just like Anna does in her leap, in which she flings herself in front of the train.
Sofiya accomplishes something different in her novel, which, despite its defensive title, offers more than a he-said, she-said document. Instead, Countess Tolstoy counterpoises her husband’s mad denunciation of sex with a skillfully evoked account of the evolution of love. Love in all its facets, from the sexual to the familial to the fantasized adulterous. Love, in all its contradictory complexities and unresolvable mysteries, from a woman’s point of view. From inside a woman’s mind and heart, with a subtlety that makes her husband, Lev Nikolaevitch, look like a blockhead.
In the novella Sofiya gives us a touching portrait of a tender, hopeful young girl at first finding herself falling under the spell of an older man, an elegant-looking local landowner, a count like Sofiya’s husband. He’s not a successful writer, but he does seem to pen boring polemics she can’t really respect. He holds strong convictions, especially about sex and marriage. He’s very similar to the crank Sofiya’s husband became in his dotage—and almost identical in his opinions to the wife-murderer in Kreutzer. They are the opinions of an ignorant male presuming to be sophisticated about sex. (Fortunately we no longer have these types around these days.)
Behold sexual ignoramus Tolstoy, sermonizing to us in Kreutzer about his hydraulic, pneumatic, steam-engine gasket theory of male sexuality. “Pressure,” he writes, builds up and must seek “relief.” (“Relief”—his charming word for his attentions to his wife, with no regard to her needs. Her relief only comes when he falls asleep.) Unsurprisingly, as its wife-murderer-to-be Pozdnyshev looks on women as nothing but an instrument for man’s pressure-gasket release of steam, Kreutzer offers no sense of the interiority of women. And it sees sexual passion—the sexual pressure cooker—as a terrible evil against which men must struggle to avoid shame and degradation, even when the passion concerns one’s lawfully wedded wife.
Anna’s narrative in Sofiya’s novel offers us something else entirely. The woman in Whose Fault? reveals complexity, conflictedness, perplexity. During courtship, when the murderer-to-be first kisses her, “she feels a wave of passion such as she had never experienced run through her body.”
And yet for a considerable time after marriage, she refuses to have sex with her husband. She is fearful of the unknown. It doesn’t seem logical, but there is an awareness in the character Sofiya draws of the complex entwinement of love and sex. She ultimately succumbs, with a briefly mentioned docility, to “relations” with him. But she finds herself almost horrified, in a detached way, by her body’s response, and even more repulsed by the brutal, utilitarian nature of her husband’s attention. Even after his momentary pressure gasket relief, he is never peacefully sated, but actually becomes angry and hostile at the way he has degraded himself. What fun for Anna!
And yet, and yet. She finds love in the family situation, primarily love for her children and, dutifully, some kind of love for her husband. It is enough at first.
Enter Bekhmetev. He’s an old friend of the husband, has been out of the country because of illness. Frail, gentle, he likes drawing and conversation. His “chivalrous politeness, propriety, respectful admiration” of Anna allows him to “completely yet imperceptibly enter” her “familial and personal life,” without—at first—arousing “the Prince’s vicious feelings of jealousy.”
A sly dog? Not from Anna’s point of view.
It is here, with extraordinary delicacy, that Sofiya begins to evoke the intangible boundary between platonic and romantic love. The love her heroine starts to experience is nothing like the hectic headlong Eros of that other Anna, Karenina. (It seems likely Sofiya has not chosen the name Anna accidentally. It’s almost a challenge to his Anna.)
What Sofiya succeeds in doing in her novel is to counterpoise, to her husband’s inability to conjure love, her own utterly different vision. Is it one unique to women? I like Flannery O’Connor’s line in this context: “Everything that rises must converge.” The beauty of Sofiya’s novel is in its moments of convergence or near-convergence, when unity between Anna and Bekhmetev seems imminent, so close. There are recurrent suspenseful moments of near-adulterous physical passion—love as a suspense story.
The high point, the moment of near-to-total convergence between Anna and Bekhmetev, is one of those rare instances in literature in which conversation can transcend words and merge spirits. It is the scene in which Anna and Bekhmetev exchange thoughts on the nature of infinity, not as mathematicians but as souls possessed by the same transcendent dream of limitlessness. He discovers she’s been reading “a classic author, Lamartine.” She says she’s taking great pleasure in the work and he asks if he can read aloud to her. (Smooth move.)
He picks a passage, and it’s not clear how he knows it, but she says, “That’s just where I stopped.”
The passage from Lamartine’s French is about night: how “night is the mysterious book of meditations for lovers and poets. Only they know how to read it, only they possess the key to it. This key is the infinite” (l’infini).
At this moment they both realize the implications. They both “possess the key” to the infinite. They both know how to read and translate the Book of Night.
He then says something dramatic that invokes the infinite, something about its wonder and terror: “And the relationship of night to the infinite, to l’infini—is astonishingly poetic. If one doesn’t believe in this l’infini, it’s terrifying to die.”
The stakes are now higher. The “key” they share is the key to life, to courage in the face of death. To love.
(It’s fascinating when you think of all the—let’s face it—windy, half-baked philosophy of life, death, and history Lev Tolstoy inflicts on us, to the point, in War and Peace, of obscuring the intensity of human feeling he can achieve, and does achieve when he stops his incessant lecturing. And fascinating that his wife is able to offer a glimpse of the transcendence his grand formulations rarely deliver.)
To return to Sofiya’s novel, it is no accident that, almost immediately after this l'infini moment, Anna’s husband senses something and begins his death spiral into murderous jealousy. He senses something but he has no idea what it could be and can only think that his possession is in jeopardy. He becomes tormented with jealousy, with hatred of the woman he wished to possess alone.
She notes with revulsion now his lust for her: “Along with this hatred grew his passion, his unrestrained, animal passion, whose strength he felt, and as a result of which his anger grew even stronger.”
It is here on this very page that Sofiya gives away the game, not explicitly, but leaving no doubt of the dynamic going on in her own matrimonial prison: “He didn’t know her, he had never made the effort to understand the sort of woman she really was. He knew her shoulders, her lovely eyes, her passionate temperament (he was so happy when he had finally managed to awaken it).”
“He knew her shoulders.” In Tolstoy’s world of glittering soirees, when he speaks of bare shoulders, it is metonymy for a woman’s naked availability. Her shoulders inflame Anna’s husband because he knows they will inflame other men. Filtering that through the realization that she is subject to carnal desires too (her “passionate temperament”) makes for an explosive mix in the man’s increasingly deranged mind.
So things progress. Anna is spending glorious summer days painting with Bekhmetev by the riverside, and at last Bekhmetev hesitantly discloses that he has more than reading to her in mind. His acknowledgement of her desirability is cloaked: “You know that if anyone falls in love with a woman like you, it’s dangerous; it’s impossible to stop halfway on the road to love; it consumes you entirely.”
This is, they both recognize, a transgression. Not merely an observation about “other men,” but a dramatic declaration that his own feelings have leaped from platonic spiritual bonds to passionate love.
And we’re told “he turns pale and gasps for breath.” His health, never good, seems to teeter on the brink of a breakdown.
She tries to be cautious and, in a highly charged moment of implicit Eros, this exchange ensues:
“But such demand of love kills it … ”
“How then, Princess, can love survive, that is, live for a long time?”
Forgive me. I couldn’t help making an anachronistic connection when I read “How then, Princess, can love survive.” Philip Larkin’s great poem on love, “An Arundel Tomb,” ends with the line “What will survive of us is love.” I’ve written here on Slate about the mystery implicit in that line—what is the “love” that will survive of us? It’s a question implicit in what Bekhmetev asks: What sort of substance is this surviving love, mortal or infinite?
Some spirit, Anna hastily tries to say, shying away from their physical closeness. “Oh, of course, only by a spiritual connection” can love endure.
Hesitantly, awkwardly, he ventures, “You think, a spiritual connection exclusively?” You have to feel a bit sorry for the poor guy.
“I don’t know whether exclusively or not,” she says, which admits the possibility their physical closeness could become closer.
Sofiya is incredibly adroit, suggesting in the subtext the undertow of the words and silences between them. There is an erotic charge to what they leave unsaid. Here, as throughout, Countess Tolstoy’s description of love rings true to the array, the changeableness, the spectrum of embodiments from physical to metaphysical human love can take.
And then, she tells us, “his glance … glowed inside her.” Another euphemism, but what a beautiful one, luminous and sexual.
I won’t pursue the details to their horrifying conclusion. Ultimately nothing physical is consummated; she’s too honorable. Her husband refuses to believe it. He murders her by hurling a heavy paperweight that strikes her forehead.
But if her surrogate must die, Sofiya lives on in this astonishingly skillful novella. The final exclamation point to Lev Tolstoy’s career. ~
https://slate.com/culture/2015/02/sofiya-tolstoys-novella-whose-fault-a-response-to-the-kreutzer-sonata-reviewed.html
Arundel Tomb detail: "What will remain of us is love."Mary: THE YOUNGER VERSUS THE ELDERLY TOLSTOY
It is very hard to think that Tolstoy, who created Anna Karenina and had such a keen sense of her entrapment in the social mores and restrictions on women, came up with such a misogynistic, disgusted and disgusting, set of ideas as are discussed in the Kreutzer Sonata article. There is so much self loathing in the vision of women as basically prostitutes, that snare men into depravity, and so much rage in blaming women for what he finds disgusting in himself. Certainly these are feelings and ideas common in those who hate and abuse women, those who would kill a woman with a sense of righteousness — because she is to blame, of course, for all his base and disgusting sins.
It is always hard to accept foulness in a beloved artist, but turning a blind eye is no solution. That Tolstoy was much diminished and even mentally unbalanced is evident in his thinking castration a good idea, and the end of the human race an even better one. It is very hard for me to see that man as the same one who created Anna, with such sympathy and understanding. He may not have been able to write her from within, as a woman would experience, and yet he sees her tragic entrapment in a way the elderly Tolstoy, I believe, could not.
Oriana: THE UNION OF BODIES AND SOULS
If there is any reason to praise The Kreutzer Sonata, it is the opening of it, the discussion of romantic love among strangers in a train compartment. The speakers idealize love as a spiritual connection. Tolstoy’s anti-hero responds by asking why these spiritually connected partners also need to be young and attractive. This is sobering honesty.
But then Tolstoy goes overboard with his hatred of sex, as if sex made lecherous slaves of all of us, with women luring men like prostitutes. This is far from the more balanced view that emerged later with the development of psychology: love is a unions of bodies, but it is also a union of souls — and ideally the union of souls should happen first.
*
FROM SOFIYA'S DIARIES:
~ Lyovochka [Lev Tolstoy] was standing behind one tree . . . and I asked him why he didn't write anymore. And he stooped down, looked around in a rather comical way and said, "Nobody can hear us but the trees I think, my dear." (He called every one "my dear" as he got older.) "So I shall tell you. You see, before I write something new I need to be inflamed by love – and that's all over now!"
"What a shame!" I said, adding as a joke "You can fall in love with me if you like, then you could write something!"
"No, it's too late!" he said. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/05/sofia-leo-tolstoy-diaries-review
*
“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy.
I believe it exists to show us
how much we can endure.”
~ Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind
Oriana:
True, love can make us anxious and miserable. But a nurturing love, when we feel secure in being loved, is also a great source of emotional strength. It often takes a series of mistakes before we learn that a nurturing person is the best choice.
Hermann Hesse, portrait by Ernst Würtenberger, 1905
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IS CONTENTMENT MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE PURPOSE AND GOALS?
~ There is much written about finding one’s life purpose and reaching self actualization, but do we really need to have one? My partner is happy pottering around the house with his family around him, watching TV, reading the news, working in his unskilled job without responsibility, supporting his football team. Meanwhile, I am frustratingly “growing and developing”, learning, wondering what it is all about – yet without much actually changing in my life. Are drifting and feeling contented in life more important than having a “life purpose” and goals? ~ Brenda, Blackpool
Questions about happiness, purpose and goals remind me of Don Quixote, the dreaming knight in Cervantes’ novel of the same name, and Sancho Panza, his earthy page.
As the novel progresses, we realize that both characters are equally sophisticated intellectually. But while Don Quixote’s goals are utopian, romantic and clearly unobtainable, Sancho is satisfied with feeling safe and eating bread and cheese – accompanied by a little wine, of course – after each of their frustrated misadventures.
Research on personality shows that a more open and inquisitive personality will always want to seek new experiences and sensations. This is more exciting, but also less comfortable, than rejecting what feels strange or unfamiliar.
Don Quixote’s sensation-seeking and restless personality, as well as his lofty ideals, are the drivers of his misguided adventures. Unable to find excitement in the comfortable but mundane daily life of a landed country gentleman, he sets out to right all the wrongs in the world in the most chivalrous and valiant manner he can imagine. His ambitious goals are unobtainable, though, and so he remains chronically dissatisfied.
In contrast, Sancho’s goals (cheese and wine) are simple, and they are also reliable and immediately achievable. Sancho will inevitably have some difficult emotions, like every other human, that will prevent him from being consistently happy. But he will be less inclined to express his occasional periods of distress in complex existential terms – and they are unlikely to nag and torture him in the same way.
On one level, then, Sancho’s personality seems better suited than Don Quixote’s for achieving a satisfactory level of psychological well-being. But we need to consider the fact that Quixote’s tortured loftiness will also afford him occasional moments of ecstasy that Sancho will never experience. Quixote will sample all the many wondrous highs – and lows – of existence.
CHOLERIC QUIXOTE
Quixote has a type of personality that Galen, the Greek physician of classical times, would have labelled as “choleric”: passionate, charismatic, impulsive and sensation seeking. He also has an extremely rich, but equally unstable, inner life, which produces copious amounts of fantasy and emotion.
Soon after the second world war, a London-based psychologist called Hans Eysenck developed another personality theory that included the dimensions of extroversion and neuroticism. Quixote is high in extroversion (he engages constantly with the external world) and high in neuroticism (his emotional life is unstable and intense), a combination that would be the equivalent of Galen’s choleric personality.
Sancho is, of course, the exact opposite. He could be described as “phlegmatic” in Galen’s classification: he is generally introverted, and being perfectly steady in emotional terms, he would certainly score very low on neuroticism. He does not view the world through the filter of a rich but volatile inner life, and instead sees ordinary windmills where Quixote sees formidable giants.
Personality types have been found to be predictors of psychological well-being in a way that could be considered relatively intuitive. Essentially, there is a positive correlation between happiness and extroversion and a negative one between happiness and neuroticism. Quixote is more neurotic than Sancho, but he is also more extroverted. The two will find and experience moments of happiness in different ways.
On one level, what we need to be happy is a stable (low neuroticism) and outgoing (extrovert) character. But that’s not the whole story. Those of us who see ourselves as a little more neurotic than we would ideally like – and perhaps not quite as sociable as some others – can find comfort in the knowledge that a busy and lively inner life, coupled with an inquisitive nature, can be associated with certain types of creativity.
The idea of happiness as a state of placidity and serenity, facilitated by a stable and untroubled psychological makeup, is persuasive. But it ignores perhaps the upper and more intense limits of human experience – and these have a power all their own. Cervantes novel, after all, is called “Don Quixote”, not “Sancho Panza”.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION
When Abraham Maslow, the celebrated American psychologist, placed self-actualization at the top of his hierarchy of human needs, he thought of it as a positive drive for developing one’s personal potential.
Maslow thought that more basic needs had to be satisfied before moving up to the next level – water and food before safety, then love, self-esteem and only then self-actualization. But subsequent research shows that humans don’t always do this in the anticipated order and that satisfying different levels of need either simultaneously, or in the “wrong order”, doesn’t seem to affect well-being significantly. This explains how those living in poor countries can also satisfy their psychological needs even when the fulfillment of more basic needs is uncertain.
In any case, having a set of needs – hierarchical or not – inevitably puts us in a needy position, and the relationship between striving to better ourselves and happiness is not a simple one. Maslow himself struggled in his personal life with issues such as racism (he was Jewish) and an awful relationship with his mother, whom he hated.
PAIN AND PLEASURE
Research shows that factors such as poverty, pain and loneliness make us unhappy, and it is equally clear that pleasures of any kind contribute towards our sense of well-being.
The 19th-century British thinker John Stuart Mill postulated in simple terms that happiness is “intended pleasure, and the absence of pain” while unhappiness is “pain, and the privation of pleasure”.
Like Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, Mill also saw a similar hierarchy in pleasure, with the physiological at the bottom and the spiritual at the top. He also advised against too much introspection in matters of happiness, saying:
ASK YOURSELF IF YOU ARE HAPPY AND YOU CEASE TO BE SO.
And even though Mill saw happiness as being predicated on pleasure and pain, he also hinted that being human, with all that this implies, may bring a dissatisfaction that would be preferable to mere contentment.
Don Quixote is a dissatisfied man and his ambitions to achieve his glorious goals are always frustrated. He has, however, certain characteristics that have been found to be associated with happiness: an optimistic attributional style and an internal “locus” (place) of control.
Don Quixote’s “internal locus of control” means that he feels in control of his destiny (despite all the evidence to the contrary). Control resides within him. His “optimistic attributional style”, meanwhile, refers to the fact that he always ascribes his failures to transient external forces, rather than to permanent internal issues.
Sancho, on the other hand, has a reactive attitude to life. He doesn’t have any fantasies about being in control of his destiny, which he believes is in the lap of the gods. “The lucky man has nothing to worry about,” he says.
So, in this respect at least, Don Quixote, driving his own fortune and making his own luck, is probably happier in his quest, however frustrating, than Sancho is in his passive contentment.
CONTENTMENT VERSUS HAPPINESS
The difference between contentment and happiness, or to be more precise, the incompatibility that exists between a state of permanent contentment and being human, has also been explored in modern novels, such as The Time Machine by HG Wells or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Some of the characters in these future dystopias, where pain and suffering have been eradicated, are perfectly placid, even content. But their insipid pseudo-happiness, devoid of choice or intense emotion, is less desirable than our own imperfect emotional tribulations – at least according to the authors.
Indeed, our ability to feel happy is affected by a variety of personality factors and temperamental attitudes, not by just one single dimension of placidity versus psychological restlessness, or even optimism versus pessimism.
But does it matter anyway? Whether we are “half-empty” or “half-full” personalities, none of us is designed to be happy – only, ultimately, to survive and reproduce. Consequently, we will all battle with frequent unpleasant emotions, whatever our temperament. And perhaps we can all find comfort in the knowledge that our nagging dissatisfaction is a key part of what makes us human. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/happiness-is-feeling-content-more-important-than-purpose-and-goals?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana: STAGE OF LIFE
I think to some extent it all depends on one’s stage in life. In youth, we are more likely to be driven by goals and intense emotions, and are on the whole less happy than during the later stages of life. And that’s one of life’s best surprises: as we grow older, we typically diminish our expectations, become less ambitious, and start taking delight in life’s “small pleasures.” We perceive the beauty of the world more acutely than ever before. Watching a plant grow can give more satisfaction than a publication.
We start giving away the possessions we once so avidly accumulated. They are no longer important. But contentment becomes more important than ever. And life is still meaningful the way it has always been, but perhaps we didn’t see it that way: now the purpose is to give to others, to share our riches — including of course our mental riches. We want to be useful — to touch the lives of others — gently, lovingly.
Joe: IS SANCHO PANZA REALLY HAPPY?
Whether Sancho Panza is a happy man is doubtful. He relishes the simple necessities of life, but to say that enjoying the simple pleasure of life — food — sex — warmth — is more than the viewpoint of the aristocracy toward those living in poverty in the 1600s is wrong. The author promotes the privileged class’s attempt to equate their life to one in poverty.
Those who eat well do not suffer like those living in hunger. To the author, Sancho happily enjoys simple things and has humble dreams. If this is true, Sancho’s worldview would be an inversion of Don Quixote’s viewpoint. On the one hand, Quixote bases his beliefs on the imaginary world of the knight-errant, magic spells, giants, and fairies.
Sancho’s world is that of the servant class. He sees the ineffectiveness of prayer and potions to alleviate disease and hunger. His partnership with Don Quixote is based more on his social status and his needs than friendship. In the end, Don Quixote recognizes how misleading and mistaken the falseness of his imaginary world is.
He recognizes that the world consists of hunger, poverty, and oppression. Food, sex, and shelter may give a short reprieve from the hardships of this world, but happiness is only possible in his imaginary world. His death becomes inevitable when he learns the dignity and sacredness of human life.
Quixote grasps the cost of poverty. He finds himself lacking the ambition and wherewithal to fight against it, and his demise is a result of his ideal colliding with the real. The collision breaks the illusion of the ideal of a just and fair world. When the reader sees with Quixote’s eyes, the story of the Gentleman from La Mancha becomes painful to read.
Oriana:
Joe, thanks for reminding us of class differences: Don Quixote was indeed an aristocrat, an Hidalgo. Even though he was an impoverished aristocrat, he had the luxury of reading the tales of chivalry and eventually trying to imitate the life of a knight errant.
When I was young and poor I was a lot more like Don Quixote than Sancho. I was idealistic, had a rich inner life, and all kinds of fantasies and delusions about what the future would bring. And now, forced to deal more with the “practical side of life,” I see more of Sancho Panza in myself. And yes, I miss the greater freedom and richness of my younger, Quixotic self. I don't miss the poverty and constant heartbreaks, though. So again, stages of life, stages of life!
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Mary:
Joe's comment on Sancho Panza definitely a good one. He is of the servant class, and the lower classes must be clear-eyed and practical simply to survive. They don't have the luxury of living in a fantasy world the way a rich or aristocratic man can.
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WANT HAPPINESS? LIVE LIKE A STOIC
~ What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, obviously the roads – the roads go without saying. How about guidance for how to live in the 21st century? That seems less likely, but in fact the last few years have seen a flurry of interest in the work of three Roman Stoic philosophers who offered just that. They were Seneca, tutor to the Emperor Nero; Epictetus, a former slave; and Marcus Aurelius, himself emperor.
Stoicism holds that the key to a good, happy life is the cultivation of an excellent mental state, which the Stoics identified with virtue and being rational. The ideal life is one that is in harmony with Nature, of which we are all part, and an attitude of calm indifference towards external events. It began in Greece, and was founded around 300BC by Zeno, who used teach at the site of the Painted Stoa in Athens, hence the name Stoicism. The works of the early Stoics are for the most part lost, so it is the Roman Stoics who have been most influential over the centuries, and continue to be today.
CONTROL HOW YOU THINK
So, what were the ideas? Two foundational principles can both be found in the Handbook, a short work summarizing the ideas of Epictetus. The first is that some things are within our control and some are not, and that much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things that, in fact, we can’t.
What can we control? Epictetus argues that we actually control very little. We don’t control what happens to us, we can’t control what the people around us say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. The only thing that we really control is how we think about things, the judgements we make about things.
This leads us to the second foundational principle from Epictetus: it’s not things that upset us, but how we think about things. Stuff happens. We then make judgements about what happens. If we judge that something really bad has happened, then we might get upset, sad, or angry, depending on what it is. If we judge that something bad is likely to happen then we might get scared or fearful. All these emotions are the product of the judgements we make. Things in themselves are value neutral, for what might seem terrible to us might be a matter of indifference to someone else, or even welcomed by others. It’s the judgements we make that introduce value into the picture, and it’s those value judgements that generate our emotional responses.
The good Stoic news is that these value judgements are the one thing over which we have complete control. Things happen, none of which are inherently good or bad, and it’s within our power to decide how we value them. The paradox of Stoicism, as Epictetus formulates it, is that we have almost no control over anything, yet at the same time we have potentially complete control over our happiness.
TRAIN YOUR MIND
At first glance, this might seem to understate the very real challenges that people face in their daily lives. How can just thinking differently help someone who is struggling to put food on their table, for instance? The Stoics didn’t shy away from this. They fully acknowledged that life can be hard sometimes.
Seneca knew this all too well: he suffered exile, multiple bereavements, and was ultimately forced by Nero to commit suicide. He also knew that it was all too easy to say “I’m not going to let these external things disturb me” but quite another to follow through and not be disturbed oneself.
So the Stoics developed a whole series of practical exercises designed to help train people to incorporate Stoic ideas into their daily lives. Seneca recommended taking stock at the end of each day, noting when you become irritated by something trivial, or act angrily in response to someone who perhaps didn’t deserve it, and so on. By noting his mistakes, he hoped to do better the next day.
Marcus Aurelius had another strategy, reminding himself each morning that he was probably going to encounter a lot of angry, stressed, impatient, ungrateful people during the coming day. By reflecting on this in advance, the hope was that he would be less likely to respond in kind. But he also reflected on the fact that none of these people would be like this intentionally. They were the victims of their own mistaken judgements.
Here we get another paradox: no one chooses to be unhappy, stressed, angry, miserable, and yet these are in fact all the product of our judgements, the one thing within our control.
ACCEPT WHAT HAPPENS
Another Stoic strategy is to remind ourselves of our relative unimportance. The world does not revolve around us. Aurelius regularly reflected in his Meditations on the vastness of the universe and the infinity of time stretching into the past and future, in order to put his own short life into wider context.
Our lives are but moments when placed within this cosmic perspective. Given this, why should we expect the universe to deliver whatever it is that we might happen to want? On the contrary, it would be absurd to expect it to conform to our will.
https://theconversation.com/want-to-be-happy-then-live-like-a-stoic-for-a-week-103117
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THE COLLEGE-EDUCATED FEEL LESS DESIRE TO HAVE CHILDREN
~ The college-educated today are more likely to be childless than those with high-school degrees or less. In 1992, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania asked the university’s graduating students if they planned to have or adopt kids, and 79 percent gave an unequivocal “yes.” In 2012, just 41 percent did. The number who said “probably not” grew from one to 20 percent.
“Young women today, one reason why they are less likely to plan to have or adopt kids than their forbears is that their engagement in friendship networks and professional networks is a kind of substitute for the need to create a family of one’s own,” said Stewart Friedman, an author of that study and director of the Work/Life Integration Project at the University of Pennsylvania. “Engagement in social and political networks, and work that has a positive impact on society—both of those factors are substituting for the creation of a family of one’s own.”
Aarssen said it’s possible that, if childlessness really is genetic, in coming decades the childfree movement will fizzle. Childless women simply won’t pass their genes along.
Of course, some of the works they have created along the way—including books about their childfree existences—will survive. In that way, they might pass their quirky legacies along after all, helping future couples as they kick their own cans down the road. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-people-decide-whether-to-have-children?utm_source=pocket-newtab
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“Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it.” ~ Dostoevsky
EXIT FATHERLAND: HOW GERMANY BECAME LESS NATIONALIST
~ After 12 years of fascism, six years of war, and the concentrated genocidal killing of the Holocaust, nationalism should have been thoroughly discredited. Yet it was not. For decades, nationalist frames of mind continued to hold. They prevailed on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain and predominated in the Global North as well as in the developing world of the Global South. Even in the Federal Republic of Germany, the turn away from ‘the cage called Fatherland’ – as Keetenheuve, the main character in Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel The Hothouse (1953), called his depressingly nationalistic West Germany – didn’t commence immediately.
When the turn did begin, however, Keetenheuve’s country would set out on a remarkable journey – not one racing down the highway to cosmopolitanism, but rather a slow one that required a series of small steps leading to the gradual creation of a more pacific, diverse and historically honest nation – a better Germany.
After the collapse of the Third Reich, Germans widely blamed other countries for the Second World War. ‘Every German knows that we are not guilty of starting the war,’ asserted the Nazi journalist Hildegarde Roselius in 1946. With ‘every German’, this acquaintance of the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White certainly exaggerated. But in 1952, 68 per cent of Germans polled gave an answer other than ‘Germany’ to the question of who started the Second World War, and it was not until the 1960s that this opinion fell into the minority.
In the mid-1950s, nearly half of all Germans polled said ‘yes’ to the proposition that ‘were it not for the war, Hitler would have been one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century.’ Until the late 1950s, nearly 90 per cent gave an answer other than ‘yes’ when asked if their country should recognize the Oder-Neisse line, the new border with Poland. Perhaps most revealing of all was their stance on Jews. On 12 June 1946, Hannah Arendt hazarded the opinion to Dolf Sternberger, one of occupied Germany’s most prominent publicists, that ‘Germany has never been more antisemitic than it is now.’ As late as 1959, 90 per cent of Germans polled thought of Jews as belonging to a different race – while only 10 per cent thought of the English in these terms.
The sum of these attitudes suggests that Keetenheuve’s cage called Fatherland remained shut for more than two decades after the fall of the Third Reich.
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Like most of Europe and indeed the world, Germany lacked a powerful alternative discourse to nationalism. Until the 1970s, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights possessed little traction in postwar Europe. Regional affiliations, such as those to Europe (or Pan-Africanism or Pan-Arabism), were more viable but as yet confined to a small number of elites. Strident defenses of capitalism also did little to deplete the store of nationalist tropes. And on the western side of the Iron Curtain, anti-Communism supported rather than undermined Nazi-inspired nationalism.
The postwar world was, moreover, awash in new nation-states, especially as it shaded into the postcolonial era. In 1945, there were only 51 independent countries represented at the UN: 30 years later, there were 144. Whether in Jawaharlal Nehru’s India or Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, nationalism and promises of self-determination fired anti-colonial independence movements in Asia and Africa.
In Europe, nationalism also continued to shape claims to group rights and territorial boundaries. In Germany, divided and not fully sovereign until 1990, it informed discussion over eventual unification, the right of the ethnic German expellees to return to their east European homelands, and the validity of Germany’s eastern borders. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1970, a quarter-century after the war, that the Federal Republic of Germany finally recognized as legitimate the German border (established at the Potsdam Conference in 1945) with Poland. And still nearly half the citizens of West Germany opposed the recognition.
The pervasiveness of exclusionary nationalism in the postwar period also reflected a new underlying reality. The Second World War had created a Europe made up of nearly homogeneous nation-states. A series of western European countries, now thought of as diverse, were at that time just the opposite. The population of West Germany who were born in a foreign country stood at a mere 1.1 per cent, and the minuscule percentage proved paradigmatic for the tessellated continent as a whole. The Netherlands had a still smaller foreign-born population, and foreigners made up less than 5 per cent of the population in Belgium, France and Great Britain. In the interwar years, eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary had significant ethnic minorities and large Jewish populations. In the postwar period, both were all but gone, and Poles and Hungarians were largely on their own.
Nor, in the trough of deglobalization, did Europeans often get beyond their own borders, and Germans were no exception. In 1950, most Germans had never been abroad, except as soldiers. Some 70 per cent of the adult women had never left Germany at all. Travel, a luxury enjoyed by the few, didn’t begin to pick up until the mid-1950s, while international travel became a truly mass phenomenon only in the 1970s, when most people had cars of their own. In the first decades of tourism, Germans mainly visited German-speaking destinations, such as the castles on the Rhine or the northern slopes of the Alps. In these decades, few Germans, save for the highly educated, knew foreign languages, and most other Europeans, unless migrant workers, were no different.
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The cage called Fatherland was thus reinforced. The persistence in a world of nationalism of the habits of thought of a once-Nazified nation-in-arms constituted one set of reinforcements. The relative homogeneity of postwar nations and the lack of peacetime experiences abroad constituted another. There was also a third reinforcement keeping the cage shut. This was that Germans had something to hide.
In the postwar period, Germany was full of war criminals. The European courts condemned roughly 100,000 German (and Austrian) perpetrators. The sum total of convictions by the Second World War allies, including the United States, the Soviet Union and Poland, pushes that number higher still, as does the more than 6,000 offenders that West German courts would send to prison, and the nearly 13,000 that the much harsher judicial regimen of East Germany convicted.
Nevertheless, there was still a great deal left to cover up. Lower down the Nazi chain of command, a dismaying number of perpetrators of various shades of complicity got off without penalty or consequence. Two jarring examples might suffice. Only 10 per cent of Germans who had ever worked in Auschwitz were even tried, and only 41 of some 50,000 members of the murderous German Police Battalions, responsible for killing a half a million people, ever saw the inside of a prison.
Trials and sentences reveal only part of the story of complicity. Many Germans not directly involved in crimes had come into inexpensive property and wares. Detailed reports from the north German city of Hamburg suggest that, in that one city alone, some 100,000 people bought confiscated goods at auctions of Jewish wares. Throughout the Federal Republic, houses, synagogues and businesses once belonging to Jewish neighbors were now in German hands. Mutatis mutandis, what was true for the number of people involved in the murder and theft activities of the Third Reich also held true about what people knew. ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst’ (‘We knew nothing about that [the murder of the Jews]’), West German citizens never tired of repeating in the first decades after the war. Historians now debate whether a third or even half of the adult population in fact knew of the mass killings, even if most scholars concede that few Germans had detailed knowledge about Auschwitz.
The Germans shared a European fate here as well, even if they had the most to hide. In his trailblazing article ‘The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’ (1992), the late Tony Judt pointed out the stakes that almost all of occupied Europe had in covering up collaboration with Nazi overlords. This wasn’t merely a matter of forgetting, as is sometimes assumed. Rather, it involved continuing and conscious concealment. After all, many people (especially in eastern Europe, where the preponderance of Jews had lived) had enriched themselves – waking up in ‘Jewish furs’, as the saying went, and occupying Jewish houses in what was surely one of the greatest forced real-estate transfers of modern history.
For all these reasons, the cage called Fatherland wasn’t easy to leave and, rather than imagine a secret key opening its door, it makes more sense to follow the hard work involved in loosening up its three essential dimensions: a warring nation, a homogeneous nation, and a cover-up nation. It wasn’t until West Germans could take leave of these mental templates that they could even begin to exit the cage. Fortunately, in the postwar era, Germany was blessed with prolonged prosperity, increased immigration, and the passing of time. When brought together with small, often courageous steps of individuals and institutions, these factors allowed West Germans eventually to embraced peace, diversity and the cause of historical truth: in short, to exit the cage.
The vision of ‘a living, not a deathly concept of Fatherland’, as Dolf Sternberger put it in 1947, had already been laid in the early years of occupation. Sternberger, who cut off the ‘A’ from his first name, argued for a different kind of nation, one that commanded openness and engagement but didn’t end in the glorification of killing and dying in war or in the marginalization and persecution of others. The nation as a source of life, as a caretaker of its citizens, and not as a vehicle for power, expansion, war and death: this was Sternberger’s initial vision.
It was a conception of Germany that West Germans slowly embraced, symbolically replacing the warfare state with the welfare state, swapping barracks and panzers for department stores and high-performance cars. Enabled by a velvet transition in which GDP per capita essentially quadrupled between 1950 and 1980, Germans came to conclude that their recent democratic past was far preferable to even the peace years of the Third Reich. Forgetting how solid and confining the cage was in the immediate postwar period, contemporary critics often scoffed at this shallow embrace of ‘fair-weather democracy’. Yet with a wider aperture, we now know that prosperity, and the absence of war, is the fundamental precondition of the global transition to democracy, most of which has transpired in the postwar era. In 1939, roughly 12 per cent of the population of the world lived in democracies, but by the end of the 20th century nearly 60 per cent did.
Germany’s slow exit from a nation-at-arms mentality was essential to it joining the democracies of the world. But the exit was by no means easy. The contentious memorialization of the conservative resisters who’d tried and failed to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is instructive in this context. In 1951, some 40 per cent of Germans said that they were for the resisters, while some 30 per cent were against them, with the rest ignorant of the so-called Operation Valkyrie or unsure. Typical of nations cognitively still at war, the problem for many Germans was perceived treason during wartime. This was especially true of men. More than half of all German men thought that the assassination attempt was morally wrong. And even of those who did approve of it, a significant number thought that the resisters should have waited until after the war.
The persistence of this nation-at-arms mentality shadowed one of the most contentious issues of the early Federal Republic: the reconstitution, in 1955, of an army. A broad coalition, ranging from church organizations to trade unions, emerged to warn against the resulting remilitarization of German society. When it became clear that the army would be revived, the same activists worked to ensure that soldiers be ‘citizens in uniform’ ready to refuse patently unethical orders. In conception, then, the new army, the Bundeswehr, personified the rejection of Prussian and Nazi traditions. Yet some 80 per cent of the officers of this newly created federal defense had once served in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of Nazi Germany.
The basic coordinates of the nation-at-arms held – as it would for the first quarter-century after the end of the Second World War. Gradually, however, Europeans ‘invented peace’, in the words of the military historian Michael Howard, and came to think of war as an unnatural state, unbefitting civilized societies.
In postwar Germany, conscientious objection to military service was a reliable index of this new regard for peace. In the first years of the Bundeswehr, almost all the young men who were drafted showed up for duty. But by the early 1970s, the number of applications for recognition as conscientious objectors climbed above 20,000, and would continue to climb throughout the 1970s and ’80s, so that in the two years before unification, the number of applicants was close to 80,000. By this time, German peace movements, reacting to the Superpowers making the two Germanies into armed camps, had eroded the prestige of all things military among young people. By 2000, Germans were among the least willing to pick up arms and fight for their country: only a third of those polled said they would do so.
The exit from the cage called Fatherland also took longer for those who saw belonging in terms of ethnicity and conceived of nations as ethnically homogeneous units. This second exit also started later than the confrontation with Germany’s militarist past and, ironically, it was the building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 that powerfully accelerated it. Intended to end East Germany’s haemorrhaging of qualified young people to the West, the wall inflamed national passions in the short term, but not in the long run. The next generation of young West Germans came to see the solution of ‘two-states, one nation’, as West Germany’s chancellor Willy Brandt would later put it, as permanent. The wall also accelerated West Germany’s efforts to bring in Gastarbeiter (guest workers), as the massive influx from East Germany (more than 3 million people between 1945 and 1961) suddenly came to a halt.
As if with the turns of a kaleidoscope, the ethnic constellation of West Germany began to change, at first slowly, then rapidly. The so-called Worker Recruitment Stop of 1973, meant to reduce the influx of foreigners to a trickle, actually doubled the number of workers coming to West Germany and encouraged them to bring their families. By 1982, with West Germany still reeling from the Oil Crisis and unemployment hovering at 10 per cent, the country suddenly had a foreign-born population of 7.5 per cent. Almost 80 per cent of West Germans thought that too many foreigners now lived in their country. Even 60 per cent of West Germans identifying with the new Green Party held this opinion.
A debate, which continues until this day, had already emerged about the degree to which West Germany had become what Heinz Kühn, commissioner for foreigner affairs in Helmut Schmidt’s government, would call ‘an immigrant nation’. An irreversible situation had occurred, Kühn wrote in 1979, and ‘those who are willing to stay … must be offered unconditional and permanent integration.’ The Kühn Memorandum, forgotten about by all except specialists in German immigration history, effectively shifted the ground of the debate – not whether foreign workers should be allowed to remain in Germany, but under what terms and with what support. It also furthered an incipient discussion about the extent to which foreigners were not guests but Mitbürger, fellow citizens.
In the life of nations, small openings can have profound effects. In these postwar years, general prosperity allowed Germans to travel as tourists, not as soldiers, and indeed no major European nation supplied so many tourists to other European nations as West Germany. More important, prosperity continued to draw workers to the Federal Republic. By the end of the century, a united Germany would have a foreigner population roughly eight times as large as it had in 1950; in percentage terms, the foreign-born population in the year 2000 was not far behind that of the US.
Yet if the insularity of earlier decades was gone, ethnic segregation remained, and anti-foreigner sentiment continued to poison the private and public sphere alike. Indeed, after unification in 1990, it erupted in greater violence than ever before. Beginning in cities in the east where unemployment was high, prospects bleak and experiences with foreigners limited, vicious and often lethal anti-foreigner violence occurred in Hoyerswerda, Dresden, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, and many other communities, and soon spilled into west Germany. By 1993, anti-foreigner extremists had murdered nearly 50 non-Germans and, by the end of the decade, more than 100.
Was the concept of an immigrant nation at an end, as many warned? The best evidence suggests otherwise. In reaction to the killings, hundreds of thousands of German protesters (more than a million in some estimations) went out on to the streets in order to publicly oppose the violence. They were men and women of all ages, walks of life and political persuasions. Many had never demonstrated before. But they wanted the world to know that ‘This is not who we are.’ The ‘we’ was important to them. For theirs was an appeal against the xenophobic nationalists in their midst and for a more inclusive nation.
And by the end of the 1990s, this general appeal began to transform into hard policy. In 2000, new citizenship regulations reflected the new inclusive discourse by making significant concessions to jus soli, the idea that you are a citizen of the place where you are born, as opposed to jus sanguinis, the older German measure, defining citizenship by blood. Almost immediately, roughly a million immigrants became German citizens. Since the mid-1990s, bi-national marriages have doubled, making up more than 7 per cent of all heterosexual marriages in Germany. The new immigration nation was far from being uncontested terrain, however, as the rise of xenophobic populists in the midst of the refugee crisis of 2016 showed. And yet here, too, as in the 1990s, the number of Germans who came out in order to publicly demonstrate for tolerance and lend a helping hand was commendable.
The most remarkable transformation was, however, the third: how Germany faced its past. It didn’t face it right away. Certainly, it’s defensible to argue that it wasn’t until the major war trials had passed, and the restitution of property was regulated and settled, that a genuine and honest turn to the past could even begin. Following this logic, one might have expected a surge of interest in the National Socialist past after the trials of the late 1950s and early ’60s. But in the late 1960s, passionate conviction, not patient reconstruction, was the order of the day, and political ideology, rather than deepening historical analysis, often occluded insight. It remains controversial to assert that serious and sustained interest in the National Socialist period didn’t take off in the late 1960s, and that, instead, a ‘second forgetting’, as one leading West German historian has described the 1970s, set in.
An interpretation that de-emphasizes the breakthrough of the late 1960s puts the turn at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the ’80s, as four events converged. The first was the 40th anniversary in 1978 of the November Pogrom (Kristallnacht) of 1938; it brought forth a great number of commemorations, especially in West Germany’s larger cities. The second was the airing of the US TV miniseries Holocaust (1979). As many as 20 million Germans, mainly in the Federal Republic, saw some part of it, and its very narrative structure invited them to identify with the main character – the intrepid Inga Helms Weiss, played by Meryl Streep, who married into a Jewish family and did everything she could to save them. The third event, less often discussed, was the end of a two-decades-long debate about the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes, with a close vote in the West German parliament – 255 for the cancellation of such legal shields, 222 against – allowing West Germany’s authorities to continue the hunt for Nazis guilty of murder. And finally, the fourth event: a major, nationwide essay contest for high-school students in 1981, with some 13,000 submissions on the subject of ‘Everyday Life in National Socialism’.
The confluence of these four events created a tsunami effect. Research – in schools and communities – soared. Across the country, literally thousands of schoolteachers, archivists, retirees, interested citizens and school students – such as the real-life Anna Rosmus, whose story was told in Michael Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl (1990) – dug into local records and researched what happened in their own communities, often working with Jewish people who’d once lived in these cities and towns and were now in Israel, France, Great Britain, Argentina or the US. Suddenly, the patient work of commemoration that had been missing in earlier decades was being pursued with a vengeance. People restored synagogues, exposed abandoned barracks that had once been used to house forced laborers, and discovered literally hundreds of subcamps of concentration camps throughout the German countryside. They held speeches, wrote articles, published books. Hardly any town in Germany with a population over 20,000 and where Jews once lived is now without an account of what happened then, and what fate befell the Jews who lived there – former Jewish Mitbürger, as many Germans now began to call them.
The story of how Germany faced its past has been told often, most recently in Susan Neiman’s book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019). Less common is to bring it together with Germany’s confrontation with its militarist past and its transformation into an immigrant nation. It was the confluence of these three ways of attempting to construct Germany anew – making it into a pacific nation, an immigrant nation, and a truthful nation – that allowed Germans to exit the nationalist cage Keetenheuve called Fatherland.
Granted, the metaphor isn’t a perfect one. In the main, Germans didn’t exit that cage by leaving the nation behind them; they didn’t, in the main, become cosmopolitans or Europeans, even if this was the path for some. When, in an opinion poll in 2001, Germans were asked to choose between identities, the overwhelming number (c75 per cent) picked ‘German’ over ‘European’ or ‘citizen of the world’ as their principal identifier. Germans, these polls suggest, exited the cage by becoming better Germans. What they tried to leave behind was not their nation but their nationalism. Certainly, there is more of the path to walk down. But that many postwar Germans have even begun to take this path ‘less traveled by … has made all the difference’, to borrow from the poet Robert Frost – and not just for Germany, but for other countries seeking a way out of the nationalist cage. ~
https://aeon.co/essays/germany-became-a-tolerant-nation-only-by-painful-small-steps?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=14efe78670-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_06_04_06_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-14efe78670-71890240
German citizens protest outside the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany’s 1967 congress in Hanover. The poster reads: ‘Again? Not with us!’ Photo by Wolfgang Kunz
Mary:
I found the discussion of how Germany faced its past and became a "pacific nation, an immigrant nation, and an honest nation” very encouraging. It clearly lays out the reasons preventing this kind of progress, and for me, the most striking was that "they had something to hide — profits to protect." The Nazi crimes left so many to "wake up in Jewish furs," gave such economic advantage, they couldn’t risk losing it. Reminds me of T Jefferson and his slaves — knowing it's wrong, criminal and indefensible, but keeping the status quo because it's in your economic interest to do so.
Reparations, when mentioned in the US, kicks up a storm, but it's important to notice the healing, the facing and admitting of truth, that allows for progress, could only happen for Germany after the war trials had passed and the restitution of property was done. When you don’t have a stake in the lies, you can see the truth. You no longer say "nobody knew," and do your best to know now the truth of the past. This is redemptive. It opens more cages than one, and makes peace and democracy more possible.
Oriana:
For me the eye-opening part was the depth of denial soon after the war. That the denial has finally been overcome (at last to a significant degree) is a major victory for democracy. Another important point was that prosperity had to precede the rejection of fascism, i.e. ordinary people had to feel materially secure and less stressed before they could face the past.
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CLIMATE CHANGE HAS SHIFTED THE EARTH’S AXIS
~ The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.
The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.
In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tons of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions.
The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995.
Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 meters in distance.
“The accelerated decline [in water stored on land] resulting from glacial ice melting is the main driver of the rapid polar drift after the 1990s,” concluded the team, led by Shanshan Deng, from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Gravity data from the Grace satellite, launched in 2002, had been used to link glacial melting to movements of the pole in 2005 and 2012, both following increases in ice losses. But Deng’s research breaks new ground by extending the link to before the satellite’s launch, showing human activities have been shifting the poles since the 1990s, almost three decades ago.
The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, showed glacial losses accounted for most of the shift, but it is likely that the pumping up of groundwater also contributed to the movements.
Groundwater is stored under land but, once pumped up for drinking or agriculture, most eventually flows to sea, redistributing its weight around the world. In the past 50 years, humanity has removed 18tn tonnes of water from deep underground reservoirs without it being replaced.
Vincent Humphrey, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and not involved in the new research said it showed how human activities have redistributed huge amounts of water around the planet: “It tells you how strong this mass change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.” However, the movement of the Earth’s axis is not large enough to affect daily life, he said: it could change the length of a day, but only by milliseconds.
Prof Jonathan Overpeck, at the University of Arizona, US, told the Guardian previously that
changes to the Earth’s axis highlighted “how real and profoundly large an impact humans are having on the planet”.
Some scientists argue that the scale of this impact means a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared. Since the mid-20th century, there has been a marked acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the destruction of wildlife and the transformation of land by farming, deforestation and development. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/climate-crisis-has-shifted-the-earths-axis-study-shows?utm_source=pdscl&CMP_TU=usmsp&utm_medium=sfbk&CMP_BUNIT=mem&utm_content=USgrowthmarketingcampaign_FBpromotion_secondphase&utm_term=USgrowthmarketingcampaign_FBpromotion_secondphase&utm_campaign=USgrowthmarketingcampaign_FBpromotion_secondphase&kwp_0=1919182&kwp_4=5547241&kwp_1=2387064&fbclid=IwAR2siKk_T5XuQ65F-w66e4FD7t-I0r7Mqvnk4t2CWPTmXvu5AgafsoM8Okk
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EARTH’S MOUNTAINS SEEM TO HAVE MYSTERIOUSLY STOPPED GROWING FOR A BILLION YEARS
~ If you could explore Earth’s surface a billion years ago, the most remarkable sight might be the world’s un-remarkability. There would be no trees or bugs, nor birds overhead. The only life is simple and small, a slimy oceanic soup.
And a new study published in Science points to yet another feature that may be missing: towering mountains.
The restless tectonic plates of modern Earth shift continuously, in a slow-motion dance that reshapes the surface of our planet. Collisions between continents thicken the crust and heave up mountains, such as the Himalayas, that reach ever higher into the skies.
But clues etched into tiny zircon crystals that formed deep in the Earth suggest that plate tectonics didn't always work the same way it does today. In the eon between 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago—a time dubbed the "boring billion"—the continents seemed to grow progressively thinner. The exact driver of this continental slimming is unknown. But at its most slender, the land was about a third thinner than it is today—a change that researchers suggest may have been caused in part by a slowdown in plate tectonics.
The researchers also posit that this thin crust could have delayed the evolution of life as we know it. Puny mountains would have slowed erosion of the planet’s rocks, limiting the supply of life-giving nutrients for creatures in the oceans.
“It’s a famine in the oceans at that time,” says Ming Tang, a geochemist at Peking University, China, and first author of the new study. But soon after continents began to thicken again, a flush of nutrients seemed to drive evolution to ever larger and more complex life.
“This paper is bringing up more questions than answers,” says Christopher Spencer, a geochemist specializing in tectonics at Queen’s University, Canada. But overall, he says, the work could provide a “springboard” to better understand how our modern world came to be.
GOOEY CONTINENT CAKE
Though the exact process behind this crustal winnowing remains uncertain, Tang and his colleagues contend that the change could come, in part, from a slowdown in plate tectonics. Without the continuous upward march, mountain peaks would slowly flatten as erosion by wind and water worked away at the rocks.
The team suggests that this slowdown resulted from changes in how heat was distributed on Earth's surface during the boring billion, when the continents largely clustered in a single supercontinent.
The supercontinent known as Nuna began forming around 2.1 billion years ago. Then, after a minor rearrangement, the supercontinent known as Rodinia took shape, starting some 1.2 billion years ago and lasting nearly a half billion years longer. For more than an eon, the landmass formed a nearly unbroken blanket over a large swath of the planet, trapping in the heat deep below the surface.
Tang suggests that the excess heat beneath the supercontinent would also produce a cooldown under the oceanic crust, affecting the march of tectonic plates.
Slowed tectonics, however, doesn’t entirely square with the geologic record, according to Spencer of Queen’s University. Though the plates weren’t making tremendous leaps around the globe, there was still magmatic activity; nearly 40 percent of North America formed during this time period. If you draw a line between Southern California and Labrador, everything to the southeast took shape between 1.8 and 1 billion years ago, Spencer says—and that couldn’t have happened without actively churning tectonics.
Apart from the question of a tectonics slowdown, the idea of the supercontinent blanket raises another possibility: that excess heat building underneath could have weakened the overlying rocks. Such a phenomenon would cause the surface to flatten, since hot rocks can’t support high mountain ranges.
“It’s a bit like a gooey cake,” Cawood says. As long as the sugary structure stays cool, it can hold its shape. Heat it up, and it starts to ooze.
“I think that’s really the crux of the paper,” Spencer says. Perhaps the thinning crust isn’t so much due to a quieting of the tectonic movements that build mountains as to a change in the way these processes worked.
The combination of excess heat and a thin crust could explain an unusual series of rocks that formed during the collisions that produced Rodinia, says Andrew Smye, a metamorphic geologist at Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the study team. These rocks seem to have formed at temperatures hotter than expected for the depth—but a hot, thin crust could account for that.
Though Tang argues that both intermittent tectonics and weakened crust were likely in play, he says there’s still much to learn about what our planet looked like eons ago. His team’s work adds even more intrigue to the boring billion, and underscores a point some scientists have brought up in the past: Perhaps this age may have not been so dull.
“I don’t think it was boring. It wasn’t quiet or quiescent,” says Cawood, who instead coined the term “Middle Age.” But he notes that the name is irrelevant: What’s important is that the period was markedly different.
"Clearly there's something interesting going on here," Smye says. ~
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2021/02/earths-mountains-may-have-mysteriously-stopped-growing-for-a-billion-years/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_Escape_20210216&rid=E18AE510841C77329A0E2626CC03D351
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THE APPENDIX AND PARKINSON’S DISEASE
~ You’ve probably heard that you don’t necessarily need your appendix, especially if you’ve had it removed. But the appendix does have a function and scientists are learning more about how it affects our health. The organ plays a role in regulating the immune system, microbiome, and even Parkinson’s disease.
A misfolding in the protein called alpha-synuclein has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, and researchers found abnormal clumps of this protein in the appendix. This week, a team of scientists found more evidence for the link. Reporting in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researchers found that, for Parkinson’s patients, there was a 3.6 year delay in onset of the disease for those who had an appendectomy.
Neuroscientist Viviane Labrie, who is an author on the study, talks about how the proteins could move from the appendix to the brain, and what this means for diagnosis and treatment of the disease.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/how-does-the-appendix-play-a-role-in-parkinsons-disease/
Aggregated alpha-synuclein in the neurons of the appendixFrom Traslational Medicine:
THE BENEFITS OF A MISSING APPENDIX
~ Misfolded α-synuclein is a pathological hallmark of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Killinger et al. now report that the human appendix contains an abundance of misfolded α-synuclein and that removal of the appendix decreased the risk of developing PD. The appendix of both PD cases and healthy individuals contained abnormally cleaved and aggregated forms of α-synuclein, analogous to those found in postmortem brain tissue from patients with PD. Furthermore, α-synuclein derived from the appendix seeded rapid aggregation of recombinant α-synuclein in vitro. In two large-scale epidemiological studies, the authors demonstrated that an appendectomy occurring decades prior reduced the risk of developing PD, suggesting that the appendix may be implicated in PD initiation.
Gastrointestinal (GI) dysfunction is a common nonmotor symptom of PD, often preceding the onset of motor symptoms by as many as 20 years. Because of the early appearance of α-synuclein aggregates in the GI tract of patients with PD and their capacity to ascend the vagal nerve to the brain, it has been suggested that the GI tract could be the origin of PD pathology.
Although the appendix is often considered to be a vestigial organ, its mucosa is rich in immune cells, and a primary function of the appendix is to assist the lymphatic system in the detection and removal of pathogens, as well as to regulate intestinal bacterial composition. Consequently, the appendix may be prone to accumulating α-synuclein pathology that affects PD risk, although this has yet to be investigated in detail.
Our findings demonstrate that α-synuclein aggregates are present in the appendix of healthy individuals (including young people under 20 years old) who presumably lack CNS pathology. This signifies that α-synuclein aggregation in the appendix is a common phenomenon (much more common than PD) and therefore is not likely to be implicitly disease causing. Rather, it suggests that other biological processes that suppress the spread of α-synuclein aggregates or are responsible for the clearance of α-synuclein aggregates in the appendix may be crucial determinants in PD development. Hence, the abundance of α-synuclein aggregates in the healthy appendix signifies that, in certain individuals, there might be a “secondary hit” that aids in the accumulation and uninhibited spread of α-synuclein from the gut to the brain, eventually causing PD. In addition, removal of the appendix may reduce GI tract inflammation and thereby reduce systemic inflammatory cytokines, which contribute to PD as recent studies show.
In sum, our study shows that the appendix is a rich, lifelong source of misfolded α-synuclein, and early removal of the appendix is associated with a reduced risk of developing PD. Compounds that limit aberrant α-synuclein cleavage and accumulation in the appendix and other GI tract lymphoid tissue may be a potential therapeutic strategy for PD. ~
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/465/eaar5280
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TWO VARIANTS OF PARKINSON’S: INTESTINES FIRST, OR BRAIN-FIRST
New research suggests that Parkinson's disease is not one but two diseases, starting either in the brain or in the intestines. Which explains why patients with Parkinson's describe widely differing symptoms,. The findings points towards personalized medicine as the way forward for people with Parkinson's disease.
This is the conclusion of a study which has just been published in the leading neurology journal Brain.
The researchers behind the study are Professor Per Borghammer and Medical Doctor Jacob Horsager from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark.
"With the help of advanced scanning techniques, we've shown that Parkinson's disease can be divided into two variants, which start in different places in the body. For some patients, the disease starts in the intestines and spreads from there to the brain through neural connections. For others, the disease starts in the brain and spreads to the intestines and other organs such as the heart," explains Per Borghammer.
He also points out that the discovery could be very significant for the treatment of Parkinson's disease in the future, as this ought to be based on the individual patient's disease pattern.
The study showed that some patients had damage to the brain's dopamine system before damage in the intestines and heart occurred. In other patients, scans revealed damage to the nervous systems of the intestines and heart before the damage in the brain's dopamine system was visible.
This knowledge is important and it challenges the understanding of Parkinson's disease that has been prevalent until now, says Per Borghammer.
"Until now, many people have viewed the disease as relatively homogeneous and defined it based on the classical movement disorders. But at the same time, we've been puzzled about why there was such a big difference between patient symptoms. With this new knowledge, the different symptoms make more sense and this is also the perspective in which future research should be viewed," he says.
The researchers refer to the two types of Parkinson's disease as body-first and brain-first. In the case of body-first, it may be particularly interesting to study the composition of bacteria in the intestines known as the microbiota.
"It has long since been demonstrated that Parkinson's patients have a different microbiome in the intestines than healthy people, without us truly understanding the significance of this. Now that we're able to identify the two types of Parkinson's disease, we can examine the risk factors and possible genetic factors that may be different for the two types. The next step is to examine whether, for example, body-first Parkinson's disease can be treated by treating the intestines with faeces transplantation or in other ways that affect the microbiome," says Per Borghammer.
"The discovery of brain-first Parkinson's is a bigger challenge. This variant of the disease is probably relatively symptom-free until the movement disorder symptoms appear and the patient is diagnosed with Parkinson's. By then the patient has already lost more than half of the dopamine system, and it will therefore be more difficult to find patients early enough to be able to slow the disease," says Per Borghammer.
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/second-variant-of-parkinsons-diseases-that-begins-in-the-gut-is-identified-340716
A MUSHROOM A DAY KEEPS CANCER AWAY: ERGOTHIONEINE
Regular mushroom consumption (approximately 1 button mushroom per day) has been associated with a 64% decrease in the risk of breast cancer (this common mushroom variety is best used cooked, rather than raw, because it contains the toxin, agaritine, which is reduced with cooking).
The best news about mushrooms is a powerful micronutrient called ergothioneine. Ergothioneine is an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory which mushrooms have in very high concentrations. Cooking actually releases this powerful nutrient from the mushroom cells. Mushrooms also have high levels of polyphenols that give them a higher antioxidant level than green pepper and zucchini.
ending on beauty:
BIRD
This happened many years ago, on a Saturday morning before a Memorial Day. I had driven my mother out to the little Bethel Cemetery at Garber, Iowa, on the high bluffs back a few miles from the Mississippi, where a handful of people were on their knees brushing clippings away from the names on the markers, setting out tin cans of iris and peonies or planting geraniums, and a big woman in blue stiffly lifted herself and turned to us, and Mother, also in blue, went to her, and the two of them, schoolmates as children seventy years before, reached out and took the other’s elbows and drew her in and they looked into each other’s eyes, and the woman, whose voice faltered an instant, softly said “Vera,” and my mother, whose voice caught, too, said “Bird.”
~ Ted Kooser
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