Munich
The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people - and there are many in today’s world - elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today - and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture, 1970
Apr 27th 2006
It’s not the age of self-sacrifice, that’s for sure. It’s the age of shrinking the self down to the size of something too small to care about the lives that will come after ours. We can’t go on that way long - as a species, that is.
Apr 27th 2006
wow.
gut punched
Apr 27th 2006
SQ: Solzhenitsyn’s writing has been punching me in the face and then dashing it with freezing cold water; it is a wakeup call to be sure.
Darius: you’re right–I think “drowning” may be the best word to use as an analogue of our time and tendency. And, like it was for the Apostle Peter, I think a great reason for this mass drowning is the fact that we look to ourselves.