“Honor is decency without vanity.”
Someone asked me recently what I was reading, and I have to confess, I really don't read much these days. I have gotten consumed with work and writing and, more to the point, I don't have the temperament these days to sit passively. I struggle to sit still for the first 20 minutes of a television show without getting bored. I am seething. Maybe it's just the current malaise. I don't know.
It wasn't always that way. I got to college having jumped my economically sinking ship by joining the service and afterwards using my GI Bill to get an education. I loved school. This was the late 60s. Exciting times. Civil Rights. The Anti-war movement. A history major, I concentrated on the Twentieth Century and its social and political movements. All of that, the social cleavage, the writings of wondrous minds, shaped me.
Someone recently described me as a "revolutionary", saying that my discontent, like rust, never sleeps. I hope both of those are true. It's been a long and winding road. I am a pacifist but it's a lot more complicated than that. I have spent thousands of hours studying the "classics" - in college and afterwards in radical study groups. I can spout Hegel and Marx from "Das Kapital" to "...Brumaire", read Goldman, Kropotkin, Bakunin, "What is to be Done", Che, Gramschi, etc. I flirted with those ideas and rejected them. I aspire to be an anarcho syndicalist. I have not abandoned politics or activism. I have embraced hope and responsibility.
It's been a long trek. In that process, I ran across John Dos Passos' "USA Trilogy", Lincoln Stephens, the Muckrakers, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", Howard Zinn's "SNCC, the New Abolitionists". But the most important work was Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". Like Orwell, he blindsides you from the right.
That's how it might appear at first blush. Koestler's book is about one of the Bolshevik architects of the Russian revolution who eventually falls into disfavor with Stalin and is ruminating about his failures, misgivings, and misdeeds while awaiting execution.
It's not just a wonderful book. It's a personal metaphor. His progressions hit home. Here was a man who went from being a stone cold communist - had moved to the Soviet Union, was caught spying for the Spanish Republicans and imprisoned by Franco and almost executed - to become one of its fiercest critics. “I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.” A committed Jabotinsky Zionist living in a kibbutz, he would eventual break ties with Israel over the same issues that are today's flashpoints. It takes courage to speak truth to power but even more so to admit it to yourself. “Honor is decency without vanity” is a distillation of a worthy aspirational goal that he seems to have achieved.
