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The Brothers Karamazov
Book II. 1.
p35 [Peter] Miusov looked absent-mindedly at the tombstones around the church. He was on the point of saying that the dead buried here must have paid a pretty penny for the right of lying in this “holy place,” but he refrained...
I include the quote above merely to point out that we seem to have lost our (non-omniscient) narrator the moment we entered the monastery. This omniscient narrator will be our guide in some important chapters. If only because this one is more reliable, I prefer the omniscient to the non-omniscient.
Book II. 3.
p45 [Zossima speaks to Fyodor Karamazov] ...Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. And in order to distract himself without love he gives way to passion and coarse pleasures and sinks to bestiality in his vices -- all this from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone else. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it?...
Book II. 4.
p59 [Madame Hohlakov] “...Life after death -- it is such an enigma!...
...“...I shut my eyes and ask myself, if everyone has faith where did it come from? They say that it all comes from terror at the menacing phenomena of nature, and that none of it is real. And I say to myself: ‘What if I’ve been believing all my life, and when I come to die there’s nothing but weeds growing on my grave?’... I only believed when I was a little child, mechanically, without thinking of anything. How is one to prove it?...
...
p60 [Zossima] “...But there’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of it.”
“How?”
“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and constantly. In so far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt. Doubt will no longer be able to enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”
[Madame Hohlakov] “...You see, I so love humanity that... I often dream of forsaking all that I have... and becoming a sister of mercy. I close my eyes and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of strength. I have strength enough to overcome all obstacles! No wounds, no festering sores could at that moment frighten me. I would bind them up and wash them with my own hands. I would nurse the afflicted. I would be ready to kiss such wounds.”
...
“...But could I endure such a life for long?” Madame Hohlakov went on fervently, almost frantically. “That’s the main question. I shut my eyes and ask myself: ‘Would you persevere long on that path? And if the patient whose wounds you are washing did not meet you with gratitude, but worried you with his whims, without valuing or remarking upon your kindness, began abusing you and rudely commanding you... what then? Would you persevere in your love, or not?’ And do you know, I came with horror to the conclusion that, if anything could dissipate my love for humanity, it would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my payment at once -- that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I am incapable of loving anyone.”
...
[Zossima] p62 "...Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falsehood to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the result of falsehood. Never be frightened of your own faintheartedness in attaining love. Don't be too frightened even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it -- at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you...
1st unrelated content generated by me
Around the time the role of code breaking in winning the wars against Germany and Japan became public, if not before, people began to speculate that the UK, and possibly the U.S.A., had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack but let it proceed for very clever, not to say insidious, reasons. More recently, there has been similar speculation about Eisenhower and the Battle of the Bulge -- he must have known the attack was coming and didn’t reinforce his front so as to draw the Germans out from behind the West Wall. I was thinking about the latter when I had an idea about how to address the former conspiracy.
Suppose you could go back in time to December 1941 knowing all we now know about the Japanese attack: The time, the direction, the strength. What would you do if you had complete control of the U.S. military forces in Hawaii? There’s much you would leave alone: The two carrier task forces (the primary target of the Japanese attack) would continue their operations but the returning U.S.S. Enterprise task force would be diverted south to search for a non-existent (cover-story) threat in that direction. The Enterprise was so close to Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack that her lead planes actually landed at Pearl while Japanese fighters were still in the air.
The Battle Force would remain at anchor. Why? Because these battleships were old and slow and fat targets for the excellent Imperial Japanese naval aviators. All but one of the operational battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor were re-floated off the shallow harbor floor, and all but two went on to give stellar service later in the war. But that doesn’t mean you would have to entirely sacrifice them. The ships would be placed at battle stations with every watertight door secured and every gun manned and supplied with ammunition. Ships would be damaged and some would probably be sunk, but the human losses would be dramatically reduced.
Next comes the Army and Navy aviation assets. The obvious thing to do would be to have all the patrol and heavy bombers searching to the south, safely out of the way. The fighters would probably all be in the air ready to engage the attacking Japanese planes. But this is where it gets tricky. In the event, the U.S. lost many planes (on the ground) but few pilots. By putting the inexperienced and poorly equipped American pilots in combat, you would increase the Japanese losses but probably lose many more U.S. pilots.
And there are other possible unintended consequences as well. The sinking of so many battleships freed up the surviving crew members to serve on the, more valuable at the time, new ships coming out of shipyards back in the States. Band members from the battleships even played an important role at the code breaking station at Pearl Harbor in the six months after the battle. It’s impossible to say for sure that saving some ships and many men on December 7th would be a plus for the war effort in 1942.
Ultimately, that’s the problem with these conspiracy theories -- they assume a degree of genius on the part of the people making these secret decisions that one rarely encounters in real life. But if FDR was scripting this scenario there’s no way the Enterprise would have been so close to Pearl Harbor. And it would still have been “a day that will live in infamy” even if the battleships had been buttoned up and ready.
The Battle of the Bulge is actually a more interesting case. Eisenhower did think strategically and he was in a position to pull this off, had he wanted to. After months of bloody fighting on the frontier of Germany, somehow encouraging the Germans to sally out to fight in the open must have occurred to him. You can argue that the battle unfolding so perfectly for the Allies is a sort of Argument From Design suggesting planning and anticipation... except, again, that I’m suspicious of perfection in anything as complicated as modern war. First, let me explain what I mean by the battle unfolding so perfectly.
In the whole of military history there is probably no more famous battle than Cannae. Hannibal depended on the superior training and discipline of his army to lure the Roman legions into a concave defensive position. The Romans found that their advance in the center, instead of breaking the enemy line, left them surrounded and disorganized with their flanks exposed to the powerful Carthaginian cavalry. In a matter of hours the Romans lost at least 50,000 and possibly over 70,000 killed on the battlefield.
The Battle of the Bulge can be viewed as Cannae on a much larger -- spatial and temporal -- scale. If anything, the German position was worse than the Roman since the Romans weren’t dependent on fuel (that they could not resupply) for armored fighting vehicles. But as at Cannae, as the battle progressed the Allied right and left flanks grew stronger as surviving units pulled back and reinforcements flowed in. In the center, the further the Germans advanced, the more desperate their situation became. Even if their tanks hadn’t run out of fuel, the vanguard would inevitably grow weaker as forces were siphoned off to defend the flanks, while more and more Allied reinforcements could flow in freely.
If Eisenhower had planned all this he would deserve a lot of credit. Sacrificing a few green infantry regiments (even if one of them did include Kurt Vonnegut) would be a small price for such a victory, especially with the way the fighting on the West Wall was eating up American divisions.
Patton, gets credit for anticipating and preparing for his role in reinforcing the Allied right flank and even Montgomery gets credit for managing the left flank well. Whether Eisenhower knew the attack was coming or not, he must have looked at that bulge in his lines and considered what he would do if the Germans tried to take advantage of that opportunity. My guess is that he doubted he could be so lucky.
Also, I’m not sure the famous defense of Bastogne was such a great idea. It did slow down the advance of the German attack when it was at its strongest, throwing off their timetable. But it also restricted to some extent the flow of German men and material into the “bag.” You could argue that the 101st and other units fighting in Bastogne would have been better placed closer to the Meuse. The more Germans advancing that far, the fewer would be able to escape back into Germany. But it’s easy to make observations like that 70 years after the fact. Not even Hannibal was perfect and it’s worth noting that he lost the war in which the Battle of Cannae was one of the opening actions.
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