A Low Dishonest Decade
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
September 1, 1939
W. H. Auden
I
Prague 2011
Here is Count Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov from War and Peace in a moment of stress and confusion:
What for? Why? What’s going on in the world? he asked himself with perplexity several times a day, involuntarily beginning to ponder the meaning of life’s phenomena; but knowing from experience that there were no answers to these questions, he hastily attempted to turn away from them, picked up a book, or hurried off to the club or to Apollo Nikolaevich’s to chat about the gossip of the town.
Tolstoy has snatched the joy from Pierre’s passions—so he has ceased writing in his diary, avoided his brothers, started to drink heavily. Something is wrong, something must be done, something must be confronted, yet Pierre can’t quite sort his thoughts. His is listless, and stuck in what many readers might consider a much too familiar malaise. A moment when you begin to question the unquestionable, when all your old pleasures fail to amuse you, and when, if Tolstoy wrote today, you’re jolted by an awareness of the hours you’ve lost in endless scrolling through apps and updates, never quite selecting but always searching.
Whatever he tried to be, whatever he undertook—evil and falsehood repulsed him and barred him from all paths of activity. And yet he had to live, he had to keep busy. It was too frightening to be under the burden of all the insoluble questions of life, and he gave himself the first amusements that came along, only so as to forget them.
Yet the distractions of the 19th Century do look rather quaint now, with the amusements that Pierre indulges—idle conversation, Masonry, travel—almost wholesome pastimes. Contemporary readers might find his diversions a tad primitive, as we have come a long way in our skills of self-deception, inserting our need to ignore the most pressing problems of the day right into the heart of our most advanced technologies. Pierre is, unfortunately, trapped in an earlier century, stuck without our innovations in denial, lost with the rest of Moscow in a more humdrum disregard of what’s vital. Yes, there’s still a war for him to ignore, and a blundering elite for him to placate, there’s even a cadre of foolish aristocrats who come up with solutions to their war almost as fast as they create new problems. But how much easier it would have been for Pierre to own a mobile phone with a full calendar and incessant alerts. How much easier it would have been for him to focus on the ceaseless present if it arrived with beeps and flashes and rings that covered for the pain of doing absolutely nothing.
But only under the influence of wine did he say to himself: “Never mind. I’ll disentangle it — I’ve got a ready explanation right here. But I have no time now — I’ll think it all over later!” But this later never came.
Of course later never comes—that’s why later is the perfect word for Pierre. It works when discussing the war, it works in moments of planning, it works in moments of hesitation. There’s always later, always tomorrow, always a next time. It is a word for both the perfectionist and the procrastinator. It is a word for when you’re feeling sluggish and directionless and just a little bit glum, for when you’re avoiding what you must confront.
Sometimes Pierre remembered stories he had heard about how soldiers at war, taking cover under enemy fire, when there is nothing to do, try to find some occupation for themselves so as to endure the danger more easily. And to Pierre all people seemed to be such soldiers, saving themselves from life…
Tolstoy adds a curious phrase—“when there is nothing to do”—that appears, at best, inadequate for a bombardment, but it is necessary for understanding the passage. Especially when you consider that these are Pierre’s thoughts and that this is a story that he tells himself—with a rationalization always the most soothing of lies. Is there ever truly nothing to do?
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II
Prague 2011
Here is Count Nikolai Ilyich Rostóv from War and Peace, former student and current soldier, forever the idealist:
Rostóv was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood.
Rostóv has a good story, and good stories, I’ll admit, don’t let pesky details such as the truth interfere with the much more important consideration of suspense. As there’s nothing like a good narrative and a captive audience to keep your lips moving while a faint, distant voice inside your mind loses the battle to stop your words. So you distort a bit, fib slightly, and sidestep the actual facts for a more appealing storyline. Soon enough you witness the intoxicating influence of your words on your audience, a view that is exhilarating and addictive and irresistible—leaving both audience and teller pretty much drunk.
But we still sympathize with Rostóv, as he has a story of wartime triumph, and this is Moscow society during war and stories of triumph are all that’s wanted: nothing less than a repetition of the permitted truth. His story of heroism is perfectly understandable, as there’s a benefit to telling the crowd what it wants to hear. For the same reason nobody is surprised when a young child discovers the unbelievable power of an artful lie. One that is subtle yet definitive. One that shapes the room to avoid a punishment. Or, like Rostóv’s lie, a mere brag. To contort the muscles in your face into a lie results in the most incredible reverberations, which all too often come with the meretricious lesson that changing your words will change reality.
It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that.
Even the smallest of lies, however, comes with ripples, especially in wartime when the atmosphere is tenser and the consequences harsher. And as contemporary readers, aware of the coming destruction, we have an inchoate sense that Rostóv’s outward lie is but a step toward the much worse inward lie.
III
Prague 2011
Here is Leo Tolstoy interrupting the narrative of War and Peace for a brief note about the ambiguity of warfare:
The column moved forward without knowing where and unable, from the masses around them, the smoke and the increasing fog, to see either the place they were leaving or that to which they were going.
The diversions that Tolstoy adds to his narrative—about the nature of power, on the mechanics of statecraft, about the weakness of leaders—were perhaps overrated in the 19th Century and are perhaps underrated in the 21st Century. In these interludes we see the clash of incentives with constraints, and how it feels to be stuck in a room with a leader drunk from delusions of power yet somehow powerless to change events. Contemporary readers, however, have little time for tangents in a narrative: stick to the story, keep out the superfluous, get to the point.
Of course it is worth noticing that Tolstoy’s digressions aren’t incidental—there’s a significance to how an unprepared society slips into a preventable war, to how delusions of security leads to complacency, or to how fear of escalation itself triggers an escalation.
In the passage above, where a column of soldiers moves through fog, we have a truth about the difficulty of clarity during wartime—a passage about literal fog akin to the fogginess of the choices made by Pierre and Rostóv. Regardless of whether your missing compass is literal and you can’t see through a fog, or your missing compass is metaphoric and you can’t tell the truth, you’re lost.
The fog had grown so dense that though it was growing light they could not see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like gigantic trees and level ground like cliffs and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, one might encounter an enemy invisible ten paces off.
At the moment of stress and confusion, as a lifetime of bad choices triggers its consequences, you’re stuck with all those little deviations, slight detours, unspoken words, unchallenged tyrants—stuck with the results of following a broken compass.
A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has walked, whatever strange, unknown, and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is always surrounded by the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship, so the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same ranks…
The futility of the marginal choice in these moments—the one right before your eyes—is one of the grander aspects of War and Peace. We have more control over the distant future than we do over our immediate surroundings, much like how a large ship can only maneuver with small adjustments, but those small adjustments can result in vast differences to distant targets. It is the same constraint felt by the individual soldier who is left alone in the forest to fight a battle that started long ago. Or it is the same constraint felt by the politician who ignored years of warnings and is now unprepared. Tolstoy concentrates his attention at the top of the hierarchy, in the leaders who delude themselves, who believe in a destiny founded upon those delusions, until they soon discover how they, too, are trapped in a time and by events, grasping for control yet unable to exert their will.
The sailor rarely cares to know the latitude in which his ship is sailing, but on the day of battle—heaven knows how and whence—a stern note of which all are conscious sounds in the moral atmosphere of an army, announcing the approach of something decisive and solemn, and awakening in the men an unusual curiosity.
At least sailing offers an apt metaphor for all of these laters, or for anyone feeling trapped within a storm of their own choices, because there’s only so long that you can wait before finally making the choice that you’ve been putting off. The real question—What should I do?—is all that really matters once the crisis finally arrives. It is a truth that confronts every inhabitant of Moscow in War and Peace eventually. And a sailer would recognize the fault in how Pierre and Rostóv delayed and deferred their previous answers—as timidity is the worst solution during storms. Veteran sailors know that timidity can bring the most vicious swells, those broadside waves that knock against the side of your boat and lurch you off course. Veteran sailors also know that you should have avoided most storms long before they occur. To be caught by a storm is to have been sleeping as danger approached. Once you’re stuck, however, it is much better to confront a rising swell straight on with the bow of your boat—which is, in fact, exactly the same solution for the most difficult truths. After a lifetime of bad choices and distractions and laters, after you’re already trapped by the storm, after the rogue wave rises up before you, the only solution that doesn’t involve a deceptive later is to, for once, thrust straight forward.
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