Letters, 1905-1965
Schweitzer, Albert
BOOK REVIEWS ost men of comparable intellectual and artistic gifts would be appalled at the thought of living a life like Albert Schweitzer's. Saintly self-abnegation is a tough row to hoe,...
...He is hopeful that this argument will have a salutary effect on the politicalspirit of the age, which he considers positively inhuman...
...The Kingdom of God is great politics...
...To Pablo CasalS, Schweitzer asserts that atomic weapons are illegal by international law, because they have "an unlimitable effect," and "cause unlimited damage to people outside the battle zone...
...But by this time Jeff is more interested in dope than friendship...
...the politics of personal and national freedom is the politics of the world...
...Although Schweitzer extends his reverence for life beyond the human, he is not doctrinaire about animal rights...
...He expanded his hospital to "a large village," with forty buildings and 560 beds...
...The hard life took its toll: ". . . you cannot imagine the physical fatigue one feels after almost three and a half years under the equator...
...leave all incomprehensible things alone, seek only one thing: the growth of the spiritual person, so that you may achieve peace of mind, which is higher than all reason, and so that you may give people something of the spirit of peace...
...There's only one way out: a hostile takeover...
...thus the greater the honor that accrues to so hard a vocation, the brighter the nimbus that radiates from a life spent in the midst of suffering almost beyond imagining...
...His books are too literary or too political...
...he was already a philosopher, a teacher of theology, a preacher, one of the world's finest organists, and the author of a study of Bach that remains irreplaceable...
...I can see myself only as a servant who therefore tries even more loyally to make the most of the talents entrusted to him...
...The politics of this world was defined after the Second World War by the atomic balance of terror...
...At the age of 30 Schweitzer wrote to the director of the Paris Mission Society, "Absorbed in my thoughts about Jesus, I have asked myself whether I could live without scholarship, without art, without the intellectual environment in which I now exist—and all my reflections have always ended with a joyous 'Yes.' " He applied himself to the study of medicine, in order to make himself more useful...
...Now he's really screwed...
...She has tried law school, Sotheby's, and banking...
...The simple core of his spirituality was always a beautiful thing...
...I ought to be thirty and not seventy years old," he declared, but he seemed always to work as though he were a young man...
...They stop having sex...
...The deeper spirituality he sought found theoretical utterance as well as practical use...
...Anyone who deals with organs is transported beyond all that is human and all-toohuman and purified to feel the sheer delight in truth, and he venerates organs and the sound of organs as the great spiritual educators that teach us to experience a conviction of eternity...
...In Europe I wouldn't kill it even if it were bothering me, but here, where mosquitos spread the most dangerous form of malaria, I take the liberty of killing them, although I don't like doing it...
...Russell's unholy alliance with Melman the Conqueror appears to be working until October 1987, when the buzzbomb Dow kicked out and a lot of people in yellow ties found themselves in a free-fall, an ungentle glide that would scatter a priviBRIGHTNESS FALLS Jay McInerney Alfred A. Knopf /416 pages/$23 reviewed by RICHARD LAMB 64 The American Spectator December 1992...
...The important thing is for all of us to properly mull over the question of when damaging and killing are permissible...
...Russell's father was a GM exec and Russell grew up a comfortable suburbanite, if without the cachet that a bunch of nasty, selfish, uptight, disapproving, miserly, Philistine, alcoholic, smug—but, thank god, eccentric—New England relatives bestows...
...It is ironic that the greatest easing of atomic tension was in fact accomplished by increasing armament rather than by Christian sentiment...
...Correcting a Finnish journalist who claimed that Schweitzer had denigrated the role of Christianity in Africa, he replied, "The Gospel has been a great spiritual boon for the natives...
...And it has brought them Jesus and the faith in the kind Father in heaven...
...When he was just getting started, he had to work in a windowless chicken coop, and wore his pith helmet indoors because the sun came blasting through the holes in the ceiling...
...Pierce has written a book of short stories about his eccentric Old New England Family...
...When he was interned by the French during the First World War, he drew an organ keyboard on a table top and pedals on the floor, and practiced thus...
...McInerney himself was "discovered" by his old Williams friend Gary Fisketjon...
...It has freed them from the fear of magic and cruelty that the witch doctors practice...
...Corinne doesn't want to do the publishing tycoon thing...
...And he wrote to a handicapped woman, "Do not quarrel with God, do not quarrel with man...
...Despite his naïveté, he was too great a man to be dismissed as a crank...
...arrived from one hundred fifty miles away, by canoe...
...As the deal takes shape, Russell Calloway's personal life falls apart...
...It is a great doctor's compassion that underlies the reverence for life: a democratic virtue, LETTERS, 1905-1965 Albert Schweitzer edited by Hans Walter Bahr translated by Joachim Neugroschel Macmillan/420 pages/$35 reviewed by ALGIS VALIUNAS 62 The American Spectator December 1992 perhaps, as much as a Christian one...
...If McInerney had remembered The Third Man—in which a testy British military policeman reminds Joseph Cotten, "Calloway, not Callahan, I'm English, not Irish"—he might have avoided giving an ethnically Irish characRichard Lamb is a writer living in New York...
...The ethics of reverence for life is nothing but Jesus' great commandment to love—a commandment that is reached by thinking...
...43 from an Old New England Family...
...People did not believe they could make it come true...
...His wife, Helen, her health broken, had to return to Europe, and spent much of the rest of her life in sanatoriums...
...I don't see why your goal should disappear as you grow older...
...It is precisely because he is fully aware of what human beings are—not pleasure-pain mechanisms but creatures with souls—that he reveres their lives more than he does those of lesser beings...
...I can apply this aphorism to myself, but I cannot apply it to someone else's life, for his life is precisely the one thing through which I relate to him...
...John Kennedy replied to a letter of his in 1962 that he hoped Schweitzer would hurl "the great weight of [his] influence behind the movement for general and complete disarmament...
...At the end of the day you are amazed that you are still on your feet after all the misery you have seen...
...He susses the fact that the company owns its building, has a textbook subsidiary, and—"like Exxon"—is undervalued...
...Unlike Tolstoy in his high Christly days, Schweitzer does not think it the duty of decent men to lie down and die in the face of those irreverent toward life...
...Russell catches him shooting up in the bathroom at a party, and with family and friends stages 'an "intervention," packing Jeff off to a little place in Connecticut that used to specialize in Park Avenue drunks, but has broadened its horizons...
...She's happy with their lives...
...Corinne was "an erotic totem figure" at Brown...
...As a performing musician he felt himself in the service of the composer and of God: "Bach is a precious gift to our time, one of the lights that shine through the darkness in which mankind today must seek the road to a deeper spirituality...
...His powers came together in his life of service...
...To an American missionary he writes, "My idea of reverence for life is not meant to guide the African in striving for his own and his nation's freedom...
...The reverence for life (Ehrfurcht von dem Leben) is the center of his thought and feeling: Oh, what confusion was caused by the poet when he sententiously said, "Life is not the supreme good...
...To the Ode° Catala Choir in Barcelona he wrote in 1913, "And while I am bandaging the abscesses, my ears can still hear the Bach mass coming from you, and I feel as if a few solemn words of this text were resounding in the midst of these wretched people, to whom good is being done in the name of Jesus: . . . Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini [Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lora...
...He was to remain almost forty more...
...Saintly self-abnegation is a tough row to hoe, especially under an equatorial sun, and the pleasures of civilization are splendid and many...
...71 ter an ethnically English name...
...It was actually a piano with organ pedals that he played on most every evening...
...Campaigned against superficial virtuosity and for a spiritualized playing," he wrote of his European career...
...Stick to the idea of always doing whatever is consistent with the spirit of children of God...
...The truly astonishing thing is how he managed to continue to develop the gifts that he was prepared to sacrifice...
...Corinne finds out and stalks off to Stockbridge and Mom...
...He complained that his life was one hard job after another, but be never skirted the task...
...Well...
...The kitchen, it appears, is "not really intended for serious employment, but rather, it seemed, for the three-a.m...
...In a letter to a Swedish newspaper in 1952, Schweitzer sets himself against modern political life, and for the life of the spirit: Through Christianity, the idea of a kingdom of peace has been known to mankind for centuries...
...Corinne is searching a bit...
...and really wants to teach...
...He oversaw the efforts of a work-crew of lepers, who refused to answer to anyone but him...
...scrambling of a few Eggs Benny Goodman after the Stork Club...
...He never ceased to work on his beloved Bach...
...Russell, known as Crash, is a "Calloway from County Cork," by way of Boston and Detroit...
...His boss won't chat at the urinal...
...You're still my blonde bombshell," says Russell...
...There are extensive a clef elements here...
...This admirable collection of letters is a rich spiritual document of a life that few would envy but many would revere...
...in the village of Gunsbach where he had grown up, Protestants and Catholics had shared the same church...
...Staying young doesn't mean having the soul of a child, it means having the soul of a child of God, the soul of a man trying to be a child of God, animated by the spirit of God...
...Russell isn't a careerist or anything, but it is 1987, and his career is going nowhere...
...Russell has forsaken writerly ambitions for the security of the publishing house Corbin, Dern, where he made a name for himself by discovering his best friend, Jeff Pierce...
...Kept in a zinc-lined crate, to guard against the humidity, the pedal piano rolled out on rails...
...The sick Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...
...I must regard his life as his supreme good...
...He corresponded with organ builders and restorers...
...The kingdom of peace remains, sadly, a chimera...
...Whatever the flaws in Schweitzer's thinking, as a man of action he was solid as granite...
...Russell goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair and commits drunken adultery...
...Schweitzer is careful that reverence for life not be dragooned into political service...
...She loses a baby...
...He has asked her what she thinks of the Condrieu...
...In the same letter, a circular to friends and patrons of the hospital, he quotes LaoTse at length on the proper attitude toward victory in war: winning must be no pleasure, for such pleasure would be a murderer's, and the killing of many should be mourned tearfully, so that the victor in celebration must behave as if at a memorial service...
...She is lemoning the sole filets...
...He eulogized the explorer Pierre Count Sovorgnan de Brazza as a "new kind of colonizer" who "instantly launched the struggle for the abolition of slavery...
...It is impossible to fault anyone for failing to choose such a course...
...Maintain your simplicity...
...Make your life good and true...
...Every few years he would go to Europe and play a concert tour, with the proceeds benefiting the hospital...
...Russell and Corinne Calloway are standing in the kitchen of their Upper East Side apartment...
...He is grateful, after the Second World War, that he was not among those doing the killing, but he acknowledges the war was necessary: "We simply cannot fathom the fact that our calling is to help compassionately while others are condemned to suffer or have to perform an activity that causes suffering and death...
...He sees that he cannot consider his own life the supreme good, for to do so would lead him to nihilism, in which nothing but his life would have value or meaning...
...Seek simplicity...
...He remained a thinker and a musician...
...He The American Spectator December 1992 63 offered instruction to a French Catholic boy scout whose troop was named after Schweitzer: Don't choose to make your life into something great...
...He was proud that...
...It is the opening of Brightness Falls, © 1992 by Bright Lights, Big City, Inc...
...it goes along with those relatives...
...This insight is urged upon us by the times in which we live...
...Russell hooks up with an LBO shark named Bernie Melman, who orchestrates the takeover...
...It is her thirty-first birthday...
...Russell pushes away his best friend, too, keeping his scheme a secret...
...I have just killed a mosquito that was buzzing around me in the lamplight...
...For Schweitzer, the love God commands is the love of the living body, which houses the soul...
...One cannot be half-hearted about such a healing ministry...
...If it weren't for the thought of all the good one can do, then this life in Africa would be unendurable," he wrote after thirteen years as a missionary...
...So it is only the lives of others that he considers of supreme value, and in thinking thus he evades the problematic Christian principle that a man's soul, not his life, is the greatest good...
...To Lambarene on the Ogowe River in French Equatorial Africa (later Gabon), he came and built a hospital...
...Russell is the protégé of editor Harold Stone, but is being rusticated...
...4 4 ym only relaxation is practicing on the organ...
...If mankind is not to perish, then we have no choice but to place our hope in the spirit, which is different from the spirit of the world...
...It was viewed as something purely religious that could not be applied to reality, but actually it is something that should and must be realized...
...True goodness is more mysterious these days than evil, and this book teaches one to honor that mystery...
...volunteers at a homeless shelter...
...Just couldn't be better...
...Jeff and Russell see each other as alter egos, Jeff walking on the wild side, Russell nabbing the girl and the safe job...
...In 1951 he accepted the Hebei Prize but refused the honorarium that went with it, for there was too much suffering in Germany, especially among refugees, for him to take the money...
...Then he walks in on Stone in flagrante delicto with his editorial assistant—character No...
...religion and thinking meet in the mysticism of belonging to God through love...
...Leprosy, elephantiasis, scabies, sleeping sickness, heart disease, pneumonia, gangrene, malaria: the most fearful illnesses were common as a cold...
...A mere shell of my former bomb," she retorts...
...As Russell is drawn further into it they become more and more distant...
...And yet the name is perfect...
...Her recurrent bulimia flares up...
...Itis meant to serve a higher level of freedom: that of each soul among billions, each soul conscious of the reverence it owes the others...
...socially acute observers could read in [her] manner the secret code of American pedigree...
...The proposition that every life is sacred is absolute," but some lives are more sacred than others...
...It has liberated them from the dreadful concepts of the heathen life they used to lead...
...Clearly Schweitzer is more subtle in his thinking than the animal rights gang that equates animal life with human because animals are capable of feeling pleasure and pain just as human beings are...
...What to do...
...The latter politics may be justified, but it must not preoccupy our minds to the exclusion of all else...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
