Spectator's Journal/A Solzhenitsyn's Tribute
Isaac, Rael Jean
Broadway, broadened Epstein's technical range without defining his place in American poetry. Who are his antecedents, and what is his aesthetic position? The Book of Fortune helps to...
...citizenship this June, when they will have been five years in the embassy...
...Miller's example, it is clear, is of an end, personal fame, which is both selfish and nonmaterial...
...Their fight has been lonely, but sustained by the appreciation that reaches them from behind the Iron Curtain, both from those in the "official" church who CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 31) curred on June 14, 1775...
...Blahoslav Hruby struggled against the Nazis in occupied Europe and immediately after the war, in Prague, helped refugees escape from Sovietcontrolled territory...
...society, withdrew its support, and the Hrubys founded their own research center to continue publication of the magazine...
...I myself did not participate in any of these demons9t rations, and I have no doubt that Bishop's characterization of many of the participants is accurate...
...It is my case, and was that of Adam Smith, that when the composition9 of the stock of assets and the supplies of effort and skill are a response to the "profit motive" in the free market, "collective needs r (covering all human ends) are served, not ignored...
...Indeed, "competition" may be defined as "the process of substituting lowercost methods of achieving any human objective, including the production and marketing of any product, or the substitution of a preferred product...
...The opening poem "Climbing," about a window-washer who "loves high windows," is an exuberant metaphor for the poet and his audience "Whose vision he rinses clean as fresh glass...
...Miller quotes Christopher Lasch, who wants to construct "a new form of society in which collective needs rather than private profit determine the form and content of production...
...Mrs...
...Nevertheless, I am convinced that there was at least a sizable minority of demonstrators understandably troubled by the policies of the Reagan Administration: its apparently cavalier attitude toward the prospect of nuclear 'war, its doubts about the possibility of successful arms negotiations, and its indifference to the threats of accidental war and nuclear proliferation...
...And I ran with the journal to Aleksandr Isayevich and cried to him: "Look, look, here in the West they know everything[" A little time went by and we soon learned that in the West they knew very little and understood very little and that such people as Blahoslav Hruby and his wife Olga belong--as always has been true in the past--to a very, very small flock.* Most of the others receiving RCDA's human rights awards that *Mrs...
...Rael Jean Isaac back to the formation of the 182nd Infantry Regiment and the 101st Engineer Battalion in 1636, both of which still exist as units in the United States Army...
...The tonal influence here is Allen Ginsberg...
...scholarly publication devoted to reporting on religionmand religious repression--behind the Iron Curtain, RCDA was founded under the sponsorship of the National Council of Churches by Dr...
...In a companion monologue the humorous mystic John Burroughs offers an antidote, as he advises Thomas Edison and Henry Ford to respect "the universe that is one human soul...
...Indeed, the only meaning which can be given to the word "needs" here involves an understanding that investment is made in the services of men and the services of assets in any particular activity or occupation, up to the point at which marginal prospective yields are equated with the tea...
...Solzhenitsyn spoke in Russian and her remarks were translated by Father Leonid Kishkovsky...
...If one wishes to insult the memory of any musical genius by such a comparison, I suggest that Mozartian would be more appropriate--and cite The Magic Flute...
...Army, Fort Sheridan, Illinois Great Performances As a lover of his operas for many years, I take exception to your statement that TV news broadcasts are Wagnerian spectacles ("CBS Beholds the Noose,'-' TAS, November 1982...
...And I saw there a detailed description of the difficulties and sufferings of the monks in the Pochayev monastery...
...In 1971 the National Council, by now less interested in religious freedom than in exposing the villainy of U.S...
...it was not until November that the Marine Corps arrived on the scene...
...And suddenly I had in my hands the journal RCDA, and I simply could not believe my eyes...
...My purpose in this letter is to examine the often misunderstood relation between "self-interested" action and action aimed at improving one's "material condition," in the light of modern economists' understanding of the incentives to economic activity...
...Today, when economists refer to "competition," it is this process that they envisage in operation...
...At that point people in their consumer capacity are predicted to prefer other kinds of output from the scarce resources (men and assets) available...
...Epstein can handle the classic line, but he can also manhandle it, as he does in the prophetic "Ode To Virgil": "Pneumatic sage, son of the Empire, come homel/Your villa is on firel Vergilius, all is forgiven...
...In the last decade the Hrubys have fought the disheartening indifference of the leadership of mainline churches, who lend themselves to such propaganda festivals for religious leaders as the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1983 39 May 1982 conference in Moscow "Saving the Sacred Gift of Life from Nuclear Catastrophe...
...On the other hand, one working to provide food for the starving in Asia has an objective which is both altruistic and material...
...I congratulate Mr...
...each, if fulfilled, gives me satisfaction...
...It was the Hrubys who persuaded Senator Carl Levin to introduce the bill now pending in Congress to give these families permanent resident status, making them eligible for U.S...
...If we use their terminology, then self-interested economic activity is not solely selfregarding...
...If Art is accomplished at a necessary risk, so is all human intimacy...
...Army actuallydates authorities because of the watchful RCDA and from those in the persecuted church, ranging from the Gleb Yakunins to the Chmykhalov and Vashchenko families, in the basement of the U.S...
...On a stroll with his daughter around a ruined school, Epstein leads us to the question: "What have I learned in school but the savage joy/of asking questions that brought the building down...
...W.H...
...St...
...The only U.S...
...Only Maxwell Cohen, a lawyer cited for his efforts on behalf of Biafra and the Sudan, was able to accept in person...
...On this conception, all action--both "selfish" and "altruistic"-is properly regarded as selfinterested...
...Jack R. Harnes, M.D...
...Major David G. Boyd U.S...
...I read analyses and commentaries about the religious life of our country which could well have been written by one of us living there in the USSR...
...On the way to his grandfather's deathbed the poet composes an eloquent farewell, Then he cannot deliver it because he is overwhelmed...
...These poems are awesomely learned, in the manner of High Modernism, but they bear their learning in a graceful, sometimes carefree manner...
...The poem is tragedy wrought to its uttermost, and a breakthrough for the elegaic form...
...It is true that any individual seeking his own material, aesthetic, altruistic, or self-regarding objectives, may cause harm to others in the sense that the ends he tries to achieve may conflict with the ends others try to achieve...
...Further, Stephen Miller's question which follows is surely misphrased, although his point is well-taken...
...At day's end, "sadly he rides the elevator down / and starts again at the foot of the blind wall...
...The first is a poem of metaphysical wit, on the violence inherent in education...
...Every day we received thousands of journals, books and appeals, and we felt that we would not be able to penetrate that jungle...
...It should benoticed that, in this definition, there is no confinement to material objectives...
...Plainly, then, the common equating of "selfish" with "materialistic" and of "altruistic" with "' spiritual" or "nonmaterial" ,ends .is erroneous...
...The poems "Schoolhouses" and "Lafayette Square" are destined to become classics...
...Solzhenitsyn tescribed first learning about RCDA in Switzerland, where she and her husband had gone upon being expelled from the Soviet Union: We had just arrived there and we had the feeling that everything was foreign, alien, and that it was very difficult to live...
...embassy in Moscow since June 1978...
...When l give voluntarily, it is because it is in my ~nterest to give...
...He asks, "When will writers stop making a bogeyman out of self-interest, assuming that anyone who pursues his self-interest always pursues it--that he is never capable of sacrifice or altruism...
...Social psychologists have distinguished between self-regarding and otherregarding actions...
...Lafayette Square," in the voice of Henry Adams's wife, is a profound psychological portrait of a woman driven to suicide by her husband's technological prophecies of doom...
...0~IQQ0D0~0~0Ig~O0~Q0~I~m0II~0D0Q008OQ000qQB0Q~QQ~DQ0~Q~Q~0~0~Q08~0D~i~gD~OQD~QQ~0QOQ~Q~Qo~OI~O~Q000O0o000~0~QBQg~DIQQQ~00o~OO~00i S P E C T A T O R ' S J 0 U R N A L QI00g~QQIQ0Q~QOQIOgQOQQ0Qo0OQ~0Oo~O0ggQI000gQ0gQ0QmQOQQQ000IQ0m0IOQ000Qm~O0mB~m0Qo0000oQO0Oe0I~0QIQQOQQl0QO'0I0QII0Q0O0Q0m60QQ0~QQ000e0~0m000IoQD0Qm~iiQQ0mQm A Solzhenitsyn's Tribute On October 28, 1982, almost three hundred people gathered for dinner at the Essex House in New York City to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of a little known quarterly, Religion in Communist Dominated Areas (RCDA) and to pay tribute to the two extraordinary people who have kept it alive, Blahoslav and Olga Hruby...
...The most dramatic in a series of tributes to RCDA came from Natalia Solzhenitsyn, who accepted RCDA's human rights award on behalf of Father Gleb Yakunin, the Russian Orthodox priest currently serving a lengthy sentence at hard labor in a Soviet prison camp...
...Neither Miller nor Maital seems fully to9u nderstand these distinctions...
...evening could not be there: Ida Nudel, the imprisoned Jewish human rights leader, as well as heads of Solidarity and Charter 77, the Czech human rights monitoring group, whose leaders move in and out of prison...
...Father Yakunin's 1975 appeal for help for the oppressed church had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union, translated by Olga Hruby, and then sent to the World Council of Churches meeting in Nairobi where for the first time WCC leaders were forced to deal with the subject of religious persecution in the Soviet Union...
...Of course, men have to satisfy their material needs...
...Epstein's paean to his grandfather, the anti-elegaic '~lotes For A Conversation," sets up a compelling drama...
...It may help to explain that when a nonmaterial objective is sought, to the extent to which its achievement involves a cost, i.e., the sacrifice of some other o b j e c t i v e , . . , it is a product of the same economic status as say, butter, or books, or a house, or an insurance policy...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...It took the hysteria and antiacademic line of the Beats to free poetry from the scholarly rule of Pound and Eliot...
...But the term "objectives" here covers aesthetic and altruistically motivated objectives also...
...This definition serves irrespective of the institutional setup necessary to release or protect the "loss-avoidance profit-seeking incentives" which activate the system, and irrespective of whether people are greedy or generous...
...Economically, if not morally, my "altruistic" desire to give has the same status as a "selfish" desire to get...
...The author of The Book of Fortune may be the first American poet to synthesize these opposing poetics, to have it both ways...
...it is, and has always been, largely other-regarding...
...report how they have managed to (Incidentally, some figures suggest extract a few concessions from the that the U.S...
...Where Byron and Browning were the guardian spirits of Epstein's earlier work, T.S...
...But Epstein does not leave us on this note...
...Paul regrets you died too soon to be converted...
...New York, New York Positive Elements I regret that in Joseph W. Bishop, J r . ' s otherwise extremely wellwritten and thoughtful review of Theodore H. White's latest book (TAS, October 1982) his comments on the antinuclear demonstrations border on the sophomoric caricatures of liberals all too common in The American Spectator...
...To reduce the entire antinuclear movement to its most muddleheaded, ignorant, and pacifist elements seems to me an arrogant failure to take seriously the opinions 0f those with whom one disagrees...
...It portrays love, hate, virtue, crime, intrigue, race relations, religion, animals, comedy, attempted suicide, and even a touch of f0ul weather...
...Some months later---on October 30, 1775, the United States Navy was born...
...Eliot is the influence most evident in The Book of Fortune...
...First, Art succeeds only at great risk...
...It was good to sit with Hrubys' friends and hear unsung heroes serenaded...
...But then we felt the need to acquaint ourselves with the Western press, and so we divided the work-Aleksandr Isayevich looked at everything in the German language and I investigated everything in the English language...
...The concept of self-interest in this approach makes Maital's implication that "altruism lies beyond self-interest" quite inapplicable...
...Its plot is weak and its setting grand...
...I read one of the appeals of Father Gleb Yakunin...
...McGurn on his commendable fidelity to the Corps...
...Hurt Distinguished Professor of Economics University of Dallas 40 THE AMERICAN SPEcTATOR JANUARY 1983...
...Each motivates me to action...
...Steven R. Gerber New York, New York Self Interest In an exceptionally interesting review of Shlomo Maital's Minds, Markets, and Money (TAS, November 1982), Stephen Miller refers to "a wide variety of thinkers," including Mandeville, Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, David Hume, and the authors of the Federalist, who are said to have believed that ,'most people were driven by the engine of selfinterest," by which they meant that "most people want to improve their material condition...
...Miller, in fact, contradicts himself: "[Adam Smith] took it for granted that some [people] are not [animated by self-interest], that their selfinterest can take the form of a desire for fame as a legislator rather than a desire for a better material condition...
...If Young Men's uom seemed at times impetuous and sprawling, the new book is careful, almost too careful...
...In short, all the elements of TV news...
...Windows, like readers, need constant refreshening, and are mostly indifferent to the windowwash~' s dangerous efforts...
...There are twelve poems, selected and ordered with Eliotic precision...
...The Book of Fortune helps to answer these questions...
...A harsh, all-seeing light/rushes, crowds your room as if the sun/had risen on both sides of us at once...
...Furthermore, contrary to unreflective usage, "selfish" objectives are not necessarily material objectives, and "altruistic" ends are not always nonmaterial in nature...
...Ideas never made a child," she says, "though they kill men...
...And everything we read was full of those things that interest the Westmoil shortages, the election of the French President, and so on...
...And Epstein's intentions, thematic and aesthetic, are as clear as Eliot's in Prufrock...
...Paul Anderson, a specialist on the Russian Orthodox Church, and Blahoslav Hruby, a Czech-born Presbyterian minister...
...But of course (something Maital fails to see) this is true of all, not simply material or "selfish" ones...
...rate of interest...
Vol. 16 • January 1983 • No. 1
