 |
PM |  | |
Quote | | |
Reply | | |
Full Topic | |
| Joined: | Mon Nov 21st, 2005 |
| Location: | California USA |
| Posts: | 6399 |
| Status: |
Offline
|
| Mana: |    |
Book ideas are proposals made by me to bear.
bear took up the challenge and pieced together a whole book, and it is moving toward the printing stage, and then it will move toward the e-book sales stage.
Book ideas are now proposals made by me to bear, Sergey, and Mike (Kurtwaters, who is my cousin from both our fathers who were brothers and our sisters who were sisters), and that is all it is as this stage.
The proposal concerns what I think is a very serious missing element in our current human condition. I think that we human beings have been led away from the power of discussion, and the reasons why I think these things could fill a book, if someone wanted to discuss those reasons with me.
I think that the idea of a Russian History book, a product of discussion between a person living in Russia and people living in America, may go along way toward exemplifying the power of discussion.
To those words I am going to ad a quote from Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn.
From here:
Nobel Lecture
From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life. As the Russian saying goes, "Do not believe your brother, believe your own crooked eye." And that is the most sound basis for an understanding of the world around us and of human conduct in it. And during the long epochs when our world lay spread out in mystery and wilderness, before it became encroached by common lines of communication, before it was transformed into a single, convulsively pulsating lump - men, relying on experience, ruled without mishap within their limited areas, within their communities, within their societies, and finally on their national territories. At that time it was possible for individual human beings to perceive and accept a general scale of values, to distinguish between what is considered normal, what incredible; what is cruel and what lies beyond the boundaries of wickedness; what is honesty, what deceit. And although the scattered peoples led extremely different lives and their social values were often strikingly at odds, just as their systems of weights and measures did not agree, still these discrepancies surprised only occasional travellers, were reported in journals under the name of wonders, and bore no danger to mankind which was not yet one.
But now during the past few decades, imperceptibly, suddenly, mankind has become one - hopefully one and dangerously one - so that the concussions and inflammations of one of its parts are almost instantaneously passed on to others, sometimes lacking in any kind of necessary immunity. Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us - in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world - this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.
To me, in the face of what I call Absolute Abject Belief in Falsehood Without Question, there are our own crooked eyes to see with, instead of being led to slaughter through a scientifically perfected mass hypnosis.
Literature exists, art exists, if we create it.