Lessons

by Ian McEwan

To follow the obscure trail of an exquisite idea that could lead to a lucky narrowing, to a fiery point, a sudden focus of pure light to illuminate a first line that would hold the secret key to the lines that must follow.

To follow the obscure trail of an exquisite idea that could lead to a lucky narrowing, to a fiery point, a sudden focus of pure light to illuminate a first line that would hold the secret key to the lines that must follow.

He inhaled deeply and howled, a piteous piercing wail of abandonment and despair. For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.

He inhaled deeply and howled, a piteous piercing wail of abandonment and despair. For speechless helpless humans, much power lay in a violent switch of extreme emotions. A crude mode of tyranny. Real-world tyrants were often compared to infants.

A cloud of self-deception was general across Europe. A West German TV channel persuaded itself that the radioactive miasma would contaminate not the West but the Soviet Empire alone, as if to take revenge. An East German ministry spokesman referred to an American plot to wreck the people’s power stations. The French government appeared to believe that the cloud’s south-western edge matched the Franco-German border, which it had no authority to cross. The British authorities announced that there was no possible risk to the public, even as they set about closing 4,000 farms, forbidding the sale of 4.5 million sheep, impounding tons of cheese and emptying a sea of milk down drains. Moscow, reluctant to concede an error, let its infants and children drink irradiated milk.

“Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct.”

Apt description of the USA during the Trump administration and Republican party even afterward.

this opening declaration on such a grand note, written by a man, a student, still in his mid-twenties, with a passion for intellectual freedom and his sure sense of a precious artistic, philosophical and religious tradition under threat of annihilation.

How perilous, what courage, to call the Third Reich “a spiritual prison…a mechanised state apparatus lorded over by criminals and drunkards,” and to write that “every word that Hitler utters is a lie…His mouth is the stinking gate of hell.”

Never forget that all citizens deserve the regime they are willing to endure…our

Hans Scholl and his companions longed with a passion to rouse the German people from their inaction, their apathy “in the face of these abominable crimes, crimes that demean the human race…the inane stupefaction of the German people encourages these fascist criminals.” Unless they took action no one could be exonerated, because every man “is guilty, guilty, guilty.”

Yup

“We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience.

“now that we have seen them for what they are, it must be the first and only duty, the sacred duty of every Ge...

He had reached that point—late thirties was common—when one’s parents set

off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children. It was a slow process.

In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses.

Nothing forces public events on private lives like a war.

At last he gave up and moved on. Soon he was walking by the Wall, along Niederkirchner Straße. In white paint a graffito read, Sie kamen, sie sahen, sie haben ein bisschen eingekauft—they came, they saw, they did a little shopping. In historical Berlin, Caesar would certainly be remembered.

He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would “throw up.” Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination.

What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. Like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry.

Roland thought, the world was wobbling badly on its axis, ruled in too

many places by shameless ignorant men, while freedom of expression was in retreat and digital public spaces resounded with the shouts of delirious masses. Truth had no consensus. New nuclear weapons multiplied, commanded by hair-trigger artificial intelligence, while vital natural systems, including jet streams, ocean currents as well as pollinating insects, submarine cliffs of coral and the biological churn of rich natural soils and all manner of diverse flora and fauna—wilting or becoming extinct. Parts of the world were burning or drowning.

Affairs and marriages ended long ago come to resemble postcards from the past. Brief note about the weather, a quick story, funny or sad, a bright picture on the other side. First to go, Roland thought as he walked towards her house, was the elusive self, precisely how you were yourself, how you appeared to others.

Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years. Or a portal to a new kind of America, the present administration just an interregnum, a variant of Weimar. Meet me on the Avenue of the Heroes of January Sixth. From peak to midden in thirty years. Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.

As things stood he might not get a quarter of the way through. A glimpse of the contents page would be enough. Would a catastrophic global overheating be headed off? Was a Sino-American war woven into the pattern of history? Would the global rash of racist nationalism yield to something more generous, more constructive? Might we reverse the current great extinction of species? Could the open society find new and fairer ways to flourish? Would artificial intelligence make us wise or mad or irrelevant? Could we manage the century without an exchange of nuclear missiles? As he saw it, simply getting through intact to the last day of the twenty-first century, to the end of the book, would be a triumph.

He accepted that pessimism was the good companion of thought and study, that optimism was the business of politicians, and no one believed them. He knew about the reasons to be cheerful and had sometimes cited the indices, the literacy rates and so on. But they were relative to a wretched past. He couldn’t help himself, there was a novel ugliness about. There were nations run by well-dressed criminal gangs intent on self-enrichment, kept in place by security services, by the rewriting of history and passionate nationalism. Russia was just one. The USA, in a delirium of anger, delusional conspiracies and white supremacy, could yet become another.

China had refuted the claim that trade with outsiders opened minds and societies. Now the technology was on hand, it might perfect the totalitarian state and offer a new model of social organisation to compete with or replace liberal democracies—a dictatorship sustained by a reliable flow of consumer goods and a degree of targeted genocide. Roland’s bad dream was of freedom of expression, a shrinking privilege, vanishing for a thousand years. Christian medieval Europe did without it that long. Islam had never much cared for it.

But each of these problems was parochial, local to a mere human timescale. They shrank and tightened into a bitter kernel contained within the shell of the greater matter, the earth’s heating, the disappearing animals and plants, the disrupted interwoven systems of oceans, land, air and life, beautif...