Abstract
A few years ago there was a weekly television show featuring heroic people who routinely carried out missions loosely characterized as impossible. If they were really impossible, those people would have seemed more like lunatics than heroes and the show would have had a short run. As I wrote this chapter, I developed some sympathy for those people. Although the line between heroic and outrageous assumptions is often blurred in a work like this, the fogginess tends to accumulate in great blobs instead of being spread smoothly throughout the whole. When a lot of those blobs come together, the result is pretty unsettling. The sense of the whole enterprise is torn open to doubt and its mushy core oozes out as far as the mind’s eye can see. Unfortunately, that seemed to happen quite a bit in this chapter.
“Luka. Then there came to that place — all this happened in Siberia — a man exiled by the government, a learned man, with books, maps, and all sorts of things hike that. So our man says to the scientist: Do me a favor, please, show me where the true and just land lies and how to get there. The scientist at once opens his books, spreads his maps — looks here, looks there — there’s no true and just land anywhere. Everything is right, all the lands are shown — but the true and just land is just not there.
Peppel (in a low voice). Not there? Really? Bubnov laughs.
Natasha. Don’t interrupt. Go on, grandpa.
Luka. My man doesn’t believe him. It must be there, says he, look harder for it. Otherwise your books and maps, says he — they’re all worthless if they fail to show the true and just land. The scientist is sore at that. My maps, says he, are the truest of all, and the true and just land doesn’t exist anywhere. Hearing that, my man too gets angry. What? says he. I’ve lived and suffered all these years believing it exists, and your maps make out it doesn’t? It’s robbery! And he says to the scientist: You dirty swine. You’re a crook, not a scientist. And bang! he punches him in the nose, and bang! again! (He pauses.) After that he went home — and hung himself.”
From M. Gorki, The Lower Depths
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Notes
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B. Vallee, `Security: The Private Armies Grow’, The Toronto Star, May 25, 1976, p. B3.
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© 1980 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Michalos, A.C. (1980). Crime and Justice. In: North American Social Report. Crime, Justice, and Politics, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9002-9_1
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