Among Lagerkvist’s central themes is the question of good and evil, examined through Biblical figures like Barabbas, the man freed from crucifixion instead of Jesus. Below are two scenes from the movie based on Lagerkvist’s novel Barabbas, published in 1950.
The story of Barabbas can be found Mark 15:6-15:
6 Now it was the custom at the Festival to release a prisoner whom the people requested. 7 A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. 8 The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did. 9 “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate, 10 knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead. 12 “What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them. 13 “Crucify him!” they shouted. 14 “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” 15 Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.
Here are two clips from the 1961 movie starring Anthony Quinn:
The following text is from the biography Russell, by Ray Monk, published in 1999:
The Pythagorean Dream
“The first thing that led me to philosophy,” Bertrand Russell wrote late in life, “occurred at the age of eleven.” It was then that his older brother, Frank, taught him Euclid’s system of geometry. As he describes it in his Autobiography
“This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world. After I had learned the fifth proposition, my brother told me that it was generally considered difficult, but I had found no difficulty whatever. This was the first time it had dawned upon me that I might have some intelligence. From that moment until Whitehead and I finished Principia Mathematica, when I was thirty-eight, mathematics was my chief interest, and my chief source of happiness. Like all happiness, however, it was not unalloyed. I had been told that Euclid proved things, and was much disappointed that he started with axioms. At first I refused to accept them unless my brother could offer me some reason for doing so, but he said: ‘If you don’t accept them we cannot go on,’ and as I wished to go on, I reluctantly accepted them pro tem. The doubt as to the premises of mathematics which I felt at that moment remained with me and determined the course of my subsequent work.”
Here is a short documentary, The Three Passions of Bertrand Russell:
The following excerpt is from Faulkner’s novel If I Forget Thee Jerusalem, published in 1939: When the belated and streaming dawn broke, the two convicts, along with twenty others, were in a truck. A trusty drove, two armed guards sat in the cab with him. Inside the high, stall-like topless body the convicts stood, packed like matches in an upright box or like the pencil-shaped ranks of cordite in a shell, shackled by the ankles to a single chain which wove among the motionless feet and swaying legs and a clutter of picks and shovels among which they stood, and was rivetted by both ends to the steel body of the truck.
Then and without warning they saw the flood about which the plump convict had been reading and they listening for two weeks or more. The road ran south. It was built on a raised levee, known locally as a dump, about eight feet above the flat surrounding land, bordered on both sides by the barrow pits from which the earth of the levee had been excavated. These barrow pits had held water all winter from the fall rains, not to speak of the rain of yesterday, but now they saw that the pit on either side of the road had vanished and instead there lay a flat still sheet of brown water which extended into the fields beyond the pits, ravelled out into long motionless shreds in the bottom of the plow furrows and gleaming faintly in the gray light like the bars of a prone and enormous grating. And then (the truck was moving at good speed) as they watched quietly (they had not been talking much anyway but now they were all silent and quite grave, shifting and craning as one to look soberly off to the west side of the road) the crests of the furrows vanished too and they now looked at a single perfectly flat and motionless steel-colored sheet in which the telephone poles and the straight hedgerows which marked section lines seemed to be fixed and rigid as though set in concrete.
It was perfectly motionless, perfectly flat. It looked, not innocent, but
bland. It looked almost demure. It looked as if you could walk on it. It looked so still that they did not realize it possessed motion until they came to the first bridge. There was a ditch under the bridge, a small stream, but ditch and stream were both invisible now, indicated only by the rows of cypress and bramble which marked its course. Here they both saw and heard movement – the slow profound eastward and upstream (« It’s running backward, » one convict said quietly) set of the still rigid surface, from beneath which came a deep faint subaquean rumble which (though none in the truck could have made the comparison) sounded like a subway train passing far beneath the street and which inferred a terrific and secret speed. It was as if the water itself were in three strata, separate and distinct, the bland and unhurried surface bearing a frothy scum and a miniature flotsam of twigs and screening as though by vicious calculation the rush and fury of the flood itself, and beneath this in turn the original stream, trickle, murmuring along in the opposite direction, following undisturbed and unaware its appointed course and serving its Lilliputian end, like a thread of ants between the rails on which an express train passes, they (the ants) as unaware of the power and fury as if it were a cyclone crossing Saturn.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (United Kingdom, 1888-1965) Eliot was born in St. Louis, Mo.
The Hollow Men
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
André Gide (France, 1869-1951) Pointillist painting by Théo van Rysselberghe
Observations Made by Gide
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself – and thus make yourself indispensable.
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Dare to be yourself.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves – in finding themselves.
Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.
The most decisive actions of our life – I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future – are, more often than not, unconsidered.
There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, ‘It all depends on me.’
Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change.
A Remembrance from Truman Capote:
It must have been the spring of 1950 or 1951, since I have lost my notebooks detailing those two years. It was a warm day late in February, which is high spring in Sicily, and I was talking to a very old man with a mongolian face who was wearing a black velvet Borsalino and, disregarding the balmy, almond-blossom-scented weather, a thick black cape.
The old man was Andre Gide, and we were seated together on a sea wall overlooking shifting fire-blue depths of ancient water.
The postman passed by. A friend of mine, he handed me several letters, one of them containing a literary article rather unfriendly toward me (had it been friendly, of course no one would of sent it).
After listening to me grouse a bit about the piece, and the unwholesome nature of the critical mind in general, the great French master hunched, lowered his shoulders like a wise old . . . shall we say buzzard?, and said, “Ah, well. Keep in mind an Arab proverb: ‘The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.’”
Hermann Hesse (Switzerland, 1877-1962). Image by Andy Warhol.
Here is the final paragraph from Hesse’s novel Siddhartha. The book ends with Siddhartha becoming a ferryman, learning from a river the essence of his journey:
Slower, he walked along in his thoughts and asked himself: “But what is this, what you have sought to learn from teachings and from teachers, and what they, who have taught you much, were still unable to teach you?” And he found: “It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!”
The only thing I am able to find by Jensen is a rough google translation of his poem At Memphis Station.
At Memphis Station
Half awake and half asleep
proposed by a clammy reality, but still distant
in a home of Gus Danai disks Dreams
I stand and Chopper Teeth
Station at Memphis, Tennessee.
It’s raining.
The night is so desolate and extinguished
and rain scourged the earth
with a vidløs, dark energy
Everything is klægt and impenetrable.
Why is this train hour after hour?
Why is my fate have been stopped here?
Shall I flee from the rain and vexation of spirit
in Denmark, India and Japan
to count in and rot in Memphis,
Tennessee, USA?
And now the day. Light seeps joyless
against this wet prison.
Day exposes mercilessly
the cold rails and all the black Sølle
Waiting room with Chocolate Machine,
Orange Peel, Cigar and Match Snippets
The day laughs through with spyende Gutters
and a lattice of eternal rain
Rain, I tell you from heaven and the earth.
How the world is deaf and uflyttelig,
where the Creator has talent!
And why do I pay my Quota
this plebian Kneippkur of a life!
Quiet! See where machine
the mighty creature, standing quietly seething
and wraps himself in the smoke, it is patience.
Turn the pipe on a fasting life
curse God, and throat your pain!
However, so go away and stay in Memphis!
Your life is anyway nothing
than an acid rain, and your destiny
was always hanging delayed
in one or another miserable waiting room—
Stay in Memphis, Tennessee!
For inside one of these plakathujeude Houses
Happiness awaits you, good luck,
if you can just eat your impatience—
Again sleep a round young virgin
with ear buried in her hair,
she will get you in meeting
one fine day on the street
as a wave of fragrance
with an expression as if she knew you.
Is not it spring?
The rain falls not fertile?
Sounds not like a love murmur,
a long subdued Kærlighedspassiar
Foot to foot
between the rain and the earth?
The day dawned so full of sorrow,
but see now light rain fell!
During the day you are not its Kampret?
However, it is now bright. And who turns compost smell
in between Perro’s rusty Jærnstivere
mixed with Regnstøvets framework breath—
a Foraarsanels –
is it not comfort?
And now, look how Mississippi
in his bed of flooded forests
wakes from the day!
See how giant river enjoying her kink!
Where the subcutaneous fat in the royal bow and swing fleets
of trees and ragged driftwood in its vertebrae!
See where it leads an extremely Paddle steamer
Flood in his arms
as a dancer, there are men on the floor!
See the sunken Isthmus—Oh what urmægtig Ro
over the landscape of drowned forests!
Do you not see where the flor Morning Vande
dresses mile wide with Today’s frugal Lighting
and wander around during the pregnant clouds!
Fat you also you, unforgiving!
You will never forget that you promised you eternity?
Is your ground your arms gratitude?
What are you going with your Elskerhjærte?
Hold up and stay in Memphis,
Become a Citizen in the marketplace,
go and livsassurer you among the other,
pay your premium by Lumpenhed,
that they may know themselves safe for you
and you should not be poured out of the association.
Woo hin Lady with Roses and Gold ring
and start a Savskæreri as other men.
Hank quiet up in rubber boots . . .
See you out, smoke your pipe show
sphinxforladte in Memphis . . .
Ah, there comes the wretched freight train
we have waited for six hours.
It comes slowly—with crushed Pages
the whistle weak, paralyzes the wagons on three wheels
and they blew Ruf drips of soil and sludge.
But the trend between the coals
are four characters
covered by blodvaade overcoats.
Since our great snort Express Machine,
go forward a little and stop sighing deeply
and stands ready to leap. The trail is free.
And we travel further
through the flooded woods
during rainfall yawning locks.
The following is from the book Christmas in Scandinavia, edited by Sven H. Rossel and Bo Elbrond-Bek and translated by David W. Colbert:
A Farm Owner’s Christmas Eve
Finnish novelist Frans Eemil Sillanpää received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1939. Sillanpää gained international recognition with the naturalistic novel from the bloody Finnish civil war of 1918, Hurskas Kurjuss (1919: Meek Heritage). His following novels are characterized by a more poetic mood. They are set in the countryside, and the narrative, often focusing on love and sexuality as the ruling forces of human life, is framed by sensitive descriptions of nature.
Visti-Mina, an elderly woman and mistress and owner of the freehold farm Visti, assessed at 0.003 of a holding, had been awakened by the cat’s mewing, and in letting it out she noticed that it was rather cold in the room; even without looking she could tell that the water was frozen in the water cask by the door. And how might the poor little girl be doing, then? But she was still sleeping soundly in the middle of the bed under half the quilt. It had been necessary to move her sleeping space farther down, away from the right side of the bedstead. If Mina had her lying right alongside her, then she would kick all night against Mina’s sensitive midriff. She is Ida’s daughter, Mina is the child’s maternal grandmother. God only knows where Ida herself is gadding about …
These dry sticks and twigs up in the chimney vault were really true treasures on a winter’s morning; they were almost like edible delicacies. When you put them on the hearth under the trivet, they caught fire at once, and with their help you could then also get the damp firewood smoldering. And the coffee simmered, its fragrance filling the room, which was warmed bit by bit. The windowpanes, which just now were coated with a thick crust of ice, were already beginning to thaw on their uppermost edges; while the coffee was settling Mina could peer through the thawed-out spots to the yard, where a reddish-yellow December morning had just dawned. From the farms the smoke was rising straight up to the sky, and she thought she heard the crunch of sleigh runners. Now look how long I’ve slept.—Well, and then it’s Christmas Even, too, by golly!—Up with you in a hurry lass!
From under the covers two little eyes were opened and aimed at the room and at Mina, whose familiar features quickly dispelled the memory of the tangled splendors of the child’s dreams. The blazing fire in the fireplace, the frozen windowpanes, and the confidently puttering old woman gave the child’s mind full compensation, auguring a long, clear day with thousands of adventures.
………………………………………
Pearl S. Buck (USA, 1892-1973) The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off... They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) is the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize and the first woman to win both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. She won both awards for her book The Good Earth, published in 1931, which revolves around family life in a Chinese village before the 1949 Revolution.
Here are two quotes from the novel: “There was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods…Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together-together-producing the fruit of this earth.”
“As he had been healed of his sickness of heart when he came from the southern city and comforted by the bitterness he had endured there, so now again Wang Lung was healed of his sickness of love by the good dark earth of his fields and he felt the moist soil on his feet and he smelled the earthy fragrance rising up out of the furrows he turned for the wheat.”
Buck is also known for her humanitarian work: “In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House Inc., the first international, interracial adoption agency. In nearly five decades of work, Welcome House has placed over five thousand children. In 1964, to support children who were not eligible for adoption, Buck established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to ‘address poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asian countries.’ In 1965, she opened the Opportunity Center and Orphanage in South Korea, and later offices were opened in Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. When establishing Opportunity House, Buck said, “The purpose…is to publicize and eliminate injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their birth, are not permitted to enjoy the educational, social, economic and civil privileges normally accorded to children.” (source Wiki). The Pearl S. Buck International Web site can be found at www.psbi.org.
Here are the opening paragraphs from her biography, Pearl S. Buck, A Cultural Biography, written by Peter Conn published in 1996: In April, 1899, six-year-old Pearl Sydenstricker wrote a letter from Chinkiang, China, to the editor of the Christian Observer, in Louisville, Kentucky. It was her first published writing, and it appeared under the headline “Our Real Home in Heaven”:
‘I am a little girl, six years old. I live in China. I have a big brother in college who is coming to China to help our father tell the Chinese about Jesus. I have two little brothers in heaven. Maudie went first, then Artie, then Edith, and on the tenth of last month my little brave brother, Clyde left us to go to our real home in heaven. Clyde said he was a Christian Soldier, and that heaven was his bestest home. Clyde was four years old, and we both love the little letters in the Observer. I wrote this all myself, and my hand is tired, so goodbye….’
As an adult, she would completely reject the religion in which she was raised, but it was the source of everything she learned about values as a child. Living in a small Chinese city, she was separated from her own country and its culture almost from birth….In the end, Pearl was inevitably shaped by both her parents. She rejected her father’s religious beliefs and his narrow-mindedness, but she inherited his evangelical zeal, his sense of rectitude, his passion for learning. Though she stopped believing in Christian ideas of salvation, she became, in effect, a secular missionary, bringing the gospels of civil rights and cross-cultural understanding to people on two continents.
