Monday, February 2, 1976

Candlemas. Yesterday I served for the second time on 71st Street, then a "treat" and my lecture. A conversation at breakfast with M.M. Koryakov and Vyach. Zavalishin. At the lecture ("On Russian Religious Thought Abroad") there are quite a lot of people. All four Steins, with whom, after the lecture, we go to the café for half an hour. Yura talks with passion about dissident quarrels, mutual curses, intrigues. How sad it all is!

On Saturday – thirty-three years since the wedding day! A wonderful quiet day at home, and in the evening - at Anya's.

Yesterday there were three confessions, two in the morning, one after the vigil. The reality of unhappiness, in the sense of "non-happiness", that is, the absence of happiness, what you want, the inability to possess it. Perhaps, only now, in my old age, I am beginning to understand this – not with my mind, but with my gut. I didn't understand because I myself had been very happy all my life, again in the sense of having what I wanted. I even get scared at the thought that God has never "deprived" me. Nothing, not a drop of Job's fate. Maybe it's because He knows the extent of my weakness. But how difficult it is then to "teach" others to be strong, to call for this.

An icy blizzard in the yard.

Tuesday, February 3, 1976

Spent about six hours yesterday at La Guardia and Kennedy in a futile attempt to fly to Colorado, where I was supposed to go for three days. Because of the weather (monstrous ice) it was not possible ...

During these hours I made observations of the American crowd and still cannot "formulate" them in myself. Perhaps the main impression – or feeling? is something "impersonal". Of course, the crowd, the "average man" is always and everywhere impersonal, but in Europe there is a "mystery" behind each person, it seems to shine through in the expression of his face, in his gait, in everything. And it is this secret that is not felt in the American. It seems to me that he is terrified of her, does not want her, kills her in himself. And that the entire American civilization is aimed at helping man in this. It is all built and acts in such a way that a person will never, if possible, come face to face with this mystery. This does not mean at all that the American is "stad". On the contrary, the same civilization is built on individualism. It seems to be addressed to everyone, but to everyone it says: look how good and comfortable it is for you, how everything is done for you. And everyone accepts it individually, for himself, although he accepts exactly the same thing that is offered to any other "everyone". It is a civilization à l'échelle humaine, only l'humain[611] is "aseptic" here. And so, knowingly or unbeknownst to himself, everyone represses the secret in himself, and from this repression comes the American neurosis. The success of psychology and psychoanalysis in America began with a passionate desire to reduce the "mystery" to a law of nature, to a multiplication table, to classify and thereby "discharge" it. He, an American, "blurts it out scientifically". He is grateful to science, first of all, for the fact that it gives him a ready-made explanation, a liberation from the search (which in man is the expression of his relationship with the imprisoned "mystery" living in him). It is wrong to say: the American is "not deep". He is as deep as all people, only, unlike others, he does not want depth, he is afraid of it and hates it. The real question is: why? Where, what are the roots of this rejection of the "mystery," of the deep, of the "personal"? I don't know if I'm right, but it seems to me that this is because the experience of "primitive" man was repeated in America: an encounter with the alienity, vastness, mystery of nature, fear of it and the desire to overcome this fear – by "ritual", repetition, regularity... Religion was born out of fear, we are told, and this is mostly true. And America was born out of the same fear. The religion of fear overcomes fear by ritual, that is, by such a sacred symbolization of the world, nature, life, which "removes" the mystery, "discharges" it, frees it from that which is the most terrible and unbearable for man: the uniqueness and uniqueness of everything. Ritual, sacredness is the reduction of everything to an "archetype", to a law. In this sense, and strange as it may seem, America is extremely sacred and religious (and not at all "secular," if secularism is understood as the rejection of the sacred, freedom from it). It was the "ritualism" of American life that I felt with special strength when I came from Europe. In everything, absolutely in everything, the American wants the reassurance of the rite: in food, in what he eats and how he eats, in the way he dresses, walks, laughs, brushes his teeth. Otherwise, everything is scary. Between himself and the "secret" of life, that is, the one and only, he posits a rite; Thus, for example, the "uprisings" of young people in the 1960s, the rejection of "conformism," the proclamation of everyone's right to one's own thing[613] instantly resulted in a ritual developed to the smallest detail: clothing, behavior, language.

All this does not contradict what is usually perceived as the quintessence of Americanism: the cult of novelty, change, advertising, entirely built on the principle of "it's different..."[614], the cult of openness, experimentation, etc. For it is precisely the function of this almost phrenetic "novelty," of constant renewal, that it protects man from encountering the mystery of life, with himself, with essence. This meeting is possible only with the cessation of life, with the liberation of internal attention, its liberation from the external, which is possible in traditional civilizations, which have grown up around a "mystery"... I have always asked myself why every American firm should not only constantly change its products, but also modify itself by rearranging furniture, changing the appearance of its offices, changing the uniforms of its employees, etc. And now it is clear to me that this "changeability" is the basic rite, the essence of which is always the repetition of the unrepeatable. Change and novelty are frightening as long as they are the "mystery" and the essence of the mystery ("what does the coming day have in store for me?"). Therefore, the only way to make them "not frightening" is to introduce them into the ritual, to make them "repeatable": everything is always "new" and everything is the same, because it is aimed at the same thing: for benefit, for pleasantness and convenience, and so on.

Gradually, slowly, the Frenchman discovered that cheese washed down with red wine was delicious. And, having opened it, he eats cheese, washed down with wine, and enjoys. There is no ritual here, but the "truth of life" itself. An American goes to France, "learns" that the French eat cheese with red wine, and on his return to America establishes a new rite: the "wine and cheese party." And this is all - huge! –difference. But the Frenchman, who is delicious, does it exactly as his ancestor did it under the Louis, for it was delicious then and now it is delicious. And the American, because he is not looking for taste, but is performing a ritual, will certainly introduce some novelty into this rite: he will put a piece of pear or raisins or something else on top of the cheese. Why? Because the ritual requires constant renewal, because he brought cheese and wine to America as evidence that everything in life is improving all the time. "The same", always offered as "new" and "improved", satisfies his need not to face the very mystery of life...

It is strange, but it is true: American civilization, American life is religious through and through, but it is not at all a post-Christian world, as they like to say, but, in a very deep sense, a pre-Christian world, that is, a world that is not freed from natural "sacredness" (the opposite of Christian "sacramentalism"). For sacredness is not at all a feeling of the divinity of the world, but on the contrary – its demonicity, not joy, but fear, not acceptance, but flight. This is a system of "taboos" with the help of which a person puts between himself and life (and this means between himself and his "secret") a certain impenetrable barrier, a filter that filters life and does not allow "mystery". And in this sense, America's puritanical past and its anti-Puritan present are phenomena of the same order at the depths. Rejection, the removal of one "taboo" is only the replacement of it by another "taboo".

During these two or three days I read two thick tops by Paul Leautaud (Journal Litteraire, X, XI)[619]. And it seems to me that this "militant" (in words) atheist, so to speak, cannot but be loved by God. Precisely for truthfulness, for ruthlessness in depiction, retelling of oneself, for "humility" without any knowledge of him... I don't know, I don't know: all these words are somehow inappropriate, but I always read Leoto with spiritual benefit, with which, alas, I almost never read so-called "spiritual literature". He denounces in me any spiritual cheapness, unnecessary excitement, addiction to beautiful words, somehow inwardly liberates. And the 18 volumes of this man's diary without a biography turn out to be more necessary than all the stories about growths, crises, crossroads, insights...

Wednesday, February 4, 1976

Bogdan Khudob's book "Of Light..."[620]. Disorderly, but interesting: about time. I am very close to his basic statement about time as a "mode" of man's ascent to God. Another example of how books come "on time". This one, for example, was on my desk for a whole year.