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Sunday, February 05, 2012
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I COULD BE WRONG
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There came a time when I became so disgusted with self-righteous Armenians that I was tempted to end everything I write with the words “I could be wrong.”
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You want to know what’s the worse thing that can happen to a man? Being poor and dependent on the charity of swine.
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My greatest disappointment? My career as an Armenian writer. Make it, my life as an Armenian.
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May I confess I don’t understand everything? Sometimes I don’t even understand the things that I think I understand.
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Thousands attended Thomas Mann’s lectures. Many more attended Hitler’s speeches. Which may suggest, at the beginning may have been the word, but at the end was garbage.
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Why are you consistently negative? My aim is positive. Things never stay the same. They either get better or worse. By covering up our failings or by pretending they don’t exist, we advance further towards decline and degeneration. I could be wrong.
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Monday, February 06, 2012
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COUSINS
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Every day something happens to remind me that God (if He exists) keeps telling me: “I don’t want to get involved. You are on your own.”
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Both believers and non-believers have doubts. In that sense they are not black and white but shades of gray. They thus share more things in common than they think. They may not be brothers but they are cousins, very much like Sartre and Schweitzer, real-life cousins, great thinkers both, one an atheist, the other a theologian, and both great lovers of J.S. Bach.
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DENIS DONIKIAN
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A full page of the 12-18 January, 2012 issue of PARIS MATCH is devoted to Denis Donikian’s latest book, VIDURES (368 pages. 22 euros. Published by Actes Sud). It begins with the words: “Corruption, murders, censorship: this indeed is the present-day tragedy in Yerevan. But in France we prefer to speak of the past and to accuse Turkey of everything that is evil.” Gilles Martin-Chauffier (the author of this article) goes on to identify Denis Donikian as a writer in whose hand “the pen becomes a flame-thrower.” He goes on to equate all talk of genocide recognition as “getting angry at the offspring for the blood their grand-grandparents shed.” He concludes by saying “we wouldn’t even mention these things if Turkey had been an oil-producer. On the contrary, Turkey would now be a member of the European Union.”
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HALF-FULL OR…
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Is our glass half-full or half-empty? I am willing to concede that it is half-full or even three-quarters full provided you agree with me that the contents are not fit for human consumption because they are polluted with carcinogenic agents whose first symptom is blindness.
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THE MORAL OF THE STORY
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What is the moral of Dickens’ GREAT EXPECTATIONS? According to Jonathan H. Grossman: “You will never fully comprehend the most important events in your life while they are happening. Any plans you make will not work out – and you may grow up to be a jerk.”
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Wednesday, February 08, 2012
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BLAMELESS
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Turks are brought up to believe they are blameless. So are we. Blameless means morally superior and I for one do not believe in anyone’s moral superiority especially when it is self-assessed. Remember Orwell’s swine in ANIMAL FARM: they too believed to be morally superior -- “four legs good, two legs bad”; “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Remember the Nazis and their claim of superiority. I for one find it extremely difficult to believe that a civilized and progressive nation that has produced some of the greatest and most influential thinker in the history of mankind would allow itself to be taken in by the charlatanism and bare-faced lies of a mediocre and repulsive speechifier – that is to say, a full-time compulsive liar – and allow this nonentity to bankrupt, degrade, humiliate, and ruin the nation. If I had read this scenario in a sci-fi novel I would have accused the writer of going too damn far. Nothing human is alien to me. For many years I too was brought up to believe we were morally superior. I know better today. Do I have a low opinion of my fellow Armenians? Yes, I do, beginning with myself.
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