Gustaw Herling "I did not know... that a mental condition of full consciousness is
more dangerous in slavery than hunger and physical death. Until then I had lived like
other prisoners, instinctively avoiding the necessity to come face to face with my own
existence."
Herling comes to the insight quoted above when another prisoner secretly gives him a copy of Dostoyevsky's The House of the Dead. The book, which he reads twice, terrifies him. Why? Because it gives him hope in the gulag, which is a place without hope. It is the hope of escape. Dostoyevsky ends thus: "Yes, with God's blessing! Freedom, new life, resurrection from the dead..." But Herling the prisoner also sees that "there was not the slightest break between his [Dostoyevsky's] fate and ours." He existed in what he saw as a continuum of human suffering. In extremis, whether of great pain or great solitude, the mind bends to the immediate task at hand: survival from this excruciating moment to the next. Reading Herling, those of us who by fortune find ourselves inhabiting a string of moments not so extreme, not so excruciating, should perhaps bear two things in mind. One is to remember the truly tormented. In every generation, some few do survive long enough to tell what happened. We forget their words, words paid with such a high price of pain that we the fortunate cannot imagine, at our own risk. The lesson? Any of us can get into a place where the world is a prison, either of great pain, or solitude, or both. The other is to remember the untormented. With time free of pain some few survive to tell what is possible. They sit, not in the marketplace, not in the home, but in nature. They sit and think until thinking can stop. They show us that the yang to Herling's terrible yin is the other half of the cosmic punchline: A mental condition of full consciousness is more dangerous in freedom than satiation or orgasm. Whether we are in the gulag or in affluence, the invisible door is always dangerously open. END Want more info?
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Long before Solzhenitsyn, Gustaw Herling (1919-2000), a Polish prisoner, sent
the world a report concerning the reality of life in the Soviet gulag. In 1951. (The book
did not appear in English until 1987.) No one paid attention. Many still didn't want to
believe the reality behind the wonderful theoretical facade of applied Communism.