Concerning an Inability to Understand

Looking at my syllabus for my HIS 222 American Experience Since 1865 course, I realize just how much ground we need to cover this semester.

Of course, History is a subjective art, and it falls to the professor to pick and choose the people and events and ideas significant enough to discuss in a limited amount of time.  In this course we begin with the Civil War and end with the Cold War and beyond.  In the mainstream of History, this represents a lot of water under the bridge!  I will be satisfied if we can just find enough time in this course to make it to the Civil Rights Movement and to the Cold War.

Few contributed as much to American diplomacy as did George F. Kennan, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, the author of some eighteen books on Russia and the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.  Kennan died at 101 in 2005.

As Mr. X, it was Kennan who spelled out his idea of “an appropriate United States response to potential Soviet aggression,” what came to be known as containment, in the period after World War II.  He argued later—during and after Vietnam—that he meant to suggest the use of political, economic, and moral pressure on the Soviet Union, rather than military force.  After his appointment as an ambassador to Moscow, he spoke bluntly to a journalist about life there, comparing it to a Nazi concentration camp, and was promptly kicked out by Joseph Stalin.

Kennan’s “Sketches of a Life,” a book of excerpts from his diaries covering over sixty years of his remarkable life, is one of the most sensitive and eloquent examples of a diary that anyone could ever hope to read, much less write.  My own diary entries contain profound enlightenments like:  “It looks like it might snow,” or “Maddie continues to disturb the neighbors with her incessant barking.”  Maddie is our dog.

Compare those insights with Kennan’s description of Berlin, fifteen years after the end of World War II.  His description is not just a reminder to us Cold War kids of that not so distant past, but Kennan also, I think, describes the malaise and unfathomable loneliness that many feel in the present day.  This, then, is a portion of George F. Kennan’s diary entry for June 22nd, 1960:

“It was now late twilight—the long-drawn twilight of the northern night.  Under the trees it was dark, but the sky was still partly bright.  There was a touch of gold in the air.  Before us, there was only the great square confronting the ruins of the enormous Wilhelminian Romanesque cathedral.  The entire area was unbelievably silent and empty.  Only one pair of lovers, standing under the trees . . . moved uneasily away at our approach.  All about us were the ruins of the great old buildings, semisilhouetted against the bright sky.  And what ruins!  In there original state, they had seemed slightly imitative and pretentious.  Now they suddenly had a grandeur I had never seen even in Rome.

We both became aware that this was, somehow, a moment like no other.  There was a stillness, a beauty, a sense of infinite, elegiac sadness and timelessness such as I have never experienced.  Death, obviously, was near, and in the air:  hushed, august, brooding Death—nothing else.  Here all the measureless tragedy of the Second World War—the millions of dead, the endless seas of bereavement and sorrow, the extinction of a whole great complex of life and belief and hope—had its perpetuation.  So overpowering was the impression that we spoke only in whispers, as though we were in a cathedral, instead of standing in the open, before the ruins of one.

Not a soul was now in sight.  But no—far up, at the top of the enormous flight of steps leading up to what was left of the cathedral . . . we saw half-hidden in the shadows three adolescent boys—motionless, themselves like statues, themselves silent, endlessly alone and abandoned;  and their lost, defiant figures burn themselves into my vision to the point where I see them still today—elbows on the knees, chins resting on the palms of hands—the embodiment of man’s lost and purposeless state, his loneliness, his helplessness, his wistfulness, and his inability to understand.”

Kennan wrote that achingly beautiful passage in 1960, but I am quite sure that I saw those same three boys at the top of the steps of Pogue Library just yesterday evening.