Nature’s Fierce Defiance

By Tom Poland

 

For seven years I only read Russian writers, Boris Pasternak, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and my favorite, Alexander Ilyich Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn wrote of life under Stalin. Solzhenitsyn received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature because of the force with which he pursued traditional Russian literature and The Gulag Archipelago, his three-volume book that indicted the Soviet state for its crimes against the people and cruel prisons.

I’ll never forget Solzhenitsyn’s account of prisoners building the White Sea–Baltic Canal. To show the United States how superior his “technology” was, Stalin demanded that prisoners build the canal in record time with shovels, wheelbarrows, and picks. To make Stalin’s impossible deadline, the bosses had the men build the canal more and more shallow. When complete, it was worthless. As prisoners froze to death, and many did, men threw their frozen corpses into wagons and stacked them like cords of wood. When the spring thaw arrived they buried them. Idiocy and cruelty wormed their way into Soviet life in sinister ways.

One day in February 1945, the KGB arrested Solzhenitsyn for a personal letter he wrote in which he referenced “The Boss” and “The Master of the House.” He never mentioned Stalin by name; even so, it landed him in prison for eight years for anti-Soviet sentiment. Were Solzhenitsyn caught with the tiniest scrap of paper and the barest stub of a pencil it would add eight years to his sentence. He dared not write down his thoughts. Solzhenitsyn wrote, nonetheless, in his head. Over eight years, he memorized tens of thousands of sentences. Released from prison, he transcribed them in secret. I mentioned Solzhenitsyn’s defiance when would-be writers told me they had no time for writing or the conditions weren’t favorable. “I only write when inspired.” They had as many excuses as ants at a picnic.

And so I recall something else Solzhenitsyn wrote. He threw a log onto a fire that ants were nesting in. “Strangely enough,” he wrote, “they did not run away from the fire. They had no sooner overcome their terror than they turned, circled, and some kind of force drew them back to their forsaken homeland. There were many who climbed back onto the burning log, ran about on it and perished.”

That kind of defiance permeates nature. Grass grows in cracks in concrete. A house burns and in no time grass carpets soil that had long been a desert. Pine cones’ helicopter-like seeds drift wherever winds take them. I know of a home whose gutter is so overdue for cleaning small pines grow from it. Just the other day, I saw a pine seedling sprouting five feet above the ground in the rotting wood of an oak. As soon as I saw it, I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s ants and survival.

Nature is dynamic. Constant change is the rule, and, given time, nature’s defiance overcomes hurdles. Many wring their hands about global warming because they wish things to remain as they know them—forever. They won’t. As proof, over 99 percent of creatures that once inhabited Earth are extinct.

Here’s a telling quote from Solzhenitsyn: “Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth.” That remains truer than ever in the era of fear and self-made prisons. Solzhenitsyn said this, too. “Beat a dog once and you only have to show him the whip.”

Misinformation is the whip, and beaten dogs cower and whimper and wring their hands over things that others, like nature, will overcome in due time. Some will perish but others will crawl back onto the burning log and extinguish the fire. The world will progress whether they think so or not. They just won’t be here to see it.

 

Georgia native Tom Poland writes a weekly column about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and culture and speaks frequently to groups in the South. Governor Henry McMaster conferred the Order of the Palmetto upon Tom, South Carolina’s highest civilian honor, stating, “His work is exceptional to the state.” Poland’s work appears in books, magazines, journals, and newspapers throughout the South.

Visit Tom’s website at www.tompoland.net

Email him at [email protected]