'Human Strength Does Not Suffice'

For almost sixteen years, Bill Vallicella, dba The Maverick Philosopher, has served as one of my reliable sources for good reading suggestions. Some of the books he recommends are over my head, philosophically speaking. I don’t have the training necessary to pursue them. Some are no longer my cup of tea – Jack Kerouac, for instance, a writer dear to Bill. But a handful of books he praises have gone into heavy rotation. Chief among them is Theodor Haecker’s Journal in the Night (trans. Alexander Dru, Pantheon, 1950). I first read it at Bill’s urging in 2007. Earlier this week, under the heading “Readings for Dark Times,” he again recommends the Journal, along with three other titles, all new to me. 

Haecker (1889-1945) was a writer, Catholic convert and Kierkegaard scholar placed under house arrest in Munich by the Nazis. He was forbidden to write or speak publicly. His house was destroyed in 1944 by Allied bombing. Diabetes claimed his vision, his son was killed on the Russian front and Haecker died less than a month before Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender. He kept his journal a secret, writing at night. His was an emblematic twentieth-century life. I pulled Haecker from the shelf again and wasn’t disappointed. He writes in brief passages, often aphoristically:

 

“The paradoxical state of the world can be seen from the fact that scoundrel helps scoundrel more than the good, the good.”

 

“That things first of all sound right, and that dissonance comes afterwards—is the first principle of my philosophy. And so: Good comes before evil, Truth before the lie, and the beautiful before the ugly. That is my whole philosophy.”

 

“All in all, the best things that God has given me are my nights of solitary writing. An occasion for eternal thankfulness.”

 

And this, with wonderful implications for the books we choose to read and how we decide to remain loyal to them despite their failings:

“I really have to like an author before I can take up his faults in any detail: all that he might have done better, and so on. In most cases I leave them entirely aside.”

 

I borrowed from the library another book recommended by Bill: Paul Roubiczek’s Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940 (trans. George Bird, Cambridge University Press, 1982). Roubiczek (1898-1972) was born in Prague to a Jewish family and served in the Austrian army during World War I. That experience led him to convert to Christianity and emigrate from Germany in 1933, eventually settling in England, where he taught philosophy and German literature at Cambridge University.

 

Thus far I’ve only browsed in Across the Abyss. Here is a passage from the entry Roubiczek made on this date, November 13, in 1939:

 

“This constant news of the deportation of Jews from Germany to the Polish reserve is terrible. Now apparently the Vienna Jews are being transported to Lublin. Human imagination, human strength does not suffice to picture all the suffering and all the destruction embodied in that brief statement! At one time the talk is of 22,000—then out of 2,000, approximately 600 have disappeared—then eighty-two have committed suicide—those figures, even if exaggerated for propaganda purposes, are unthinkably dreadful, and in Vienna alone there are still 100,000 Jews! To make the thought bearable at all, there is really nothing for it but to hide away behind these inanimate figures and not attempt to bring them to life.”

 

The twentieth century taught us how to juggle otherwise unthinkable numbers – statistics as anesthesia for the conscience.