'Ease Anguish With Your Voice'

“If you think that, well, all morality is simply prejudice and murder is fine,” says Gary Saul Morson in an interview, “you actually become a terrorist.” 

In 2023, Morson published one of the few essential books of the twenty-first century: Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press). In it he anatomizes Russia’s homegrown fashion for terror in the nineteenth century and the responses of the country’s greatest writers. In the interview he tells Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.:

 

“This is when the modern terrorist movement is born. I mean, by the end of the century, by the beginning of the next century, there were so many terrorists. It was a career that was inherited from parents to a child, including daughters who had become terrorists. It was a family tradition. There were thousands of them killing thousands of people, and it was considered, next to being a great writer, the most prestigious occupation in the world.”

 

I had never heard of Charlie Kirk before his murder. I don’t follow the news closely and have little interest in politics. Three things about his killing and its aftermath struck me: 1.) Kirk seemed like a reasonable fellow, a gentleman, not a thug, someone with whom you could disagree without being assaulted. 2.) He was murdered on a college campus. 3.) A friend sent me a video of young people celebrating the killing of a husband and father. Some were singing about it.

 

More than forty years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I sat in a jail cell with a man who had just been convicted, along with an accomplice, of kidnapping a barmaid, killing her in an Indiana cornfield and raping the corpse. The court had ruled he was sufficiently sane to stand trial. No sign of contrition. His reaction was typically grandiose. Like the young people in the video, he sang and expressed joy at what he had done. He had adopted the name of a cartoon character. This was the closest I had ever come to undiluted nihilism. I was stunned but fortunately had a professional job to do. I kept asking questions and taking notes. Who can argue, using logic and appeals to morality, with barbarism?

 

In Wonder Confronts Certainty, Morson writes of the Russian nihilists: “Terrorists, therefore, felt little or no compunction about killing dozens of innocent bystanders and they eventually engaged in random killing (throwing bombs into cafes).” In the last few days, as my country goes insane and many celebrate evil, I’ve taken some comfort in Mike Juster’s “Vigil”:

 

“Set all routines aside;

let hours leak to weeks.

Decide not to decide.

 

“Ease anguish with your voice;

speak, though you are unheard.

When sleep is deep, rejoice.

 

“Let go of Hell and Heaven.

Pray, play a cherished song,

forgive and be forgiven.”