The
Chinese have discovered, and have practised for many centuries, a way of
life which, if it could be adopted by all the world, would make all the
world happy. We Europeans have not. Our way of life demands strife,
exploitation, restless change, discontent and destruction. Efficiency
directed to destruction can only end in annihilation, and it is to this
consummation that our civilization is tending, if it cannot learn some
of that wisdom for which it despises the East.
It was on the Volga, in the summer of 1920, that I first realized how
profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks
are attempting to force upon an essentially Asiatic population, just as
Japan and the West are doing in China. Our boat travelled on, day after
day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were noisy,
gay, quarrelsome, full of facile theories, with glib explanations of
everything, persuaded that there is nothing they could not understand
and no human destiny outside the purview of their system. One of us lay
at death's door, fighting a grim battle with weakness and terror and the
indifference of the strong, assailed day and night by the sounds of
loud-voiced love-making and trivial laughter. And all around us lay a
great silence, strong as death, unfathomable as the heavens. It seemed
that none had leisure to hear the silence, yet it called to me so
insistently that I grew deaf to the harangues of propagandists and the
endless information of the well-informed.
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