A Mystery and a Portent

Boris Pasternak

It was a sunny evening in August and the room I was staying in was full of light. An upper room in an old house, I think it was the first time I had ever had a room all my own. The college had placed me for the summer with an elderly lady who had been a missionary in China during her early years, Mrs. N. Astrup Larson. And I was reading. I’m not sure where I got the book, perhaps from Mrs. Larson: Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak. From a remote, hitherto unknown world, it called into being my odd little inner self.

How happy I was lying in a bed with an iron bedstead, in a sparsely furnished room with twilight settling in. We had done laundry that day and I was able to hang my clothes out on a line in the small back yard where Mrs. Larson kept a garden. The sheets smelled of breezes and sunshine. The crickets had begun to sing and the birds too held their evening chorus.  I felt like a monk in a place where everything was simple and fresh. My last classes were complete (I had actually gotten my degree in the spring) and I was working full time at the library to make as much money as I could before going on my first overseas adventure.

Newly shorn of religious certainty, I looked to grounded literature for truth, and who better to dispense it than Pasternak, the heir of Tolstoy. I was reading Pasternak's novel in 1966. He had died six years earlier, in part because of the stress of publishing his book in the West. He knew there was no chance of having it published in his native U.S.S.R. in an unexpurgated version. Handing the manuscript over his garden fence to a representative of the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, he said, “You have invited me to take part in my own execution.” The book appeared in 1957 in Italian, and shortly thereafter in translation. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1958. The Soviets were furious. He was made to refuse the prize. It became a major cultural incident of the Cold War.

We recognize what is meaningful for us by its resonance. Something clicks into place at a deep level and we cannot turn elsewhere. Even if it doesn’t seem to be the best idea, if its harmonic matches our own, we are helpless in front of it. Knowing this feeling is a skill no one teaches you. Experiencing it is an inner guide toward becoming. It requires some quiet, some listening, and a sense of freedom is essential. We must be honest with ourselves. Cultivating quiet and honesty allows us to trust the attractors which call into being an order we did not know existed. It is how personal evolution happens.

What I needed to know from Pasternak was how he had retained his internal freedom in a world which was so inhospitable. The character Zhivago reflects some of the author’s struggle, but so does his biography. Pasternak never wanted to leave Russia, though the rest of his family settled in England. A famous poet as a young man, he was enthusiastic about the Russian revolution at its beginning, but he soon found the bureaucracy and ideological furor deadening. During the worst of the Stalinist purges, Pasternak made his living by translating Shakespeare and worked in his potato field. He refused to participate in the literary world, for the most part, and worked quietly on his great novel.

It cannot be said that I was ever denied freedom of speech, but it was also clear to me from an early age that no one wanted to know what I thought. Even worse, I didn’t know what I thought. I moved to San Francisco and easily found work which made me living enough, but it was structural work. It was nothing which created content. The hippie ethos of simple living was fine with me, but when my friends moved into consciousness raising, spiritual paths and feminism, I could not follow. I also made a poor marriage, which occupied all of my survival power, though it was freely chosen and taught me much.

Where had I come from? Who was I? I was working on it. My Dad had been an iconoclast. Like me, he was not far off the mainstream, making his living as a pastor in small Midwestern towns. But when it came to clambering up the career ladder of an institution, he wasn’t interested. He preferred to polish what he knew of the Gospel as the shepherd of his small flock, indulge his many interests and live for his family. Beloved by those that knew him, he was not permitted a long life. He died at 63.

The conflict between inner life and outer demands seems to come down to the fact that we are herd animals. The middle of the herd is a safe place to be; the edges not so much. Education, politics, economics and even the arts are geared toward the development of leaders whom others can follow. Much of it is crude and brutal, fitting people into boxes and rubbing off the corners. “Organized society is a lethal fraud,” said Kenneth Rexroth, “and men must learn to live simply and at peace, in mutual respect and love, or the species will not last out this century.” Understanding this, I organized my own society, protecting my inner life as Pasternak had done.

Pasternak’s techniques involved submission and dissembling. “Oh, of course you are right. I am quite to blame,” he would say. But then he went ahead and did exactly as he knew he must, keeping alive the light of the human spirit. When I recently read Doctor Zhivago in the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, I was struck by how much the title character stands in for each of us.

I recently gave away most of my books. Icons for all the inner lives I had lived, some were ragged and falling apart, full of post-it notes and highlighting. Books were the intermediaries between myself and the world. With language, I had freely built my own sturdy inner structures. Reading is a quiet place and no one can tell you how to feel about it. The writer speaks to you directly and you are allowed a free and honest communication. So it has ever been. All across literature we find writers who describe their early experiences with reading as profound.

When I think about which reading experience affected me the most strongly, it has to be that early reading of Doctor Zhivago and much subsequent study of its author. I recognized the resonance it had with my beauty-loving, habit-seeking, classical heart.

A mystery and a portent, Pasternak’s work has helped me to resist the commodification and politicization of everyday life and shown me what personhood is. My iconoclasm has grounded me in joy, opened me to beauty across national, racial and class lines and helped me resist pressures from many directions about how things should be. I’ve found work which I enjoyed, without worrying about the future; loved many people; traveled as much as anyone deserves; and written books which have no market value (so they say). 

Thus I find myself at the edge of the herd, contented, watchful and considerably more certain of who I am. Thankfully too I found a partner who is happy to be there! If the effort to live a meaningful life involves finding a place in the outer world where the inner self feels free and useful, this pilgrim is on the right path. I am grateful to Pasternak for his work and his example.