It is an unfortunate custom that Strength has late entrance: it oftentimes occurs that we must first consult all our weaknesses before realising our proper power. And the world has been a slow learner. But a much worse defect is that our learning has been mostly tactile. We do not master surpassing a stone without first stumbling over it. Yet our knowledge remains capricious enough to wear off as soon as a sore toe gets better, and our eyes unlock from the path and predict no further danger. The human genius of prudence is thus neglected.
Meanwhile, storm clouds do not grow overnight, and Terror in Belarus and Russia had been nourished for decades into the never satiable Giant by others’ watering his potatoes and washing his dinner plates afterwards. Unless, as it happened, he reached such a size that there is no more space to contain both – the Giant and the others. And this brief insight is not about lamenting the former. Whatever monstrous features they bear and no matter how unwanted they are, hatred, sorrow and pain (in small or large proportions) continue their daily rule and are still believed by most to be inexorable, even an indispensable part of our life, similar to death itself. We are cheated by no one but ourselves.
As far as we are obliged by the certainty of death, there is no such obligation to cohabit with hatred, sorrow and pain, whose place in life is sanctioned by no other than ourselves. For what an odd mentality our collective mind holds still thinking of “world war” as possibility and of “world peace” as an ideal, i.e. only imaginable, unreachable. Truth brotherly competes with faith, with hope, while unhappiness delights. We wrong the Evil to be mundane; the Good – absolute. But Love is not an angel, a deity, nor the highest office with its own career. It is neither a costly invention nor a privilege. We think greatness is entailed only in some positions or certain occasions. Peace, Love do not demand but for a welcoming body. I understand, Truth shames us by our defects and renders indignation when we are unfaithful to it. But what you must see today is not the idiocy of war but yourself in it. Make a step out of your body and look: the cure to all the ills has already come out of this war naturally – in the Unity’s garments.
We made our own shackles and continue dragging them with no prison guards following. The traditions of human, but inhumane, disunity has long lost its application. My Love, similar to most people’s of today, has acquired different nationalities: I am born Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish – which is the list most certainly incomplete, and it obviously changes to the reader’s own view on maps and blood; as a boy, I lived loving the embrace I gave my grandfather from the rear seat of his motorcycle going to our дача in Belarusian countryside; I loved listening to Ennio Morricone’s melodies on our family car trips to visit another part of the family all over Ukraine; I love Mykolaiv’s market that brought me my first private second-hand book, The Headless Horseman by an Irish-American, Thomas Mayne Reid; I love cleaning the beach from plastic debris near my wife’s family house in Italy; I love watching the show Bake-Off Italia, although preferring the French version, Le Meilleur Pâtissier, for its productional tenderness; I love Korean TV dramas and how good-wise they often are; I love Belarusian war-time literature, the nineteenth-century French and Russian novels; I lived and studied in Belarus, Iran, China; for six years I lived and matured in Italy, studied Italian, English and Russian literatures by the only commission of love and choice; and now, based in Scotland, I am a researcher of Anglo-American poetry in an English university… I love my total incapacity to transmit fully where and with whom I don’t see myself. But I am suspicious of being right that you as well do not live in the “locality” cage. For one’s I is multifaceted today more than ever. Thanks to Unity and Peace, human culture flourishes, while war devolves us back to the gloom. And each extremity of the world – sooner or later – shivers from its repercussions.
My heart is unsettled for some of my family, stranded in Belarus and Ukraine, no less than for those who attribute “brotherhood” a badge. My Slavic ancestry does not impersonate my Love, does not confine it in space. And if today one deceits oneself into belief in viability of racial, national, social, geographical or any other artificial division, the one harms first of all oneself and is hypocritical: for he or she eats daily from other country’s labouring hands, laughs and is inspired by across-the-globe cinematography, and works on a cure for those whom he or she may never get acquainted with. Would this person renounce the world for his bias? Ourselves are those who either voluntary or unconsciously propagate any discrimination: for all are none but one; for this war – or any – is but the world war.
Love is being wasted while we are preparing to love. So let us learn the Prudence and befriend ourselves forever.