Sunday Morning In Selby Garden

The past four or five days I have by coincidence been immersed in the history of such violence and suffering that it has put me into a really down mood.  I read a review of Nicholas Stargart's history of civilian Germany from 1939 to 1945 and got it from the library, and at the same time read a review of Svetlana Slexeivich"s compilation of recollections by her countrymen of the years of dramatic change going from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Putin.  For some reason I also checked out of the library Montefiore's history of the Romanovs thinking it would provide some interesting "background."  Well, it wasn't for some reason actually; I read a review.  It was reviews in fact that brought me to reading these three in concert on the same weekend.  Add to this the effect from several years ago of seeing multiple times in London and New York City the two great productions of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia after which I have been intrigued with the story of  the Russian intelligentsia  in the nineteenth century.  Alexeivich's Secondhand Time was a revelation to me of a large body of Russians who bemoaned the loss of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Communist ideals, the emergence of a money economy, a rising bourgeoisie, consumerism.  Again and again the respondents to her questions talked about life without ideals, a public obsessed with making money, rather than promoting equality for all.  I have to imagine that there is some selectivity going on here, and she is trying to highlight the unpleasant shock of the new.  That democratic ideals came into existence and then faded with the onset of a cutthroat capitalist competition, replete with large scale fraud and executive level robbery, and ending with the loss of political freedom and the return to what I can now see was three centuries of tzarist repression--the Russian "norm," so to speak.  Over in Germany I read about the mass enthusiasm for Hitler, the celebration of German-ness, the eager dispersal and destruction of elements identified as not German, principally the Jews, over the early years of the war, and then the mass depression of 1943 after the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin, and a wave of thinking that Germans could expect nothing but reprisals; there did not seem to be guilt, but an awareness that they had done something collectively for which they were being punished.  So far I am only at the early years of the Romanov dynasty, Peter the Great and that crowd, but already the  alist of beheadings, impalings, brutalities of every kind, constantly imposed to maintain power and discipline, behaviors that of course I associate with the Stalinist years as do many of Alexeivich's respondents, curiously not critically but as a necessary feature of building and imposing a new system, and I suppose this would be the way adherents to Christianity would justify the monstrosities of the Inquisition.  All of these books speak to the horror of system.  Sunday morning I set my reading down and went with a photographer friend to the Selby Garden here in Sarasota.  He takes that time every week to photograph butterflies for aesthetic pleasure.  There is a special section of this Garden where flowering plants and shrubs that attract butterflies are made to grow, and in the center of it is a glass enclosed stand where the larvae grow and hatch, and where the new butterflies can stretch their wings and dry out.  And then volunteers release them to the world of the flowers.  I sat on a bench and watched butterflies for maybe three quarters of an hour, fluttering, alighting, making an exquisite aesthetic blend of their coloration and wing patterns with the many exotic flowers in this part of the garden.  And then it was I felt the peace of God that passeth all understanding descend upon me.