"A Valentine's Day Message"

With Valentine’s Day appearing Friday, this essay is a little early, but love knows no calendar.

A beautiful wintery morning has arrived here in Connecticut. It reminds me of February days of yore.

 

The photo (“When Cupid’s Arrow Struck”) was taken on Friday March 9, 1962, the day Caroline agreed to be my Valentine for life. With her roommate and fiancé, Caroline and I were driving from Boston to New Hampshire for a weekend skiing at Wildcat Mountain. The photo was taken somewhere along New Hampshire’s coast.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“A Valentine’s Day Message”

February 9, 2025

 

“The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”

                                                                                                Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

                                                                                                Interview, U.S. News & World Report, October 27, 1986

 

Love is a unique sensation. Your definition of the word may differ from mine. It is ubiquitous in that every child born is embraced with the instinctual, maternal love of its mother. Love allows a child to understand they are integral to their family. Love is all around us, yet also singular. When missing, its absence is felt. It can arrive quickly, as did my love for Caroline not long after we met (and which has persisted for sixty-three years), or it may germinate for several months, even years, before blossoming. And, sadly, it sometimes dies.

 

We mostly think of love in terms of the one we marry, the individual we have chosen to share our life. But love assumes different forms. Love for one’s parents and one’s children are not the same. The former rests on the appreciation for one’s conception, while the latter is based on the knowledge that one’s children are the creation of you and your spouse, and that all one’s descendants, carry one’s genes into the future, making life eternal. It is spiritual, as in love for God. It can be generic, as in love for one’s country or for one’s fellow man. Love for one’s pets is not the same as love for one’s spouse, but it is nonetheless real. Love demands involvement, as Elie Wiesel suggested. It may be blind, however, as when passion, compassion, or admiration are mistaken for love. In such cases, it may be unrequited, for love is not always equally shared. 

 

Two hundred years ago Noah Webster defined the word as an “affection of the mind,” feelings of “esteem and benevolence” “animal desires between the sexes.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word: characterized “by strong feelings of affection for another, arising out of kinship, companionship, admiration, or benevolence;” it is “an individual emotion.” It has been used, the dictionary says, “to refer to sexual attraction or erotic desire.”

 

Today, we use the word liberally. “love you,” we say or write to our children and grandchildren when departing, ending a phone call or completing a text message. We hug one another and say how much we love them. Is the word over-used? I think not, for expressions of love make us considerate and respectful. On my shaving mirror is a saying, attributed to the University of Notre Dame’s longest serving president, Father Theodore Hesburgh (1917-2015): “The most important thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother.”

 

Like many of my generation, I was born into a family who loved me but who were not demonstrative of love, or, in fact, of most emotions. Saying “I love you,” and hugging were not common forms of expression. While I knew I was loved, the word ‘love’ was used only when signing letters. The last time I saw my father, in late November 1968 as he was dying of cancer, I told him I loved him, and I remember the awkwardness I felt when I said the words. Less than a year later – the evening before he died – I stopped to see my father-in-law in New York before heading back to Connecticut. I told him my wife loved him. I recall my words seemed forced, even as I knew Caroline loved him deeply.

 

As a college freshman in an introductory class in psychology, we were asked to define love. I demurred, unable to define a sensation I barely understood. Perhaps I was wrong for not attempting, as today I suspect the professor was not looking for a precise definition but to initiate a discussion.

 

A fun story: In the early 2000s, I was in Louisiana on a business trip. Two of us had been visiting a client in Baton Rouge, before driving to New Orleans to fly back to New York the next day. That evening we had dinner at Galatoire’s, a century-old restaurant on Bourbon Street. By chance, we were seated at a table next to Leon Galatoire and a lady friend. Mr. Galatoire had had a few drinks, and we started chatting and soon joined the two tables. My friend bought two copies of Leon Galatoire’s cookbook. Asked to sign them, Mr. Galatoire complied. My copy – today one of my treasures – shows three attempts to sign it, the last reading: “For Sydney, Love you so much! Bon appétit, Leon Galatoire.”

 

To love and to be loved are among the greatest sensations available to us as humans. As one of life’s eternal mysteries, it is too big a subject to be covered in this short essay. It has been written about by poets and portrayed by artists, far more articulate than I am. Nevertheless, I felt the urge to write something as we approach Valentine’s Day. “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies,” is a quote attributed to Aristotle, signifying the deep connection felt between two people in love.  When Justice Stewart Potter was asked to describe his test for obscenity, he replied, “I know it when I see it.” Today my answer to my psychology professor would be, I know love when I feel it. And I have been fortunate in being loved, especially by my wife Caroline, and by my children and grandchildren, but also by a large extended family and by numerous friends.

 

In Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady there is a scene in which the dying Ralph Touchett, speaks to his cousin Isabel Archer; he contrasts physical pain and love: “It’s (the pain) very deep, but…it passes; it’s passing now. But love remains.” It does, but to receive and experience it, we must be open to it and generous with it.

 

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!

"A Conspiracy of Silence"

 Apologies for two of these essays in three days. This one, however, had been started before the extraordinary events of the past ten days – the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump and the decision by Mr. Biden to not seek a second term. With these developments, the future always unclear has become further obscured.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtottd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“A Conspiracy of Silence”

July 24, 2024

 

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought

never to be the system of a regular government.”

                                                                                                                    Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

                                                                                                                    British Philosopher and Social Reformer

                                                                                                                    The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 1839

 

In many social settings, silence is the better alternative. As my mother would say: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Or my father: “Better to remain silent and have people think you a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” And my mother-in-law would quote the ancient proverb: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” 

 

Yet silence does not always contain the remedies its fans claim. In The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously, Martin Luther King wrote: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1986, Elie Wiesel spoke: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever humans endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

 

The silence of which I write does not bear the evil of which King and Wiesel wrote and spoke, nor is it the silence of my late in-laws and parents that leads to worried looks and shaking heads in social gatherings. My concern is the Omeretà, the code of silence of politicians and their accommodating friends in the media – it is the silence that deprives people of the facts necessary to make informed decisions. As the British Parliamentarian Rory Stewart wrote in the prologue of his recent book How Not to be a Politician, “The public see the appearance that someone else chooses to share.” 

 

A conspiracy of silence was responsible for a refusal to publicly debate the origin of COVID-19. It could be seen over the past three and a half years in the refusal of the media to expose the horrific effects of an open southern border; in the dire ramifications of federal debt that exceeds one hundred percent of GDP; and in the potentially disastrous repercussions of allowing Iran to build an Atomic bomb.

 

Silence has kept people ignorant of the consequences of a partisan federal bureaucracy that employs 2.7 million people in two thousand agencies – 95% of whom give money to the Democratic Party. The growth of the administrative state is usually ignored by mainstream media, as it serves their progressive goals. Considered by some the “fourth branch” of government – and unlike the other three branches, which have swung between Republican and Democratic control – it has remained reliably Democratic. 

 

This Omeretà between the media and their favored politicians is not new. The American people were kept in the dark when President Woodrow Wilson, in October 1919, suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated. On March 28 1944, shortly after returning from the Tehran Conference, Franklin Roosevelt, at the urging of his daughter Anna, visited his doctor, cardiologist Dr. Harold G. Bruenn at Bethesda Medical Naval Hospital. He was diagnosed with reduced lung capacity, hypertension, acute bronchitis and acute congestive heart failure. Again, his condition was kept secret from the American public.

 

Recently, a conspiracy of silence surrounded the cognitive decline of President Biden, before it was witnessed by 50 million people in his debate with Donald Trump.  Mr. Biden’s behavior exposed what most people already knew, or suspected, or at least those whose reading is not limited to The New York Times and the Washington Post and whose viewing is not bounded by MSNBC and CNN. Barton Swaim wrote in last Monday’s Wall Street Journal: “Elected Democrats, with the eager compliance of their allies in the media, dismissed any expression of concern about the president’s acuity.”  As for the debate, it was telling to read and listen to mainstream media’s analysis of what a cold or sleep-deprivation could do to an individual, otherwise in command of his faculties. Most of us who had watched with alarm Mr. Biden’s decline over the past three-and-a-half years felt like Chico Marx in the 1933 film Duck Soup: “Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?” In The Spectator on July 22, Freddy Gray wrote that Biden’s health cover-up “may well go down as one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.”

 

Silence, when it suppresses knowledge, is a dangerous stratagem, especially in a democracy where an informed electorate is critical; for voters hold power. Politicians of all stripes play loose with the truth. It is in their DNA, so it is left for the media to uncover the truth, without bias or prejudice. Their responsibility should always be to the public, to keep people informed. Candor on the part of politicians and accurate reporting by the media might have kept at bay the hatred and distrust that infests today’s politics.

"'Night' by Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Night, Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil”

August 31, 2023

 

“Nobody had any strength left. And the night seemed endless.”

                                                                                                                                              Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                                              Night, 1958

 

Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.

 

Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.

 

Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America. 

 

Things were worse in the 20^th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India.  It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold. 

 

Why? There is no answer. How did Austro-Germany, countries that produced Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Albrecht Dürer produce an Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Why do people have so little regard for the sanctity of life that they will torture, mutilate and kill? Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (the SS) established twenty-five main concentration camps, with over a thousand satellite camps. While still confined to the ghetto, Wiesel wrote: “There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate...” 

 

Once at Auschwitz, death was omnipresent: “Death was settling in all around me, silently, gently. It would seize upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit.” As the Soviets advanced westward in late 1944, surviving prisoners from Auschwitz were force-walked most of the four hundred and twenty-five miles west to Buchenwald. More than half died on the way. Shortly after their arrival, Wiesel’s father died in January 1945. Three months later, on April 10, Americans arrived. Survivors were saved, but at what cost: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

 

This is a short but powerful book. It is still read in some high schools, as it should be, for its message is one we should never forget. But it should also be a reminder that evil lurks everywhere. It is why we need religion and their moral codes of conduct. Evil infested Tailei Qi, the shooter this week on the UNC campus. It is with us today in many parts of China (the treatment of Uyghurs in China’s northwest); in Russia (Prigozhin’s death was no accident). It is visible in Islamic terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We ask again, ‘Why?’. Remembering his own time in the World War I trenches, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Fellowship of the Ring, has Frodo say to Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” “So do I,” replied Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the life that is given us.” Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. We must play with the cards we are dealt.

 

We cannot deny evil’s existence. In recent years, we in the West have been fortunate. Democracy and free market capitalism give power to the people, not the state. Evil nations reflect excessive powers granted to, or usurped by, governmental workers. Our Founders, rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief that man was inherently good, recognized man’s capacity for evil, so they gave us a federal government with limited powers, with separate but equal branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – separate entities that make, execute, and interpret laws. Nevertheless, the desire by individuals to garner power persists; it is gradual and subtle and has become common in Washington. Evil takes root with a promise to do good, which justifies whatever insidious means are necessary to achieve a desired end. And the silence of good people abets its advance. 

 

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was directed at the rise of Fascism and was a warning that no nation or civilization is immune from authoritarianism. Today, while we must remain vigilant of right-wing extremists, we should not ignore the fact that most of the Twentieth Century’s murderous regimes emanated from the left – from communist governments that control the media, along with the educational, cultural, economic, and personal lives of their people. 

 

A re-reading of Elie Wiesel’s classic tale Night is a reminder that evil is real, it is pervasive, and it is contagious. It must be confronted, from whichever direction it comes and in whatever guise it appears.

"Roald Dahl - Thoughts on Fiction and History"

 Winter came late to Connecticut. While we had a few cold days in December and January, this year’s weather, at least here where we live, has been mild and, more surprisingly, snow-less. That changed as this monstrous storm moved across the country, dumping snow and wreaking havoc. And, finally, as February was saying adieu, it brought us some snow – not much, perhaps three inches, but enough to make the trees sparkle and to remind us of the beauty winter came bring.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Roald Dahl – Thoughts on Fiction and History”

March 1, 2023

 

“Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory,

there would be no civilization, no society, no future.”

                                                                                                                Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                NPR – “All Things Considered”

                                                                                                                April 7, 2008

 

Novels are vessels that carry our past. If we abandon or amend them, we relinquish or alter our past. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, provides a look at first-half-19^th Century London, an unpleasant place to be poor. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, written in 1869 provides a Russian perspective on the Napoleonic Wars, which were devastating for both victor and vanquished.  Joel Chandler Harris, born and raised in Georgia, wrote Uncle Remus in 1881, during Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow era, a time when blacks in America were treated badly. These books make some uncomfortable, but they are social commentaries on their time. Fiction speaks to thoughts people had, words they spoke, and actions they took. Through them we can trace the arc of civilization as it has advanced over the centuries.

 

Last week Penguin Random House made the sensible decision to rescind their earlier announcement that only expurgated versions of Roald Dahl’s books for children would be published by Penguin Young Readers Group in the U.S. and Puffin Books in the UK. Now, copies with the original language will be branded as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, to differentiate them from edited copies for more sensitive readers. However, it is troubling that the change came only after a backlash that included such writers as Salmon Rushdie (a man who knows what it is to be censored) and Camilla, United Kingdom’s Queen Consort, who urged writers to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination.” Wise words from a well-read woman. Consumers are best served when offered a choice, which is what Penguin is now doing.

 

Changing words in books is not the same as censorship, but it is illustrative of a different problem – the coddling of American youth. Young children were once taught to prepare for a tough world. The old adage: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” has been updated to conform with today’s more sensitive culture: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also harm me. /Stones and sticks break only skin, while words are ghosts that haunt me.” It is not that parents of my generation (and earlier) were unaware of bullying and taunting or did not love their children. They were and they did. They also wanted them to be responsible, accountable, and respective of others. We also knew the world is a tough place, and we knew that children should be prepared.

 

Both the left and the right have been guilty of banning and/or challenging books that do not conform to their ideologies. A photograph of California’s Gavin Newsome was published in the April 7, 2022 issue of Newsweek. He was “reading some banned books.” In his hands was a copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (banned by the right). On the table was a copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (banned by the left). On the right, books on LBGTQ subjects have been challenged or banned in some elementary schools, books like George by Alex Gino, Stamped: Racism, Anti-racism, and You by Ibram X and Jason Reynolds, and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Some parents feel the books’ content age-inappropriate for their young children, and their wishes should be respected. The left has placed challenges or imposed bans on books they see as insensitive to gender and racial issues, like George Orwell’s 1984, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. 

 

It took a while, and their initial, instinctive reaction was wrong, but Penguin Random House made the right decision in offering readers a choice. Roald Dahl was known as an antisemite and misogynist, but his books have sold over 300 million copies since the early 1940s. His books, and movies made from them, have entertained and enlivened the lives of millions of children in dozens of countries. Penguin’s decision ensures that millions more will have the delight of knowing Willy Wonka, Augustus Gloop, Matilda Wormwood, and many others. 

 

None of this is to argue that fiction is always accurate in its portrayal of the past. It is, after all, fiction, meant to tell a story, to make a point. And historical figures, like public ones today, are generally more nuanced than shown. Nevertheless, we get a sense of life in mid 19^th Century English debtors’ prison by reading of Charles Dickens’ Amy Dorrit and of what it was like to grow up black in 1930s Alabama by getting to know Harper Lee’s character, Tom Robinson.

 

Changing words in any book leads to a slippery slope, more associated with totalitarian regimes than with a nation of free people. Let us pray that the media coverage of the Dahl episode will cause both sides to reconsider their efforts to ban or challenge books that do not suit their particular political ideology. As Elie Wiesel said in his talk on NPR fifteen years ago, in speaking of the horrors he suffered during the Holocaust: “…our stories are essential – essential to memory.” Most writers today were not alive then, but knowledgeable and empathetic writers of fiction can provide readers a sense of time and place, of what caused the tragic events in Germany. Such stories may prevent future nightmares. Not all that is written is true, but truth only emerges when authors are free from censors, when books are not altered, challenged, or banned, and when readers are free to decide for themselves what to read.