Lessons from an autobiography

Every now and then, I get the desire to write down some part of my personal history. This time, it was from my early adulthood.

I spent several days, off and on, writing out and researching memories. I started with what I recall now, and then I looked up old emails.

I have always kept most of my old emails. I can access the ones that are from after 2004, which must have been when web mail programs stopped limiting space. I probably have even more saved somewhere, because I used to copy and paste them into long documents and save them. But likely they are on floppy disc or CD and not easily accessible.

I won’t post what I wrote, because it also involves other people.  The only way I would consider sharing it is in person, on paper, with no recording devices in the room. But I enjoyed the process and I think it was helpful.  Some insights I have:

1) Memory is a story, not a recording. Even the act of recalling requires putting a filter into what is recalled. What I mean is, I always remember with a purpose and then I specifically remember what seems to address that purpose. But as I actually read some of the old emails, I started to remember things that were omitted by the filter. There’s a lot more to my life than the story I tell myself.

2) I feel like my self and identity is pretty consistent over time, but reading old emails challenges that idea. Many times I would read over points I was trying to make in the emails and wonder: “What on earth was I thinking?” “What could have been motivating me to say that?” It was as much like trying to understand a character in a book as it was like recalling the details of an event.

This was especially revelatory as part of my motivation was to compare my memories with an account I read by someone I knew at roughly the same time in our lives. I read their account thinking: “They have definitely left things out.” Well, my memory also left things out! 

3) We’ve all heard sayings like “just be yourself” “think outside the box” etc, etc. It’s cliche.  But really, we should actually try our best to think for ourselves and come to conclusions based on real experiences. It’s much more interesting reading about that than reading an account of how you once read something and decided to believe it.

4) I have some memories that can make me laugh out loud, twenty years later or almost that. It makes me happy.

5) I experienced a lot of uncertainty in my twenties about my direction in life. Plans had to be abandoned and modified. Disappointment was frequent. One thing that I think I did right, however, was engaging with small clubs and loosely organized activities that exposed me to different people and their ways of getting along and getting things done. These included volunteer jobs, ballroom dancing and step dancing, concert band, and my various employers. I was always “distributed” in the people I relied on. I am very grateful for this, and grateful for the many functional groups and systems in my current life (whatever their flaws). It’s a reminder never to underestimate the power of small systems and networks.

up the mountain, making a trail (two)

 I'm continuing to read Robert Orsi's History and Presence, alongside A Comparison of the Mennonite and Doukhabor emigrations from Russia to Canada, 1870-1920, by Robert Sawatsky. The purposes of each writer become clearer as I read, and my personal feelings and motivations can temporarily recede a bit, to come back later (one assumes) with greater clarity. I'm noting quotations from each as I go, and already have a significant amount of copied text and scribbled citations. I have a pleasant sensation of curiosity that is not fettered to any conclusion yet. I'm also having a flashback to my undergraduate days, when I seemed to have a knack or doom for finding the dustiest, obscurest, smelliest books in the library. Of course the dust on an online text is non-literal, but I think I can still see it out of the corner of my eye.

Anyway. Here is a passage from Orsi that resonated, on the topic of encountering a saint or deity. It references the story of Bernadette at Lourdes.

The testimonies visionaries give of their experiences are not exhaustive [...]. Both those who see and hear and their interlocutors sense that there are levels and dimensions of what is happening to and around them that are not completely within their grasp. To understand an experience, including an experience of real presence, involves relationality, conversation, doubt and ambiguity. It entails tracking back and forth between one life and other lives, as Bernadette and her family and neighbors did in their efforts to begin to understand events in the woods outside the village. But they did not succeed in containing the experience, which was probably not, in any case, their goal. "Life might be understood as precisely that which exceeds any account we may try to give of it," and this includes accounts of our life and the life around us that we give to ourselves, as well as to others. No life is to thoroughly embedded in given structures of meaning, discourse, and power as to be fully accounted for by them, just as meaning, discourse and power are rarely hermetic, coherent, unidirectional, and stable. Narratives of encounters with the saints are simply not isomorphic with experience, just as the holy figure is not completely identified with any one social environment. These stories are incomplete, contingent, and intersubjective. They are shot through with "unknowningness," studded with "opacities." Talk about the Blessed Mother and the saints is contingent upon the unpredictable supernatural figure and the never fully knowable lives of the others with whom stories of what the Blessed Mother has done are shared. Such stories are always in three voices, at least. There is the Virgin Mary, the one speaking, and the one listening.  In these exchanges, aspects of one's life previously unknown or unacknowledged may be discovered. The imagination takes hold of the world as the world takes hold of the imagination. This all belongs to the experience itself and to its history. "Human culture, like consciousness itself," Jackson writes, "rests on a shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice, and this subliminal, habitual, repressed, unexpressed, and silent mass shapes and reshapes, stabilizes and destabilizes the visible surface forms." Bernadette was not an already, once and for all fully formed subjectivity when she entered the grotto where she saw aquero. Her experience of the supernatural other did not arise on securely and fully constituted discursive grounds, nor was it completely containable in the stories that first Bernadette and then others told about their experiences of her and of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The Blessed Mother lived in others' lives and they lived in hers. The apparitional figure standing in the grotto was at once known and unknown. She was an appearance. No story about what happened or happens at Lourdes is ever a secure medium of world making or meaning making, subject formation, or power because the narratives of this experience are never free of the interplay of the known and unknown, conscious and unconscious. There is always an excess of intersubjectivity in encounters with the Blessed Mother and the saints, and there is excess in the narratives that precede and follow from them, too. The experience arises on the shadowy and dissolving floe of blue ice. (pages 62-61)

This is an admirable effort to say in precise language that some stories and experiences cannot be contained inside an interpretation even as they attract people to try and interpret them.

I am particularly intrigued by the sentence "there are always three voices, at least : the Virgin Mary [or other saint/presence, I would presume] the one speaking, and the one listening." This reminds me of the Caedmon story which turns on speaking and listening.

As I read Orsi's accounts of spiritual experiences and the interpretations of them by philosophers and theologians and heretics and all-sorts who wanted to the the ones with answers, I also become curious how and where the Doukhabours fit in. The obvious answer seems to be the Protestent side of things, but I wonder? They very much prioritized personal spiritual experience. But they did not, as far as I can tell, link it with specific locations or objects.

Other entries in this series:

(one)

Up the mountain, making a trail (one)

So almost a year ago, I had a short online conversation with the Substacker Flat Caps and Fatalism, about his piece "Without Saints." I eventually responded with my own blog entry, called "The Saints," where I remembered my life-changing encounter with Caedmon and Hild, and tried re-framing it as an encounter with a saint.

But additionally, in part of our conversation, FCF made this comment:

"....I wonder how common this feeling that you have to make your 'interest' [in saints or some aspect of religion] respectable is. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there are often seminar rooms with several people all talking in 'respectable' language about something they relate to in a far more complex way.

Have you read Orsi's 'History and Presence'? Your story makes me think of it a lot." (Comments, July 28th 2022)

 I did in fact buy Robert Orsi's History and Presence after that exchange. But when the actual book arrived it look intimidating and I put off reading it. Finally today, a cool May day with rain, the kids at their grandparents', I started reading.

The first few chapters describe the theological disagreements of Catholics and Protestants and how these resulted in violence: rioting, torture, warfare, and (depending on one's affiliation) martyrdom. (Chapter 1, "The Obsolescence of the Gods). Now in the past three years, some aspects of Christianity seem clearer to me, and I even feel something like a call to participate. But, what Orsi describes is completely alienating. Obviously such carnage happened, it is documented, but there is no chime of understanding in me.

Or is there.

Maybe I have just not been listening for it. Maybe it's the last thing I want to hear.

I was born in Canada, with a immigrant Greek father and a Canadian mother of Russian descent. People who hear me say that usually make a few assumptions about my cultural background immediately. Most of them are wrong.

• I don't speak Greek or Russian, and this was deliberate on both parents' part. I never met my dad's parents and while I met my mom's parents and my dad's sister, there was a language barrier.
• I was raised with Christian stories. But not only do I have no background in the Greek or Russian Orthodox churches, I was raised to be actively hostile towards all churches.
• Growing up, I had almost no deliberate exposure to Russian or Greek culture or traditions, though there was some accidental exposure, for sure.
• As a child I celebrated no holidays, not birthdays, not Christmas or Easter or Halloween. Nothing.

Now, my childhood was not terrible; in fact it was extraordinarily rich in many ways. Family has always been my safe place, even when it was complicated, so I'm not trying to make my childhood family sound crazy or anything. Also, there is no doubt in my mind that they were always trying to do what they thought was right.

Still, when I think of my cultural background, it's hard for me to put into words just how fragmented and filled with loss it feels. If I include religious experiences and feelings in there, even more so. It's like an abyss that I only look at sideways, because looking right into it is overwhelming.

But maybe it's time to look at bit more closely at these pieces of cultural inheritance. I will start by learning about the Doukhabours, the Russian sect that my mother's family came from. They were both her cultural inheritance and a group she didn't want to be associated with at all, at least not when she was interacting with people outside her family. The Doukhabours were a sect that developed in Russia, and many eventually came to Canada because of religious persecution. My mother's grandparents were among those that immigrated.

There's some general information on websites, but I'm currently reading this thesis: MQ36523.pdf (doukhobor.org) It is a history and comparison of the Doukhabours and Mennonites. It will take me a while to go through it, so I'm optimistically titling this blog entry as "one" assuming there will be other entries. (But I'm kind of bad at long reading projects, so the likelihood of me making progress, or alternately, just continuing to be angsty and confused are equally likely.)

Observations/questions so far:

• I don't know if it's possible to reach a sympathetic understanding of the early Doukhabours (the ones who lived in Russia). So far I find it hard to relate (several levels of dislocation). It's natural to want to find points of sympathy with one's ancestors, but so far not.
• The history of the Doukhabours frequently involves isolation from the mainstream society as they tried to maintain their culture and religious practices.
• Many of the bloggers/stackers I read speculate about stepping away from an increasingly technological society and forming "parallel societies". There is logic to it, even a sort of cool "rebel" factor. But reading Doukhabour history should give one pause before promoting this idea. Corruption, scandal and misery are all just as likely in an isolated society, if not more so. It's rather depressing to read about, truthfully.

The metaphor in the title:

My maternal grandparents' property included a small forested mountain. On occasion, my brothers and I and sometimes my parents would hike up it. There were no trails and I remember these mountain excursions as challenging, exhilarating and spiced with a sense of risk and danger. In reality it couldn't have been more than a half-hour hike and I didn't have any trouble even as a small child. But there was a powerful sense of being off the map, away from the civilized world, into an unknown. So that is kind of how this research undertaking feels.

I will also try to continue reading History and Presence. It will be helpful background info I'm sure. Also I'm curious what exactly reminded FCF of my writing in the book, because it certainly is not obvious yet.

Other entries in this series:

(two)

Learning from history

I have started a new book, the first book I have read of recent contemporary fiction in….uh….not sure how long. Five years maybe? It is Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated from the Russian). It is an eccentric book but appealing, for reasons I don’t totally understand yet….perhaps I am curious about the logic by which it is structured? It’s also full of rich, humourous language and references which I always enjoy in a book.

Anyway, I took a break from reading and found this interview with Vodolazkin and his translator, which I want to bookmark here. There is lots in it to think about.  Here is some of the text as to give a flavour:

Eugene Vodolazkin: Memory … What do we have except memory? Nothing. Memory is the consciousness of a person, whereas history is the consciousness of the people. And that is why the book of books, the Bible, is a historical text. It ismemory. As it happens, I am a historian — formerly a philologist, but my whole life I’ve studied the Middle Ages, and my academic writing is more about history and the philosophy of history than about linguistic problems. But history as such is not as important as we sometimes think. There’s Cicero’s famous aphorism: “History is the teacher of life.” But we shouldn’t take these words too seriously. History doesn’t actually repeat. I mean, it does in some sense, but if you want to build a modern democracy, you quickly understand that ancient Greek democracy has nothing to do with what you want, except in name. Because every historical event is a great complex of different circumstances, intentions, and so on and so forth. And to bring all of these together for a second time is impossible. And that’s why knowledge of history will not save us, cannot teach us what to do in the future. You can’t draw political conclusions from history, except in some extremely limited sense.

Interviewer: So it’s not the case that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it?

EV: Well, it’s not that history doesn’t teach us anything at all. But you have to identify the specific sphere of its influence. And for me, that would be the personal sphere. If we want to draw historical lessons, we must understand that they are moral rather than political. For society as a whole, it doesn’t make sense to study examples, because each person has his or her own agenda, in the same way that every battle has its own general. There are so many directions, so many vectors, that it is impossible to regulate this process. Which brings me back to our previous topic: if you want to help your society, develop yourself. Don’t develop the Volk, the people in general. Don’t deal in thousands and millions; deal with your own self. This point is crucial for The Aviator. One of the book’s main ideas is that personal history is much more important than general history, than world history — that world history is actually only a small piece of individual history. Whereas all these utopian ideas, like communism, all these ideas that put pressure on individuality — they are not organic, not vital. They have no right to exist. And The Aviator is precisely a text about an attempt at emancipation of personal history from world history. (full interview)

Solitude and Solidarity

Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents was a much easier read in most ways than Cynical Theories. I took several months to get through Cynical Theories and about a week to get through this one. Rod Dreher’s book, while it refers to the academic theories discussed in the Pluckrose/Lindsay book, is not an academic discussion. It’s much more applied: How do you live in a society which is infiltrated by applied postmodernism, critical theory, and (Dreher argues) soft totalitarianism?  It is also written specifically for a Christian audience, so one must read with at least openness to that perspective.

For me personally, it was very interesting to read this book after Cynical Theories. Cynical Theories spoke to my adult, postmodern and agnostic self, the one that went to university and absorbed a certain amount of academic knowledge and a few practical strategies for getting along with people. It also led to to consider why, despite many similarities, I seem to run different mental software from most of my peers. I thought this must have something to do with family and cultural background. How engaging then, that Live Not By Lies specifically addresses family life and encouraged me to explore this very question.

Regardless of whether you consider yourself a “Christian dissident” (it is a stretch for me to claim membership in this group, though I’m sympathetic), an interesting and valuable part of Live Not By Lies are the accounts of people who lived and grew up in Soviet Bloc and how they maintained their identity under a totalitarian state. It’s a fascinating insight into how different perspectives on society are formed. For me, it provides insight into my family life and background and why I have the perspective I do today.

The introduction to Live Not By Lies provides the thesis of the book:

Part one of this book makes the case that despite its superficial permissiveness, liberal democracy is degenerating into something resembling the totalitarianism over which it triumphed in the Cold War. It explores the sources of totalitarianism, revealing the troubling parallels between contemporary society and the ones that gave birth to twentieth century totalitarianism. .... Part two examines in greater detail forms, methods, and sources of resistance to soft totalitarianism's lies. Why is religion and the hope it gives at the core of effective resistance? What does the willingness to suffer have to do with living in truth? Why is the family the most important cell of opposition? How does faithful fellowship provide resilience in the face of persecution? How can we learn to recognize totalitarianism's false messaging and fight its deceit? (pages xiv to xv) 

The new, "soft" totalitarians will not (at least initially) gain control over people with threats or awful punishments. Rather, they will appeal to the desire to be safe and able to pursue any pleasure we want. This is at least partly because capitalism encourages people to think in terms of satisfying their desires, and stopping to consider if those desires are actually any good for you takes a lot of effort and is perhaps close to impossible anyway without reference to a concept of a greater good. (read my outtakes here) Meanwhile, multiple forces continue to undermine a coherent story of what that greater good might be. They are discussed in a series of subheadings: Loneliness and Social Atomization, Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions, The Desire to Transgress and Destroy, Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies, A Mania for Ideology, and a A Society that Values Ideology more than Expertise (pages 31 to 46). I don't have time to go into all the arguments, but those who follow what is called "the culture war" should be familiar with them. Progressives don't generally use the term culture war, so for them I call this section "all the reasons Those People won't accept on trust our program for improving the world." 

Part 2 of Live Not By Lies moves away from explicit commentary on the contemporary world into accounts from people who lived under Communism in Eastern Europe.  They tell their stories of how they maintained their identity and faith despite living in a society that was hostile in every sense including deadly force.

The first challenge is to not repeat the lies that the totalitarians insist you repeat. One might argue, the first step is recognizing that they are lies, but perhaps this is not even possible outside of the simple act of not repeating them. For example, many people refused to swear oaths or display/repeat slogans supporting the totalitarian state. This resulted in losing opportunities in education or jobs (but it its way, led to other opportunities). In extreme cases, pointing out state lies led to torture and imprisonment. But even outside of that, living in an environment where people avoided discussing their own observations of reality for fear of saying the wrong thing, led to a distortion of reality for everyone.

I relate to this because I grew up in a family of very blunt speakers. Certainly, neither my parents nor brothers nor myself were always right about everything.  And sometimes we talked over and past each other when it would have been more prudent to listen. But there was no shying away from difficult topics.  There was no "We won't discuss this because someone's feelings might be hurt or it might be unpleasant." The highest value was recognizing and naming the truth of what is important. This has stayed with me, even as I have explored and challenged a variety of beliefs. I do not think that the search for truth can be uncoupled from the act of speaking and writing (other creative pursuits could also be included). This is why I have been fiercely protective, from my earliest memory, of my right and ability to express my thoughts.

Have I seen the value of telling the truth acted out in the society around me? Not necessarily. In my university years, my friends mostly wanted to sound witty, ironic and cynical. As we grew older and became active on social media, people started to share slogans that signaled comradery to people who agreed with them, and intimidation to those that didn't. Influencers "boost" signals or try to go viral, which basically means getting people to react to or repeat what someone said, mostly without any evidence of reflection. I find this creepy. On the other hand, I continue to have opportunities to engage in thoughtful conversation with individual people, in which at least sometimes we seem to be carefully considering and challenging our observations. 

Other strategies that are outlined in Live Not By Lies involve maintaining cultural memory by explicitly teaching the history, religion and culture of the group. In the totalitarian states, this was usually done within families, or in small groups inside private homes. Czech mathematician and human rights activist Vaclav Benda called this a parallel polis: "an alternative set of social structures within which social and intellectual life could be lived outside of official approval. The parallel polis was a grassroots attempt to fight back against totalitarianism, which mandated, in Benda's words, 'the abandonment of reason and learning [and] the loss of traditions and memory.'" (page 121)

Vaclav Benda and his family are discussed at length as examples of how to create the parallel polis. As a family, they screened and discussed classic movies such as High Noon. They identified with the heroic stance taken by the characters. Kamila, Vaclav's wife, read for hours every day to their children, and a favourite was The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein. For the children, it was easy to draw a parallel between Mordor and the state which oppressed them. But neither is it that simple. Philip, Kamila and Vaclav's son says:

"[The Lord of the Rings] is about the East and the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that's not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire."

This is how Tolkein prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism's collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation. 

 "What my mom always encouraged in us and supported was our imagination, through the reading of books or playing with figures," [Philip] says. "She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others." (page 138-139) 

I am reminded a lot again of my own family in this description. I believe my dad, coming from Greece where he experienced war, occupation and tyranny, shared many of the Benda family's attitudes about family as the bastion against a hostile world. My mother did not share the same background but came from a Canadian cultural and religious minority, so she knew what it felt like to be outside the mainstream.  More so than the families of anyone I know, my parents tried to create their own little culture within our family. They had ambivalent feelings about their own ethnic and cultural backgrounds, so there was little effort to explicitly teach Russian or Greek traditions. Rather, they tried to take the best of what they had encountered and create something new. 

Like the Bendas, there were always books and reading in our home, and while there were children's books, we were never limited to children's books. Those we had were also most likely to be classic children's novels. We had no TV until I was 11, but I remember seeing classic movies in a local artsy theatre: Charlie Chaplin's comedies and Ben Hur are ones I remember. Later we would borrow film reels from the library and watch documentaries and movies on select weekends. We might have accidentally been exposed to some 80s or 90s pop culture on those weekends but it was more likely to be The Sound of Music. My dad was haunted all his life by his wartime experiences and sought to understand them by reading and viewing anything to do with the World Wars. There was no effort to censor or protect our innocence from this history that I recall. I saw the footage of gas chambers and mass graves at Auschwitz on one of those family movie nights, when I was no more than 8 or 10 years old. There would also have been extensive discussion around it, though I don't recall details. There was also regular discussion of the Soviet gulags, as Stalin did not get a pass anymore than Hitler did.

Music was particularly important to my dad, and probably the deepest emotional connection I share with him. Our alarm clock every weekday morning was classical music mix tapes he had created. Although we did not play instruments, the house was outfitted with the best speaker system that could be purchased at the time. I attended my first ballet and opera at age 4, and later there were frequent trips to the orchestra. There was no pretension about these outings or an attempt to be something we weren't. We wore our best clothes, but they were always second hand. Fashionable clothes were a luxury that could be dispensed with; music, dance and song were not. As an adult, I feel as at home in a concert hall as I do in my own living room. I do like to have stylish clothes though. 

 While my parents were not very impressed with the cultures they were born into, they also weren't particularly trying to fit in to mainstream culture. My dad often spoke disparagingly of Greece, but he was not impressed with many things about Canadian life in the 80s and 90s, either. Divorce and sexual promiscuity horrified him, and he saw it mainly as shallowness and selfishness on the part of adults who should know better. Pop or rock music, movies with nudity, easily most culture from the 60s onward, was looked on with disdain. In fact I think my parents stopped paying any attention at all to pop culture after the 50s and 60s. They talked about the Beatles and Elvis but I am not sure they were ever aware of the existence of say ABBA  or Madonna or Billy Joel. Michael Jackson I heard about, but never heard his music in our house. (Not until I got my own radio, at least.)

As you can imagine, this is all a bit complicated. I had a very rich childhood in many ways, filled with creativity and imagination and unique experiences. I have not described a fraction of them. I was enriched by all the beauty I was introduced to. Myself and my brothers were always academically precocious. We were shy but also confident and not easily influenced by trends that our peers fell for. But there is a cost to growing up more or less alienated from your social environment. As Jonathon Pageau would say: "But how does it scale up?" -- meaning, how do you take a belief or lesson or truth you learn as an individual and replicate it in your life and the life of your community. It's very difficult, and probably impossible, to do this as an individual. You need a community that is oriented around the same values.

In the sense of community, I see the Benda's experience as different from my own. Like us, they were isolated from the mainstream culture, such as it existed in the country: "Don't be afraid to be weird in society's eyes," says one subheading, and this is certainly a lesson myself and my brothers learned well. (Or when we were afraid, we didn't show it and pushed through it.) "In our classes at school, where we were different, we were different through our faith but also through our clothes," says Partik, another of the children. We were poor....It was totally impossible to buy anything fashionable, or to take part in any fad that was popular. Collectible toys that every child had, we didn't. Sometimes it was hard, but it made us stronger" (page 139).  I agree: such an experience can make you stronger, and it's not good parenting to indulge every whim of a child or their peers anyway. Still, the music, toys, clothes and other culture are part of a collective consciousness that is important in forming an identity. It is not the things themselves, but the fact that others know and understand their meaning. If you are going to take that away, there needs to be something to replace it.

The Benda family as described in the book was not just a world unto themselves but always connected to something bigger as well. They were founding members of Charter 77, the main Czechoslovak dissident community. This connected them to a community of intellectuals. They maintained their Catholic faith within their family, but did not isolate themselves on that account. Kamila entertained a stream of visitors at their apartment every day, as many as twenty people at once. She taught seminars. Her children continued the practice, showing movies and then having discussions around them for example. Teachable moments result. "...We don't just screen new movies but older ones," says Patrik. "Jumping between eras helps the young people to understand the cultural context in which the films were made. The fact that the younger ones can learn from the knowledge and experience of the older ones is really meaningful" (page 145).

Reading Live Not By Lies helped me to consider the difference between solitude and solidarity. Facing a hostile social environment can teach people how to live in solitude, which is not a bad thing. For one thing, solitude is often helpful to know your own mind and creativity. If you are never alone, it may be hard to know where other people leave off and you begin. To be excluded is not always a terrible thing. On the other hand, solidarity provides an environment - even if populated by other outsiders - where practices and ideas and values are reinforced. Assuming they are healthy ones, this is a more sustaining way to live.

I can't change anything about my past, or other people's decisions (and who would want such a responsibility, anyway! Life is much to complex to say  with certainty "if this had been done differently, then this would have resulted!" who really knows?)  I can think about how I live my life, however. I have chosen less solitude for my family than my parents have. I view the culture surrounding us with rather less suspicion. Still, at least some of the points made in Live Not By Lies resonate with me. It leads me to wonder how best to balance solitude with solidarity.