Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. Solzhenitsyn became lost to popular memory some time ago, I think. But he was once quite famous, specifically for writing about his experiences as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. He was a dissident, eloquent and empathetic in his writing, winning the Nobel Prize in 1970. He escaped the USSR in the 70’s but returned to Russia a decade or so ago after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

As a kid in the 70’s, I remember seeing his picture and how ancient he looked–a long, dignified face with a bushy, wiry beard and weary-sad eyes. I still remember thinking he looked tired and beat up. I didn’t know a thing about his life in a prison camp.

His most famous work, the Gulag Archipelago, chronicles in great detail his prison camp experience. One paragraph from that book has stuck with me. I remembered it when the current Iraq war began to unravel and Bush looked more and more a caricature of leadership when he labeled various countries “The Axis of Evil” and raged earnestly about “evildoers” and the “crusade” in the Middle East. Here it is:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: “Know thyself.”
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good.

It’s a deeply uncomfortable thing for us humans to admit. That line between good and evil running down the middle of every one of us. The stupid and the shameful coexisting with the empathetic and the generous, us moving back and forth across the “line” dividing the two as we make our way through life.

But it’s what we do. We struggle to be acknowledged good. We seek to make that line sharper rather than softer. We repeatedly forget the difference between our beliefs and those of other people (or societies) and so, as Solzhenitsyn also said, “we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values.”

I believe we can extend that simile to the environment. Treating the natural world as a “resource” (as in “natural resources”), we judge it as having only that value which we can extract from it. We draw a line between it and us and commence paving over our own heart, so to speak, when we act as consumers of nature rather than being in a relationship with it.

And so, I think, until we acknowledge that line between us and nature runs down the middle of every heart, we will continue to live beyond our limits–and beyond our means. We are nature, and nature is us.