When is the last time you read a book that took your breath away? So beautiful its mere presence in your living space emanated luminescence like an energy field? A book so rich, so real, so enchanting you ached to read it and ached as you read it?
It’s been so many years since I shared my life with such a book.
Such was the nature of my just completed love affair with “A Gentleman in Moscow.” Set in post Revolution Russia, the book begins in 1922 and recounts some 30-odd years in the life of Count Alexander Rostov, who is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal to life imprisonment within the walls of the glorious Metropol Hotel. For writing a poem with a revolutionary innuendo.
The Count is escorted under guard back to the Metropol, where he has lived for many years in the opulent suite 313, surrounded by aristocratic furnishings from his childhood home in Nizhny Novgorod. He is accompanied by the guards as he moves some of his treasures up the back stairs to live out his house arrest in a cramped space in the attic.
The Metropol is situated a stone’s throw from the Kremlin and looks out on the Bolshoi Ballet. As communism uproots and transforms his beloved country into a nuclear power, Count Rostov leads an enchanted life, enriched by meaningful friendships, a love affair with an exotic actress, and the unexpected responsibility of parenting a young girl, Sofia.
One of the most intriguing themes of the book is that of accelerated evolution ...
“… environments are never static for long,” writes Amor Towles. “The forces of nature inevitably unleash themselves in such a manner that the necessity for adaptation will be stirred. An extended drought, an unusually cold winter, a volcanic eruption, any one of thee could alter the balance between those traits that improve a species’ chance for survival and those that hinder it.”
In one of the most poignant parts of the novel, The Count attempts to share — yet another time — his story of the peppered moths of Manchester with Sofia.
The moths had survived for thousands of years, their white wings and black flecking a perfect camouflage as they lingered and languished on the light gray tree bark. Until factories sprung up in the region in the 1800s.
… the lightly speckled wings that had served to protect the majority of the peppered months suddenly exposed them remorselessly to their predators – even as the darker wings of the aberrations rendered them invisible. Thus, the pitch-black varieties that had represented less than 10 percent of the Manchester moth population in 1800, represented over 90 percent by the end of the century. Or, so explained the Count’s father, with the pragmatic satisfaction of the scientifically minded.
But the lesson did not sit well with the young Count. If this could happen so easily to moth, he thought, then what was to stop it from happening to children? What would happen to him and his sister, for instance, should they be exposed to excess chimney smoke or sudden extremes of weather? Couldn’t they become victims of accelerated evolution? ( p. 335)
What of these peppered moths? I find myself thinking of them today as I watched the Republicans being shuttled up to the White House to celebrate the repeal of the ACA. In the face of such evil, what morphing must we do to survive?
Or viewed from an alternative perspective, what role might accelerated evolution play in explaining the capacity for hundreds of elected officials to engage in such a horrendous action? Is it possible that in today’s world survival of the fittest is no longer synonymous with one’s having a conscience? Empathy? A soul?
“Yes, thought the Count, the world does spin.
In fact, it spins on its axis even as it revolves around the sun. And the galaxy turns as well, a wheel within a greater wheel, producing a chime of an entirely different nature than that of a tiny hammer in a clock. And when that celestial chime sounds, perhaps a mirror will suddenly serve its truer purpose – revealing to a man not who he imagines himself to be, but who has become.
The Count resumed his place in the chair.
‘A clean shave,’ he said to the barber. ‘A clean shave, my friend.'” (p. 37)
Vyshinsky: Why did you write the poem?
Rosov: It demanded to be written. I simply happened to be sitting at the particular desk on the particular morning when it chose to make its demands.
Vyshinksy: And where was that exactly?
Rostov: In the south parlor at Idlehour.
Vyshinksy: Idlehour?
Rosov: The Rostov estate in Nizhny Novgorod.
Vyshinksy: Ah, yes. Of course. How apt. But let us return our attention to your poem. Coming as it did-in the more subdued years after the failed revolt of 1905--many considered it a call to action. Would you agree with that assessment?
Rosov: All poetry is a call to action.
This is the first entry in a series I am writing about accelerated evolution and survival of the fittest. I intend to explore the concept that as our population surpasses the carrying capacity of the Earth, emotions of empathy and compassion, having a conscience, have become aberrations. To survive as a species, more of us will have to lack empathy so less of us survive. Stay tuned.
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