From Siberian trains to Vermont ski slopes and beyond

I started tonight with eyes on Christopher Hitchens and his insistence that he had no desire to be a "manager" of things before wrapping his weighty jowls in towels to test the limits of similated drowning and, to be sure, at some point I will return to it but in the meantime I noticed with no small weight on my chest that AleksandrSolzhenitsyn has died. Though it does not entirely fit and there are certain disjointers let me simply offer what I wrote in/on another venue:

From the half-blood prince of angry young men who toyed with torturefor all of 9 seconds to the fact-lashed scion of Dostoevsky wholabored under the weight of the Gulag for a decade. AleksandrSolzhenitsyn has died. As should be woefully apparent to most hereI am dabbler, a dilettante, in the best of lights a generalist -leaving the deep geology of a subject, the exhaustion of works toJon. That said, I still have my copy of "One Day in the Life ofIvan Denisovich" assigned so many years ago by the so happily sooften offered up Thackeray - is there anyone that man has nottouched/maimed here? Where are you daddy, throw the chalk, throwthe chalk, will it come down . . . will it?! I return to the textoften and am frequently made to mind of the idea of swapping sausageperhaps a bit of chocolate to make it through to the next day, thenext hour. It is quiet, the influence of this one man whounderwrote the crumbling foundation of the Soviet experiment - sothoroughly did his work undergird the dissolution of the happyproject that it has become easy happenstance to charge the likes ofPaul Robeson (like the man with the voice of God who lead Rutgers tovictory in many a charged game against the likes of Princeton andYale while being denined registry at various hotels and then deniedeats at various restraunts while starring on Broadway never had anyreason to look for venues and whatnot where he was accepted as aman) and myriad others with utter political and cultural blindness.It became easy to describe an evil empire and provided a broadvocabulary (well appropriate in many measures) that also has beenoverlooked. The awkward picture that accompanies the NYTs obit ofhim shaking hands with Putin aside, there are few people who withwords alone proved capable of shaking so much in the 20th century.This does not do it or him justice

-fp