In a number of surveys, Canadian farmers have found the absence of information to be a major obstacle to the development of sustainable agriculture. The traditional sources of information for farmers have been unable to provide them with suitable information. One reason for this deficiency is the absence of suitable training for agriculture professionals. The details of a newly created course designed to address these problems at the Faculty of Agriculture of McGill University are provided, and some suggestions made about (...) the pedagogy and course content of an entire program. (shrink)

The Flats, a district near downtown Cleveland, was once was the vibrant heart of Midwestern industry and is now in the throes of change: Some of its warehouses and factories have been transformed into nightclubs and restaurants, while homes in adjacent neighborhoods have been replaced by mini-mansions. In Cleveland, photographer Andrew Borowiec documents the Flats today and evokes the way of life they once embodied. Given the rare opportunity to access one of Cleveland's vast steel mills before it was modernized (...) or destroyed, Borowiec employed his camera to explore the Flats and its monuments of American industry. His striking black and white images reveal the broken power and vulnerability of the once-mighty mill as well as its relation to the surrounding city and its neighborhoods. The commercial buildings, factories, warehouses, and iron bridges that sustained Cleveland's industrial pulse convey a quiet dignity in these compelling photographs, as do the modest frame houses that sheltered those who labored for decades in the Flats. As Clevelanders struggle to redefine themselves as citizens of a twenty-first-century corporate metropolis, the Flats stand as a haunting testament to a time when men worked with their hands and steel was indeed the backbone of our nation. Borowiec's compassionate but unflinchingly honest gaze challenges us to look both at and beyond the images of Cleveland and to meditate on our common history of loss and rebirth. (shrink)

The "natural law" worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective moral truths which we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection. Most accounts of the natural law are based on a God-centered (...) understanding of the world. After the Natural Law traces this tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and then describes how and why modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Hobbes began to chip away at this foundation. The book argues that natural law is a necessary foundation for our most important moral and political values – freedom, human rights, equality, responsibility and human dignity, among others. Without a theory of natural law, these values lose their coherence: we literally cannot make sense of them given the assumptions of modern philosophy. Part I of the book traces the development of natural law theory from Plato and Aristotle through the crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas. Part II explores how modern philosophers have systematically chipped away at the only coherent foundation for these values. As a result, our most important moral and political ideals today are incoherent. Modern political and moral thinkers have been led either to dilute the meaning of such terms as freedom or the moral good – or abandon these ideas altogether. Thus, modern philosophy and political thought are leading us either toward anarchy or totalitarianism. The conclusion, entitled "Why God Matters", shows how even the philosophical assumptions of the natural law depend on a personal God. (shrink)

Books Reviewed in this Article: Introduction to the Critical Study of the Text of the Hebrew Bible. By J. Weingreen. Pp.vii, 103, Oxford, Clarendon Press; New York, Oxford University Press, 1982, £5.50. The Archaeology of the Land of Israel. By Yohanan Aharoni. Pp.xx, 344, Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1982, $27.50, $18.95 ; London, SCM Press, 1982, £12.50. A Commentary on the Gospel of Mark. By Terence J. Keegan. Pp.183, New York, Paulist Press, and Leominster, Fowler Wright Books, 1981, £4.45. The (...) Panorama of Luke: An Introduction to the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. By Neil Richardson. Pp.116, London, Epworth Press, 1982, £3.95. The Synoptic Gospels: An Introduction. By Keith F. Nickle. Pp.119, London SCM Press, 1982, £5.50. What is a Gospel? By Nicholas King. Pp.132, Leigh‐on‐Sea, Kevin Mayhew, 1982, £3.00. The Women Around Jesus: Reflections on Authentic Personhood. By Elisabeth Moltmann‐Wendel, translated by J. Bowden. Pp.xii, 148, London, SCM Press, 1982, £3.95. Paul and Paulinism: Essays in honour of C.K. Barrett. Edited by M.D. Hooker and S.G. Wilson. Pp.xxvii, 404, London, SPCK, 1982, £25.00. Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism. By William J. Abraham. Pp.222, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, £15.00. The Social Teaching of Vatican II. By Rodger Charles with Drostan Maclaren. Pp.xxvi, 569, San Francisco, Ignatius Press; Oxford, Plater Publications, 1982, £12.75. Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching. By Donal Dorr. Pp.viii, 328, New York, Orbis Books; Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1983, £7.95. The Kindness that Kills. Edited by Digby Anderson. Pp.xii, 170, London SPCK, 1984, £3.95. Communism in the Bible. By José Porfiro Miranda. Pp.x, 86, London, SCM Press Ltd. 1982, £3.50. Why I am still a Catholic. Edited by Robert Nowell. Pp.157, London, Collins, 1982, £4.95. Does God Answer Prayer? By Peter Baelz. Pp.55, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, £1.95. A Cry for Mercy. By Henri J.M. Nouwen. Pp.175, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982, £3.50. The Living Reminder. By Henri J.M. Nouwen. Pp.80, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982, £2.95. Making All Things New. By Henri J.M. Nouwen. Pp.95, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982. £2.95. Picturing God. By Norman Pittenger. Pp.x, 147, London, SCM Press, 1982, £4.50. Christotherapy II, The Fasting and Feasting Heart. By Bernard J. Tyrrell. Pp.xiii, 337, New York, Paulist Press, 1982, £6.70. With Respect: A Doctor's Response to a Healing Pope. By Frank Lake. Pp.xxiii, 327, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, £6.95. Euthanasia and Clinical Practice: Trends, Principles and Alternatives: The Report of a Working Party. Pp.viii, 88, London, The Linacre Centre, 1982, £2.75. Essays in Religion and Morality. By William James. Pp.xxviii, 345, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, £17.50. Freud and Jung: Conflicts of Interpretation. By Robert Steele. Pp.vii, 390, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £14.95. Archetype: A Natural History of the Self. By Anthony Stevens. Pp.xi, 324, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £12.50. The Seeing Eye: Hermeneutical Phenomenology in the Study of Religion. By Walter L. Brenneman Jr. and Stanley O. Yarian, in association with Alan M. Olson. Pp.xii, 177, University Park and London, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, £8.10. Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. Edited by S.M. Cahn and D. Schatz. Pp.x, 310, Oxford University Press, 1982, £6.95. Beyond Empiricism: Philosophy of Science in Sociology. By Andrew Tudor. Pp.xii, 213, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, £4.95. Philosophy and Human Geography: An Introduction to Contemporary Approaches. By R.J. Johnston. Pp.viii, 152, London, Edward Arnold, 1982, £5.50. The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences. By Eric A. Havelock. pp.viii, 362, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, £17.70, £6.30. The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste. By James McEvoy. Pp.xviii, 560, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, £35.00. Kant's Life and Thought. By Ernst Cassirer, translated by James Haden, introduction by Stephan Körner. Pp.xxiii, 429, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981, £17.50. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. By Robert B. Pippin. Pp.xii, 247, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1982, £16.50. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. By Martin Heidegger, translated by Albert Hofstadter. Pp.xxxi, 396, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1982, £16.50. In the Active Voice By Mary Douglas. Pp.xi, 306, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £9.75. Structural Sociology. Edited by Ino Rossi. Pp.xiv, 363, New York, Columbia University Presss, 1982, £45.50. A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905–1906. By J.W. Cunningham. Pp.384, Crestwood, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981, £7.95. Christians in Ulster 1968–1980. By Eric Gallagher and Stanley Worrall. P.241, Oxford University Press, 1982, £10.00. Scotland and the Papacy. By John Cooney. Pp.126, Edinburgh, Paul Harris, 1982, £8.95, £4.95. Scotia Pontificia. Edited by Robert Somerville. Pp.xiii, 177, Oxford, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1982, £25.00. (shrink)

Proactive policing strategies produce a range of harms to African Americans in poor urban communities. We know little, however, about how aggressive policing is experienced across gender by adolescents in these neighborhoods. The authors argue that important insights can be gained by examining the perspectives of African American youths and draw from in-depth interviews with youths in St. Louis, Missouri, to investigate how gender shapes interactions with the police. The comparative analysis reveals important gendered facets of African American adolescents' experiences (...) with and expectations of law enforcement. Young men described being treated routinely as suspects regardless of their involvement in delinquency and also reported police violence. Young women typically described being stopped for curfew violations but also expressed concerns about police sexual misconduct. This study highlights the differential harms of urban policing for African American young women and men and highlights the need for systematic attention to the intersections of race and gender in research on criminal justice practices. (shrink)

This article presents a stakeholder-based example of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within a university context. The first section provides a literature review that builds the case for CSR efforts by educational institutions. The next section details aspects of the focal corporate social responsibility program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USFSP) from its early conception to its implementation. The Talking the Talk section describes the overarching mission of the larger university and its influence on the mission of the (...) newly formed College of Business which undertook an ambitious community outreach program in a downtown neighborhood. The execution of the program is discussed subsequently in the Walking the Walk section, with an emphasis on formation of advisory boards, development of appropriate coursework, relevant interactions with external constituencies, and plans for assessment and continuous improvement. The article closes with recommendations for universities considering similar endeavors. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn the summer of 1783, a trial took place in the French city of Arras. One M. de Vissery, a resident of the nearby village of St. Omer, was appealing a decision by his local aldermen, who required him to remove a lightning rod he had put on his chimney. His young defense lawyer was Maximilien Robespierre, who made a name for himself by winning the case. In preparation, Robespierre and his senior colleague corresponded with natural philosophers and jurisconsultants. (...) Robes- pierre then persuasively resolved the crucial problem, namely, the proper relations of scientific to legal authority. He exploited the empiricist dogma common to contemporary physics and jurisprudence to argue that judges need not defer to scientific experts, but must only consider the facts, which required no expertise. It was a first approximation of an argument Robespierre would make with mounting authority over the next decade. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:318 BOOK REVIEWS ture. But when it comes to love, " we should measure the love of different persons according to the different kinds of union." Thomas underscores what Outka calls the " inclusive " conception of universal love. God is to be loved as the supreme good, as the source of all happiness; the neighbor is loved as sharing in the happiness we receive from God. Charity eviscerates (...) neither our natural inclination for happiness nor our natural associations with others. Rather, it " commands each act of other sorts of friendship " in relation to our friendship with God. Charity is inherently prudential and thus an account of " special relations,'' which Werpehowski and others address, is incorporated into the discussion of charity. Of course one might make the same objection against Thomas's appropriation of Aristotle that I have leveled against the appropriation of modern notions. But Aristotle is not so much a secular rival of Christianity as he is a philosopher of human nature. A return to Christian Aristotelianism is suggested by Kierkegaard's dictum that we have forgotten what it means to be Christian because we have forgotten what it means to be human. THOMAS s. HIBBS Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA The Trinity: An Analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas' Expositio of the "De Trinitate" of Boethius. By DOUGLAS C. HALL. Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 33. Leiden/New York: Brill, 1992. Pp. vi + 131. $40 (cloth). Aquinas's expositio of the De Trinitate of Boethius is an admirable paradigm of profound analysis and interpretive genius. Adhering closely to a literal reading of the short sexpartite Boethian tractate, but breaking off his analysis (for reasons unknown) just before the end of section two where Boethius begins his ex professo treatment of the Trinity, Aquinas ends up mainly plumbing the depth of Boethius's prefatory remarks about the epistemological status of theology, and thus in six questions (comprising 24 articles) constructs the most extensive treatment in all his works of the nature and method of theology. Little wonder, then, that Leo Elders titles his introduction to the expositio of Aquinas Faith and Science (Rome, 1974) or that Armand Maurer names his two volume translation of it Faith, Reason and Theology and The Division and Methods of the Sciences (Toronto, 198687 ). In Thomas's commentary, only the fourth article of question three treats the doctrine of the Trinity directly, though the four articles of BOOK REVIEWS 319 question four also discuss the cause of plurality, a crucial topic for trinitarian theology. I was mildly surprised, then, that Douglas Hall gives the title The Trinity to what professes to offer a " careful textual analysis and criticism " (112) of the methods and contents of Aquinas's commentary. In this slender book of four chapters, Hall inserts, between a short introduction and a conclusion, a second chapter on all five of Boethius's tractates and a third on Aquinas's commentary on the De Trinitate. He has some interesting things to say about the dating and contents of the Boethian works, and also makes some good points about Thomas's commentary, especially as regards questions five and six. But the title is a misnomer, for Hall skips over lightly the five articles mentioned above where Aquinas treats trinitarian issues, devoting only three pages to them. Hall's main concern, like Aquinas's, is theological methodology and epistemology. Hall attempts a rather Hegelian, dialectical appraisal of Aquinaswhich stresses Aquinas's reconstruction of Boethius by highlighting their common methodological theme of agnosia-and links it with an integrative approach which grounds itself in " a transcendental reading of Aquinas, while retaining themes from participationist and analogical literature" (112). The first chapter discusses the participationist, analogical, and transcendental strains of contemporary Thomism, and evinces a certain predilection for Rahner (his influence is also evident on pages 50, 58, 92-95). In sum, Hall combines a Rahnerian and dialectical reading of Aquinas. Due to his presupposition, however, he frequently does not engage Aquinas on his own grounds but burdens him with false problems and dubious theses as he seeks to sort out Aquinas's " dialectical tensions." Often the result is a rather gratuitous reading encumbered with unsubstantiated non sequiturs that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE CONCEPT OF POVERTY IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS'S CONTRA IMPUGNANTES DE/ CULTUM ET RELIGIONEM JOHN D. ]ONES Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin MEDIEVAL CONCEPTIONS of poverty have been given ongoing and serious attention by scholars during this century. The extensive literature on the nature and practice of poverty among the Franciscans bears witness to this. Serious investigation of St. Thomas Aquinas's understanding of poverty, however, is virtually nonexistent. Except for (...) a very recent book by Ulrich Horst,' there are, so far as I know, no monographs or dissertations treating this aspect of Aquinas's thought. The most thorough discussion in English, which falls far short of sustained textual or critical analysis, is given by Philip Mulhern.2 Apart from an article by Silvana Spirito, which primarily focuses on historical issues, one finds only scattered references and notes in other works.3 1 Ulrich Horst, Evangelische Annut und Kirche: Thomas van Aquin und die Annutskontroversen des 13. und beginnenden 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992). This work was published after the present article was completed. : Philip Mulhern, Dedicated Poverty (Staten Island: Alba House, 1973), 116-31. "II problema della poverta e deIla perfezione religiosa nell'ambito delie polemiche tra clero secolare e ordini mendicanti," Atti Del Congresso Internazionale, ed. Congresso internazionale Tommaso d'Aquino (Napoli: Edizioni domenicane italiane, 1974), 49-57. Worthy of mention is Scott Swenson's concise, but detailed, note on poverty in the Contra impugnantes (Emerging Concepts of Jurisdiction, Sacramental Orders and Property Rights Among Dominican Thinkers From Thomas Aquinas to Hervaeus Natalis [Ph.D. Diss., Cornell University, 1988], 265, n.159). For a brief discussion of poverty in 409 410 JOHN D. JONES The absence of scholarship in this area stands in marked contrast to the lavish philosophical and theological attention given to many other aspects of Aquinas's thought. If Thomas gave only a cursory nod to the subject of poverty, this absence might be understandable. Over the course of his career, however, Thomas composed several extended discussions and numerous shorter notes pertaining to poverty, concentrating particularly on the nature and practice of poverty in religious life. In addition to the Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, a relatively early work devoted to a defense of the mendicant orders and mendicant poverty, there are extended discussions of poverty in the Contra pestiferam doctrinam retrahentium homines a religionis ingressu, cc. 14-16, the Summa contra gentiles, bk. III, c.131-35, and the Summa theologiae (51), II-II, q. 184, a. 7, q. 186, aa. 3&6, q. 188, a. 7, etc. There are also brief discussions and references to poverty (paupertas) and the poor (pauper) in nearly thirty other works ranging from the In Sententiarum to various Scripture commentaries.4 My purpose in this paper is to present a close, but by no means comprehensive, textual and critical analysis of Thomas's treatment of poverty in the Contra impugnantes, concentrating on the crucial sixth chapter.5 I am interested in Thomas's conception of Summa theologiae, 11-11, q. 188, a. 7, see John D. Jones, Poverty and the Human Condition (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 317-320. Also see Jones, "Poverty and Subsistence: St. Thomas and the Definition of Poverty," Gregorianum 75 (1994): 135-49. 4 The Contra impugnantes dei cultum et religionem and Contra pestiferam doctrinam retrahentes homines a religionis ingressu are contained in the Leonine Opera Omnia, vol. XLI (Rome: St. Thomas Aquinas Foundation, 1970) and in Opuscula theologica, vol. 2, ed. RM. Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1954). An English translation of both works is contained in An Apologyfor the Religious Orders, ed. John Procter (London: Sands and Co., 1902), 50-376 and 377-479 respectively. I am using the Blackfrairs edition of the Summa theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964-81). By and large, I have followed existing translations of Thomas's works, although for the sake of accuracy, I have occasionally modified them, especially Proctor's translations of the Contra impugnantes and Contra retrahentes. 5 The discussion of poverty is contained chiefly in chapter 6 (cited in the Marietti edition as 2.5[6]). All citations in my paper will be to this chapter unless otherwise noted. Following typical form, the chapter contains... (shrink)

St. Augustine tells us that he worked on the De Trinitate on and off between 400 and 416. The aim of this work is basically twofold: to examine both how the absolute monotheism of Christianity can speak of three divine persons as well as to examine how humanity images this triune God. A rare treasure of theology and psychology, the DT has shaped most of the West’s talk about the Trinity. For how we read Scripture’s often oblique references to the (...) Trinity, how we understand the Trinitarian relations within God as well as what it means that the human person is created in this divine image, have been largely determined by Augustine. Given the importance and influence of the DT, it is curious that an English edition did not appear until the late nineteenth century when Philip Schaff included Arthur West Haddan’s translation in the 1887 Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. Since then only two more full English translations have appeared: Stephen McKenna’s in 1963 and Edmund Hill’s in 1991. (shrink)

This paper examines the nature and mission of the church in case of synchronization of individual and collective revealed and its social dimension in the doctrine of St. Augustine. We found that the doctrine of St. Augustine church focusing on a few universal concepts which make it possible to share a mystical communion into hierarchical levels and justify a higher capability to church "loving compulsion" imperfect. This flexible foundation principle of creating individual and collective synchronization and admitted his main tools: (...) Christian state that receives the highest sanction carrier sword of the Lord and the monastic way of believer's life - estrangement and in silent contemplation of the eternal state of the soul essence. The teaching of theologians had a double effect. It is, at first, was the basis of the concept of sacral and utilitarian State High and Late Middle Ages. Secondly, the teaching of theologian contemplative life was further rod idea of medieval philosophy, a doctrine that had a decisive influence on European consciousness, until the Enlightenment. Augustine's interpreted the doctrine that man can be saved independently, it can happen only with the living presence of God in this life, which is due to internal and external routes encourages people to perfection. Determining the path of salvation in the early Middle Ages was grieving and humble monk in contemplation of austerity. However, it should be noted that a key Augustine's principle - contemplative soul perfection that realized ascetic life of monks becomes narrow corporate practices. It deepened singular trend early Christian violate equality synchronization between collective and individual. Monastic Practice has proved, it is not effective, because it could not provide imaginable salvation to all members of the Christian community - tore the only body of the church - shared by Ecclesia sancta ecclesia catholic. Because the only historical conditions have changed at the same time rises task salvation of Republic Christiana, not selected by the grace of monks. Revived Early Christian idea of the right of everyone to achieve wisdom and bliss. Under these conditions, contemplative method of salvation need your additions, and most in need of a new interpretation of the concept of passivity public life of God's people. (shrink)

People who report believing in God fear death. They also experience grief when someone they love dies. Philosophers and social scientists sometimes claim that this can only be plausibly explained by the hypothesis that people who claim to believe in God do not really believe in God. I show that this is mistaken. I identify three independently plausible explanations of why people who genuinely believe in God would have these behaviors and attitudes. First, there is an evolutionary explanation of why (...) the fear of death would be resilient even if one genuinely believes God has good things in store for us after death. Second, people often fear low probability outcomes. It may be that religious people are afraid of hell or the cessation of existence even if they judge those outcomes to have a low probability. Third, belief in God is typically combined with views according to which death is accompanied by the permanent loss and radical transformation of important relationships. (shrink)

Many philosophers and members of the public think it is wrong to procreate. If one wants children, it is permissible to adopt. But procreation is allegedly impermissible because there is some respect in which adoption is better than procreation. I show that such objections are unsound.

A future biographer of Cardinal Edward Clancy, Archbishop of Sydney from 1983 to 2001, will no doubt give some attention to his major property developments. These included the complete rebuilding of the school and presbytery at St Mary's Cathedral, restoration works at, and the completion of, the cathedral with the southern spires, and the renovation and redevelopment of the parish site at St Patrick's, Church Hill.

Some feminists hold that surrogacy contracts should be unenforceable or illegal because they contribute to and perpetuate unjust gender inequalities. I argue that in developed countries, surrogacy contracts either wouldn't have these negative effects or that these effects could be mitigated via regulation. Furthermore, the existence of a regulated surrogacy market is preferable on consequentialist grounds.

Thomas E. Hill, Jr.; Servility and Self-Respect, The Monist, Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 January 1973, Pages 87–104, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197357135.

Chalmers’s anti-materialist argument runs as follows.

Vodola, Max On a wet Melbourne evening on Saturday 16 September 1916, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, coadjutor to Dr Thomas Carr, attended the opening of the parish bazaar at St John's Parish, Clifton Hill. Mannix was on his way to another function when he made the unscheduled stop at Albert Hall on Queen's Parade.2 After opening the bazaar, Mannix spoke for a few minutes about an issue of great significance, the proposal by the Hughes Government for compulsory military service. Mannix (...) spoke about achieving an honourable peace without conscription, describing conscription as 'a hateful thing' and opining that 'the present war would not have achieved such disastrous proportions if conscription had not prevailed in Europe'. Mannix insisted that Australia had done her fair share and that conscription in Australia would cause more evil than it would avert.3 In speaking on conscription, Daniel had entered the lion's den. Mannix later reflected that the speech at Clifton Hill was his 'original sin'. (shrink)

In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (6: 61), Kant provided an ethical interpretation of kenosis, the 'self-emptying' of Christ described by St Paul in Philippians 2: 6-8. This type of interpretation is distinct to Hegelian interpretations of Christ's kenosis, which read the 'self-emptying' in ontological terms. In this essay, I explore how the British Idealists received both interpretations of the doctrine, and constructed a range of Christologies of both types. Types of kenosis in the work of Thomas (...) class='Hi'>Hill Green and Charles Gore are examined in detail, revealing their dependence on Kant's work. Following thework of DonaldMacKinnon in this area, I argue that Gore eventually adopted a Kantian Christology for political and ethical reasons. (shrink)

This research poses the question of whether it is possible to optimize modern legislative drafting by integrating LLM-based systems into the lawmaking process to address the pervasive challenge of misinformation and disinformation in the age of AI. While misinformation is not a novel phenomenon, with the proliferation of social media and AI, disseminating false or misleading information has become a pressing societal concern, undermining democratic processes, public trust, and social cohesion. AI can be used to proliferate disinformation and misinformation through (...) fake news and deepfakes; can AI also be used for beneficial purposes to develop the antidote legislation combatting these challenges? Leveraging the capabilities of LLMS, such as ChatGPT and others, can present a promising direction for optimizing legislative drafting. By proposing the methodological approach of an AI bun, this article explores an important approach in which LLMS can support lawmakers and policy experts in crafting legislation. The article contributes to the discourse through a nuanced understanding of the opportunities and challenges in harnessing LLM-powered tools for legislative innovation. Ultimately, it underscores the transformative potential of LLMs as a potential resource for lawmakers seeking to navigate decision-making while developing legislation on an example of navigating the intricate landscape of misinformation and disinformation regulation in the age of AI. (shrink)

In Algorithms & Autonomy, Rubel, Castro, and Pham (hereafter RCP), argue that the concept of autonomy is especially central to understanding important moral problems about algorithms. In particular, autonomy plays a role in analyzing the version of social contract theory that they endorse. I argue that although RCP are largely correct in their diagnosis of what is wrong with the algorithms they consider, those diagnoses can be appropriated by moral theories RCP see as in competition with their autonomy based theory. (...) Most notably, proponents of consequentialism and virtue ethics can appropriate RCPs insights. This is good news because RCP’s social contract theory is vulnerable to a well known class of counterexamples. The most significant contribution of RCP, if I am right, is in their identification, presentation, and evaluation of concrete cases involving algorithms and not in the more controversial claims about theoretical ethics that RCP themselves see as central to what they are doing. (shrink)

Ptolemy reports three dated lunar eclipses observed by Hipparchus, and also refers to two more, without identifying them, which Hipparchus compared with two earlier counterparts (apparently, observed in Mesopotamia) to assess the validity of the Babylonian period relations of the lunar motion. Also, in Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, we are told that a horizontal lunar eclipse (selenelion) at sunrise and moonset was reported (observed?) by Hipparchus. Reviewing a paper by G.J. Toomer in 1980, it is shown that the pairs (...) of the eclipses were, almost certainly, the ones occurring on “31 January 486 b.c. and 27 January 141 b.c.” and “19 November 502 b.c. and 14 November 157 b.c.”; and if Hipparchus observed from St. Stephen’s Hill in Rhodes, the most probable candidate for the selenelion at moonset was the lunar eclipse of 7 February 142 b.c., although he also had the chance to observe any of the four others, occurring on 3 July 150 b.c., 10 April 145 b.c., 26 November 139 b.c., and 15 November 138 b.c., on a sufficiently elevated mountain on the island. (shrink)

This book offers original essays by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation.

The Washington National Cathedral, set on the highest hill in the capital city of the world's greatest economic and military power, is an iconic location for an examination of the intersection of immaterial faith, material power, and human conscious experience. It is a location made even more symbolic due to the fact that surrounding the Cathedral on three sides are three private schools -- an elementary school (Beauvoir) to the east, a boys' school (St. Albans) to the south, and (...) a girls' school (National Cathedral School) to the north. The students at these private schools include children of persons who wield the secular power headquartered in the City below the Cathedral Tower. Every day these students study and compete upon a hill giving them panoramic views over the great monuments and symbols of American power: the Capitol Dome, the Washington Monument, the entire City. And the Cathedral that marks their spot upon this globe is visible from all over the region, high above the City. These students are intelligent and informed, and thus for purposes of a dramatic-oriented form of exploration of interesting issues, provide a persuasive characterization for participants in a dialog of two iconic children, older teenagers, a boy and a girl, students at these schools and worshippers in the Cathedral, to develop an examination of themes of faith, power, and the experience of sentience in the material world, walking within and around the Washington National Cathedral, two of its affiliated schools, and the gardens and forests surrounding. The approach recalls the form of the dialogs of Plato, in which persons of elite educational and cultural status encounter each other within a specific building or location, and proceed to discuss such matters as are provoked to mind by the encounter of those minds in that place. The major character of the piece, Merian Validus, is, among other things, a bell-ringer of the Cathedral, a denizen of its highest tower -- as are in reality a group of the girls of NCS. She is an Esmeralda performing the role of Quasimodo. After reading this, think of that the next time you land at Reagan National Airport and catch your cab, looking right at the Cathedral as you speed north into the City. (shrink)

In an important and widely cited paper, Zerilli, Knott, Maclaurin, and Gavaghan (2019) argue that opaque AI decision makers are at least as transparent as human decision makers and therefore the concern that opaque AI is not sufficiently transparent is mistaken. I argue that the concern about opaque AI should not be understood as the concern that such AI fails to be transparent in a way that humans are transparent. Rather, the concern is that the way in which opaque AI (...) is opaque is very different than the way in which humans are opaque. What matters is the degree to which the opaque processes of a class of decision makers are stable, uniform, and safe. The degree to which such processes have these features in humans is higher than the degree to which such processes have these features in opaque AI. And therefore we should require AI to be more transparent than humans. (shrink)

It is often assumed that all lucky events are significant. The thought is that a chancy event such as winning the lottery is lucky for you in part because it affects your interests or well-being. But whether you win an Absurdist Raffle in which there are no prizes, is, intuitively, not a matter of luck. This is because this event—even if chancy—is not significant for any subject. However, a few philosophers have recently claimed not only that luck does not necessarily (...) involve a significance condition but that we should not view luck involving claims in terms of significance. After reviewing the literature on this topic, I argue that lucky events are significant. A significance condition is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of luck: practical, epistemic, and moral. All lucky events are significant and chancy, but they can be significant for subjects in different ways. For example, an event is epistemically lucky for you if it is epistemically significant and chancy, but such events need not affect your practical interests or moral standing. Furthermore, I argue that events that are chancy but not significant should be thought of in terms of chance and not luck. (shrink)

Aims The purpose of this literature review was to explore the psychosocial implications of long-term survival for people affected by cancer by systematically examining published research evidence. Key findings 283 abstracts of papers were retrieved and checked and 33 studies relating to the implications of long-term survival subjected to detailed scrutiny. This review suggests that the majority of long-term cancer survivors cope well and enjoy good QoL. However, there are areas of concern which warrant attention. Whilst this review did not (...) set out to review physical problems experienced in the long-term, long-term physical consequences of cancer and its treatment were associated with poorer QoL and more psychological distress and sexual problems. Other long term concerns included anxiety regarding recurrence, financial difficulties and reduced social and emotional support. Long term survivors of lung, head and neck cancers appear particularly vulnerable to long term problems although there were few studies involving people with these cancers in this review. A number of limitations in the current evidence base were highlighted. Little research was conducted in the UK and raises questions as to the relevance of the findings for a different environment or culture where patients may have different attitudes to cancer survival and receive different treatments. Also, when looking at practical issues for long-term survivors such as ability to obtain insurance, or employment matters, then country-specific factors will be important. (shrink)