Wonderstruck by Dr. Zhivago

Do we all still remember that as recently as ten years ago we were still trying to rather forcibly export democracy to the Middle East? So strange that so many of the very souls that were so gung-ho about the effort are now so very eager to abandon our own democratic institutions in favor of mob rule and “tribunals.”

I suppose that the only way to truly appreciate the effect a work of art has had on oneself is to revisit it after 50-some years. I first saw Dr. Zhivago when I was around 6 years old. The film opens with the orphaning of Yuri Zhivago at about 4 years old, and I distinctly remember identifying with his disorientation, his fascination with wind, snow, blowing leaves, ice, branches tapping at the window in the night, and his awareness of both the bleakness and the beauty of the world. That both Yuri and I became poets is not terribly surprising.

I also grew up with an LP of Maurice Jarre’s evocative soundtrack for the film. His use of many clanging cymbals in the context of musical dissonance made clear to me what the Apostle Paul talked about in I Corinthians 13.

I am quite sure that the romance, in which Yuri and Larissa Antipova repeatedly cross paths in an ill-fated destiny, also influenced my tendency to fall in love with girls and women and then keep having them re-enter my life years and decades later.

But the biggest impression the film made was its depiction of life in post-revolution Russia. Trading one set of blackguards for another did not seem like a terribly good bargain to my young mind — which has ever since appreciated the stability of an imperfect union over the shifting sands of rudderless chaos. The worst thing in the world, it seemed, would be to have some arbitrary bunch of yahoos deciding quite violently, and with prejudice, who are “enemies of the people” and dispensing justice accordingly. And with the cast of goons changing on a weekly or monthly basis. Sheesh.

Sorry, but as a citizen, I’m sticking with due process, rights of representation and appeal, and constitutional law and order. If I don’t like the way our system works, I will do what I can to exercise my right to vote and legislate my way out the mess — and trust in the system to self-correct, which it is very much designed to do every two or four years.

And as a pastor… well, I’m naturally still convinced that love triumphs over evil — that repaying evil with more evil is the worst possible choice. I’m still choosing to follow the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount over shrill, alarmist, and anonymous voices that are most definitely “clanging cymbals.”

If you find yourself in need of love in the coming days or weeks, you know where to find me. I’ll be sheltering in my own personal Varykino ice palace with my own personal Lara, determined to love our way through whatever days we might have left. Like Yuri and Lara, we know what we stand for, and we aren’t budging.

It’s beautiful.

Related posts:

Today Tesla is the undisputed champion in electric vehicles, producing over half a million automobiles in 2020. That’s huge progress for a company producing only a few hundred cars annually five…

Written by Tyler Pearson. Tyler is a fourth year graduate student in Danna Freedman’s group at Northwestern University. ChemRxiv is proud to sponsor the 2019 Organometallics Gordon Research Seminar &…

I grew up never thinking about, observing, or participating in sports. I hated gym class, couldn’t play tennis, never imagined skiing, and didn’t learn to swim until I was an adult. Such activities…