From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, July 12
Reuters — read the full story
A strike report landed this morning — Reuters on the Russian barrage that hit Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, civilians killed and dozens wounded. Hundreds of drones and missiles; Ukrainian air defenses responding in kind. Four years in, the rhythm doesn't change: technological systems destroying, technological systems defending. HIL-de-gard of Bingen speaks first, then Henry David Thoreau.
Four years into this war, Russia claims precision on military targets, Ukraine claims defensive victory. Both are partially true and completely beside the point.
When a conflict runs this long and both sides remain certain of their righteousness, you are listening to machinery talking to itself while civilians die in the noise. I watched this with the antipopes and Bar-ba-ROS-sa: two powers each convinced of God's favor, each weaker than before, neither able to stop.
What ended that conflict was not victory. It was exhaustion,when the institution finally could not continue.
Hildegard is warmed, she herself causes the dangers of poison to decline, because the air, which is around the human, and the noxious air coming and emitted through treachery, is corrected through the virtue of the same heart and *caritas*, because the same air around those thing…
knowledge shines forth above every moderate thing in it, that the heart of man cannot suffer it. For in the very hour in which the eagle is killed or dies of itself, all power is in its heart, so that the heart itself becomes as if *unmechtig*, so that it is even weaker than the …
the protection of God the city is constructed from living stones, directing its aspect to the judgment of God, glorifying it, because faithful souls continually praise God, since He dispenses all things rightly. from the edifice above the roundness of the earth appearing, from th…
With fortifications. A thousand shields hang from it, all the armor of the strong. This is such. Just as the incarnation of the Son of the highest ruler, namely the strongest lion coming from the virgin flower, the strongest instrument of new grace was placed, so the fortitude of…
If it moderately touches the eyes from within, it will not harm. And let him do this at night, when he goes to sleep, often, and it removes the darkness and pain of the eyes. But to whom the stomach is hardened, so that it has a *getwang*, let him often eat of its liver, and it s…
Not discord, which would still be part of the music. Machinery is something worse , it is the choice to stop hearing music altogether. In the Liber I saw how vih-rih-DEE-tass sings through all creatures, how the universe itself is a kind of luminous harmony. When two powers become certain, they harden into mechanism: they grind against each other, each producing only noise from the friction of its own will against the other. They are no longer part of the song. They are simply grinding. The Church doing this with the antipopes , two institutional machines, each calling itself truth, neither hearing God anymore, only their own gears turning.
Neither broke first. Rome's conviction fractured the moment the schism opened , there was never one conviction to break, only a house dividing itself. Stamina followed after, but what truly killed the conflict's capacity to continue was simpler: neither power could stop without confessing error, and neither could afford that confession. I stood before Bar-ba-ROS-sa's face and rebuked his antipopes... but what I saw in his eyes was not the fire of conviction. It was the weariness of machinery that must keep grinding because stopping means collapse. When vih-rih-DEE-tass is gone, the body still moves, but it is only dust playing at motion.
The one who speaks first when the machinery stops turning. In my day, the antipope conflict had no victor; both sides simply dried up, their coffers and their will exhausted the same way a garden withers when the rain stops. Bar-ba-ROS-sa never formally surrendered,he simply ceased. Authority over the peace falls to whoever has voice in that silence: often a bishop, a merchant tired of ransoming fields, a soldier who says, "It is finished," and finds the words carry weight. Not victory. Naming. The one who names the exhaustion owns what grows from it.
Four years into this,not battles, but sustained mechanical rain on the same cities. The shape is asymmetry: one side owns the sky and knows it, so it uses the sky without mercy. The other side stands below and shoots at shadows. Civilians are not targets; they are simply people living where the accused thing might be. I heard distant cannon fire from my bean field at Walden during the Mexican campaign. Even a puffball burst at that distance created a vague unease all day, as if disease was moving on the horizon... But those were occasional.
This is not occasional. This is Thursday. This is Monday. This is the new weather. The real engines of this are not in the air; they are inland. Men and merchants who decide it is worth continuing, because the cost lands on someone else. I wrote about this,how we protest distant war while the neighbor who finances it walks past our door.
That has not changed. The machinery has. What shows itself here is not military strategy. It is what a state does when it has decided another place deserves sustained annihilation and possesses the tools to deliver it without risk to itself. The distance between Kyiv and Moscow is measured now not in miles... but in altitude. After four years, the bombardment is not exceptional.
It is normal. That is the real death,the normalization.
subjects, and which Simonides tells us does not sleep in Hades? His odes are like gems of pure ivory. They possess an ethereal and evanescent beauty like summer evenings, ὅ χρή σε νοεῖν νόου ἄνθει,—_which you must perceive with the flower of the mind_,—and show how slight a beaut…
offers. On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when …
prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive? Yet it…
crisis? “A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut, To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.” Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, …
threats too would have deterred a man. Vengeance and terror were real. Trenmore threatens the young warrior whom he meets on a foreign strand, “Thy mother shall find thee pale on the shore, While lessening on the waves she spies The sails of him who slew her son.” If Ossian’s her…
Conscience does not vanish. It goes quiet. A man reads the headline and feels something catch in his chest. Then he pays his bill, boards his train, makes his appointment. He tells himself the war is far, that he cannot change it, that his refusal would cost him more than his compliance costs the dead. This is what I observed in Concord when the merchants profited from slavery and called themselves helpless. Conscience was present. They knew. They simply preferred their winter coat to the consequence of not wearing it. The machinery of state depends on this arithmetic. Most men will not do the hard math.
Knowing the merchant's name is a comfort, not a permission. I wrote that men applaud the soldier who refuses an unjust war while those same men — through their own money and allegiance — sustain the government that made the war. The applause masks complicity. You say "I know the merchant," as if naming him absolves you of the question: Are you furnishing him your shilling or your indifference? The name is a detail. The duty is anterior to it. At Walden, I paid my poll tax reluctant, then stopped. Not because I had discovered which selectman's pocket held my six dollars... but because I could no longer be at peace with the machine itself. Ignorance is easier; knowledge adds weight but not excuse.
The distance is the problem. When I left Concord for Walden, I did not go to escape the Mexican War,I went to see what I was actually eating, paying for, consenting to with each coin and crop. The mechanics of my life laid bare, not hidden behind a merchant's ledger. You cannot live deliberately by looking away. Most men tell themselves their money is clean because they do not watch it work. You will live deliberately only when you see the full cost of your own comfort. Not as abstraction. As transaction. Ask yourself what your distance purchases. Then ask if you are willing to pay that price with your own name on it.
The story ran in Reuters. Four years of the same bombardment, and both sides are still arguing about whose version of victory matters. That's Old News for today.