The Unclad Soul

In her searing memoir, “Hope Against Hope,” Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, “I decided it is better to scream.” Then she wrote, “Silence is the real crime against humanity.” She knew something about pain, horror, death. Her husband, a gifted poet, suffered endless persecution under Stalin. He died on his way to the Siberian gulag, humiliated and alone in the cold. She tells his story of sorrow in her memoir. After this week’s school murders in Santa Fe, Texas, even screaming seems useless. And though silence, too, is no solution, and worse, very well a crime in the face of so much bloodshed, one is nevertheless left in feelings of stone silence. What else can be said? We’re all tired of the empty religious jumble. Prayers and accepting God’s Will and all of that. Doesn’t work for me. It blasphemes anyone’s true faith. Our politicians have lost all sense of reality. They live in some cocoon of their own making, hiding from these horrific, senseless, obscene killings. Th