A Little Text on Violence and Love

My dear reader, let us sit for a moment, perhaps by a window that faces north, where the light is grey but honest. I’ve been reading my Anna Akhmatova again. Not the young, turbaned beauty of the Silver Age, but the later one: the woman who stood in freezing lines outside Leningrad’s prisons, a scarf pulled tight, her son taken, her husband shot. The woman who wrote; I learned to speak in a different way, / from the rattle of wheels, from the whisper of stones. What she longed for, above all, was not victory, not revenge, not even justice as the world defines it. She longed for peace. Not the peace of treaties or the peace of exhaustion, but a living, breathing quiet. A domestic silence. A hand on a child’s head. A room where a poem could finish itself without being interrupted by a knock at the door at 3 a.m.

 

And yet, here we are, a whole century later, and we have not moved toward that room. We have run from it, into the fray of more totalitarian control and more wars. Let me ask you: when was the last time you felt the world run on love? Truly. Not on the performance of love, the hashtags, the solidarity posts, the corporate rainbows in June, but on the deep, inconvenient, slow-burning fuel of caritas? The kind that forgives before it is asked? The kind that builds a school instead of a drone?

Turn on the news for thirty seconds any given day. What is the rhythm of the reports? Explosions. Sanctions. Algorithms that feed on your outrage. A political leader screaming into a microphone about “strength.” Another quietly authorizing the shipment of cluster munitions. And in your own life? Your attention; that precious, vanishing thing, sold to politicians that thrive on your fear. We call this “democracy.” Akhmatova would have called it a new form of the old hunger.

We are living, let us be blunt, on the power of violence. Not always the visible violence of tanks and trenches, though that too, but the violence of cynicism disguised as realism. The violence of believing that love is naïve. The violence of a digital economy that turns your empathy into a click. The violence of a society that equates peace with boredom, and war with meaning.

Akhmatova wrote in Requiem:The stars of death stood above us, change the name of the place below the stars, to any name. Any place and any name below the stars today. The stars are still looking down on death, the boots iron. Only now they are shinier, quieter, sometimes even made of data and algorithms. We have perfected the art of destroying while appearing reasonable. We have made a whole theology of “power.” And love? Love is for poems, for children, for Sundays, not for geopolitics, not for the stock exchange, not for the comment sections on the social media.

But here is the ache Akhmatova leaves us with. She never stopped believing that peace was possible. Not because she was foolish; God knows Anna saw more than we will ever see, lived more pain than most, but because she understood that violence is a habit, not a law of nature. And habits can be broken. Slowly. Painfully. Word by word. But ultimately they can be broken.

Visibel in her poem The Muse:When I wake up, I remember / that this is not a dream, but reality, / and I smile at the dawn. That smile was not surrender. It was the stubborn, nearly absurd choice to keep loving a world that had tortured her. That, dear reader, is the only power that can ever unseat violence. Not more violence. Not the cold arithmetic of deterrence. But the ridiculous, radiant, utterly unprofitable decision to act as if love were already stronger.

So what are we to do, you and I, in this little conundrum? Nothing grand. Nothing heroic. Perhaps just this: refuse to let violence define the grammar of your day. Speak softly. Wait in line without rage. Read a poem aloud; yes, even Akhmatova’s, and let its longing sit in the room with you. Listen to the lyrics of a song, not just the rhythm. That longing is not weakness. It is the memory of what we were supposed to become. The world runs on violence now. But a world does not have to run. It can also walk, it can stroll along. It can also stop. It can also, if we are very brave, whisper: Not another step towards the war abyss.