Posted on 06/09/2007 2:21:41 PM PDT by AlbionGirl
For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners.1 Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous story of the madman who runs into the marketplace declaring that “Gott ist tot,” and in sociology as the “secularization thesis,” it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear.2 As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion’s premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.3 Hence, somewhere in the long run — perhaps even the very long run; Nietzsche himself predicted it would take “hundreds and hundreds” of years for the “news” to reach everyone — religion, or more specifically the Christianity so long dominant on the Continent, will die out.
As everybody also knows, much about the current scene would seem to clinch the point, at least in Western Europe. Elderly altar servers in childless churches attended by mere handfuls of pensioners; tourist throngs in Notre Dame and other cathedrals circling ever-emptier pews roped off for worshippers; former abbeys and convents and monasteries remade into luxury hotels and sybaritic spas; empty churches here and there shuttered for decades and then re-made into discos — even into a mosque or two. Hardly a day passes without details like these issuing from the Continent’s post-Christian front.4 If God were to be dead in the Nietzschean sense, one suspects that the wake would look a lot like this.
It’s impact at the end of the book is incredible, as (most) everything preceeding it are pictures and book excerpts documenting his time in the Soviet gulags.
I goofed up! I misspelled "Pictorial". I'm looking at my copy right now, and that's definitely the title on the cover (Noonday Press, ISBN: 0-374-51192-6, 1974 first printing). When spelled correctly, I found used copies cheap on Amazon.com. Sorry for the messup!
There's also a different copy on eBay right now whose cover reads A Pictorial Record. This other version can also be used on Amazon. Looks like it was printed by a different publisher, and with 8 additional pages(?).
My version's cover is identical to the Record cover on eBay, except for that one word, and mine also includes the Noonday catalog # & price at the bottom right corner of the cover.
My favorites are: the one of him huddling in his prison garb (around page 35), the closeup of his face (page 47), and the one of him holding his children(?) on page 87, that immediately precedes the poem. I can never complain about my own life, after seeing what this man went through in his.
I'm very glad you're pleased with the book (and glad that you found a copy). It's one of my favorite books among my entire personal library, and one that I never tire of sharing with friends.
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