Walls Apart and Within

As the 20th Anniversary of (most) of the Berlin Wall's destruction approaches, who remembers why it was even built? Was it for protection or imprisonment?

Ask your children (if you have any) and see how much they know.
You may be surprised (or not, hopefully).

But walls are part of life, too. There are cell and arterial walls and the infamous blood brain barrier. Each works in its own sure, yet mysterious way to keep us alive.

Cell physiology

There are also the "walls" of separation of powers and between church and state (and sometimes, it seems, these, in particular, have very little meaning or reality).

There is finally, the wall between Man and God.

Solzhenitsyn wrote about that, too, though less overtly than some, since he was after all is said about him "of the intelligentsia," albeit a prisoner of conscience, too.

In Prussian Nights, his droning epic poem (not one of his best), he touches briefly upon the subject in an obtuse reference to Chavarka (or Cārvāka), which, unknown to most was/is a sophisticated, mostly defunct movement or line of thought within Indian philosophy that assumed "various forms of philosophical skepticism and religious indifference."

Also referred to (by others) as lokayata, in brief, it was a materialistic and atheistic school of thought.

"In ancient India, there were broadly three schools of philosophical thought -- Vedanta, Sankhya and Lokayata. Vedanta is theistic & spiritual, Sankhya and Lokayata are atheistic & materialistic."

And supposedly, according to Indian sources (e.g., this irritating ad-infested one), "what little we know today about the latter two schools are mostly from derogatory and dismissive references to these in the Vedanta literature."

That itself is surely debatable as "defunct" is still defunct.

Newsweek, not my favorite publication, seems to be looking at The Berlin Wall, too, as posted yesterday ( on the web) in an upcoming issue noting:

"The collapse of the 3.7-meter-tall monster in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1989, did bring about—or, more accurately, complete—a momentous transformation of the Old Continent. For the past 2,000 years, Europe had been the source of the best and the worst in human history. It invented practically everything that matters: from Greek philosophy to Roman law, from the Renaissance to the fax machine, from Brunelleschi to Bauhaus. But this was also where the world's deadliest wars erupted, killing tens of millions. It was in Europe that the most murderous ideologies were invented: communism, fascism, and Nazism, complete with the Gulag, the Gestapo, and Auschwitz."

While elsewhere, in La La Land (Los Angeles, of course)the Irony Curtain is being constructed or re-constructed (depending on your view of irony, iron and/or curtains).

And walls.
So many and so high (often) are the walls.

Lord, help deliver us from our less desirable, less iron, and even less ironic walls . . .