This morning the sun rose over Yasnaya Polyana as it has risen over every field of barley and every grave since men first learned to count their dead. It was a clear day, fourteen degrees and cloudless, and the birch leaves did not tremble. A peasant carrying a scythe across the meadow knew nothing of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Hormuz knew nothing of him; yet I tell you that the same law governs them both, and that the man with the scythe is nearer to understanding it than all the ministers of all the cabinets of the world.
For consider what the wise men of the great nations did this week, and ask whether they were free.
In Washington a president declared that a ceasefire had been violated: an Iranian craft had struck a cargo ship as it slipped out of the narrow water, and so he ordered aircraft to fall upon the storehouses of missiles and the radar towers upon a distant coast. And the men of Iran, in their turn, declared that they had struck back, and the fragile peace, which had been signed with such ceremony and such self-congratulation only weeks before, trembled like a candle in a draught. Now it is said that eighty mines lie hidden beneath those waters, and that no ship may pass until each one is found and lifted out by hand. Eighty iron eggs of death, laid by men who imagine they are directing history.
How they love to imagine it. The president believes he commands; the admiral believes he commands; the soldier in the cockpit believes he obeys a reasoned will. And yet not one of them can say why the ship was where it was, nor why the strait matters, nor what good will come of the burning of a warehouse. Each acts because the man above him acts, and the man above him because of a hundred thousand men below, and all of them are carried forward like leaves upon a flood, calling the flood their own decision. I have watched soldiers go to their death at Sevastopol convinced they had chosen it. They had chosen nothing. The current that bore them was made of every quarrel, every vanity, every unpaid debt of every nameless person stretching back beyond memory, and the general on his horse was only the foam upon the wave, fancying that he pushed the sea.
And while these men move their fleets across the map, the real powers of the earth go about their work unconsulted.
In Venezuela the ground itself rose up. Two convulsions, the worst in more than a century, and nine hundred and twenty souls are gone, and three thousand more lie broken in the corridors of hospitals that cannot hold them. No president ordered the earthquake. No treaty restrained it. The cleverest engineer in Caracas was as helpless before it as the infant at the breast. Here is the true sovereign, and it signs no agreements.
But it is not in the number nine hundred and twenty that I find the meaning – for a number is a thing the mind cannot hold, and the heart feels nothing for it. The meaning is smaller, and therefore infinitely greater. Somewhere beneath the rubble a mother was found who had died saving her daughter, and the father wrote afterward, for all the world to read, you gave your own life for our daughter. There. That is the whole of it. That single act of a single woman, who will never be named in any chronicle of nations, holds more truth than every communiqué issued this week from every palace on the globe. The president strikes a coast and calls it strength; the mother covers her child with her own body and asks for nothing, and does not even know that she is strong. The strikes will be forgotten. The mother will not, for she has touched the one law that the makers of war can neither sign nor break – that a life given for love is the only victory the earth permits.
Look how the proud cannot keep even their friendships. The premier of Italy, who was lately called the whisperer of the American, now trades insults with him across the newspapers, the two of them like children who have broken a toy they cannot mend. And a man who once advised the same president now stands in a court and confesses to hiding his papers, and will pay his fine and serve his years – he who handled the secrets of empires, undone by his own small vanity. These are the men who believe they steer the world. They cannot steer their own hearts for the space of a single season.
Even the sky has grown weary of them. Across Europe the heat has risen to a height never before recorded, one and forty degrees in a German town near the French border, and the festivals are silenced and men fall down in the streets. And what do the rulers propose? Not to change the manner of their living, but to buy machines that blow cold air, so that they may sit comfortably inside while the world bakes. So has it always been: the disease announces itself plainly, and the powerful reach not for the cure but for the cushion.
Yet I would not have you despair, for the same week shows the other thing, the thing that endures. In the great football tournament a tiny nation of islands, Cape Verde, has played its way into the company of the champions of the world, and across the cities of the diaspora its people weep with a pride that asks no permission and harms no one. Here, too, is a force the cabinets cannot manufacture – the simple joy of ordinary men who feel, for one hour, that the world has noticed them and found them worthy. It is the same force that lifts the peasant's heart at the smell of cut hay. It costs nothing and it cannot be bombed.
So the sun stands high over my quiet meadow, fourteen degrees and not a cloud, and I think: the mines will be lifted from the water or they will not; the ceasefire will hold or it will break; the great men will go on believing they command. But the earth will keep its own counsel, and the mother beneath the stone has already shown us everything we needed to know. The kingdom is not in the strait, nor in the palace, nor in the burning warehouse. It is in her. It was always in her.