TREACHERY: Tolstoy, Nightingale and Twain

In April 1910, Comet Halley lighted the heavens. Three famous authors died that year.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote “War and Peace” (1869) on the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). “The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.”

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was the founder of modern nursing and witnessed the horrors of the Crimean War (1853-1856). She was saddened by incompetent leadership. Famous is the military disaster in “Charge of the Light Brigade” (Tennyson, 1854).

Mark Twain (1835-1910) wrote, “There is no good government at all and none possible.” “Who are the oppressed? The many: The nations of the earth; the valuable; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.”

How would the three have reacted if they had lived to have witnessed the global conflict of World War I (1914-1918) and its “sequel,” World War II (1939-1945)?

Currently we get concerned when we hear, “they are crazy back in Washington.” Perhaps that is the polite way to say that many political leaders may be sociopaths, psychopaths or extreme narcissists?

Unlike the 1910 Comet, modern astronomy software predicts comet, constellation and planet positions. It is like a “Gospel of the Heavens!”

Fascinating are the intersections of the total eclipses of 2017 and April 2024 with the partial eclipse of 2023. They form the Ancient Hebrew “Alef” and “Taw” (cross) of Prophet Ezekiel’s time (570 B.C.); or “the first and the last” — said of CHRIST!

There is Hope! “The heavens declare the glory of GOD…” (Psalm 19).

JIM PEARL, geologist

Hayden