According to a Scottish legend, Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, after a disastrous first year on the throne, took shelter from his pursuers in a cave. Dejected and alone, he watched a spider trying desperately to climb up to its web, repeatedly failing to reach its goal, falling in a gust of wind each time, but never giving up its struggle, until, at last, it reached the web. Bruce took such inspiration from its success that he resolved to continue his campaign against the English, which resulted in his victory against them at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. The spider presumably never knew the effect of its example, but historians today regard the story as probably apocryphal. Nevertheless, there exist several documented accounts of the inspirational value of such trifles, whose providential outcomes for their witnesses also seemed unlikely at the time. As wartime Lancaster bomber pilot Les Morrison observed in his memoir Of Luck and War, “it’s the silly things that attract attention.”
The Russian writer, dissident, and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1917-2008) was an outspoken critic of communism in what was then called the Soviet Union, and was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag for eight years for critical comments he made of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in a private letter to a friend. His later writings, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago, were based on the ill treatment he and countless other innocent victims of Soviet repression suffered as a result of their alleged crimes. Disillusioned with the false promises of an allegedly ‘classless’ society, he became a committed Christian, and until his death years after his release, he continued to point out to authorities the yawning disparity between the promise of official propaganda in his native land and the chilling reality of life in Russia. Yet both he and other victims of injustice have testified in print to moments of revelation that brought hope to them in their silent suffering.
In a ‘prose poem’ called ‘The Elm Log,’ the author provides readers with a short personal narrative of an epiphany that occurred to him and his unnamed workmates when they came across an elm log from a tree they had chopped down the year before. Most of the logs from the downed tree, he tells us, were “thrown onto barges and wagons,” but one remained at their feet. It had not given up the struggle for life. “A fresh green shoot had sprouted from it with promise of a thick, leafy branch, or even a whole new elm tree.” The men “placed the log on the sawing-horse, as though on an executioner’s block, but we could not bring ourselves to bite into it with our saw. How could we? That log,” he says, “cherished life as dearly as we did; indeed, its urge to live was even stronger than ours.” The example of the persistence of a life-giving natural force in the shadow of death was inspiration enough for him to recall it with astonishment and reverence years later.
