Saroyan would have been 74 years old today. Death, I think, catches us with our silent or open consent, that is, when our own doubt regarding our life, work, purpose, and behavior confuses us for a moment, and therefore I can't understand in any way, when I have already started to understand a lot of this world and accept many things without understanding, I can neither understand, nor even more, accept the great absence of that person, the absence of a person who had no doubt, for whom life and work were one and the same thing. for whom, like a mountain, blooming, water flowing, light unfolding, living, pondering, working, failing, succeeding, carrying on, being carried away was not care and effort, but a quality of spirit and body, a joy.
I was with him for a couple of hours in 1976 and a couple of days in 1978, and they were the greatest gifts of fortune to me, just as his death was the greatest robbery of my life. In its depth, the literature that understands, accepts and rejects everyone, living and non-living on the face of the earth, which very often was not even literature in the classical sense of the word, but a page caught from the cosmic symphony of human life, even if it is "The Armenian and the Armenian", "The Pomegranate Garden", the song-like piece of "Human Comedy", where a flock of children rushes to destroy old Henderson. the apricot grove and the gardener watching the children from among the trees is just one of the children, his "At least one", "My heart is in the mountains", "The time of your life" have put me and my generation in the most receptive times of our lives in the position of the pilgrim who has reached his Mecca, reached it with tears and unconditional faith and is able to absorb every word, pause, laugh and exclamation of his worship, just like the thirsty ground - the rain... but direct contact did not give us any secret warning about its end. He was eternal on earth, and therefore our joy in his existence was also eternal. like a child who saw a flower in a dream, we would always wake up with some expectation of a light, beautiful, promising day and then realize that the source of our secret joy is Saroyan's presence here in Yerevan or in another place of this world, in Paris, Sofia, California. The cruel coldness of evil and evil rarely, only a couple of times, creeps into its warm, good and fertile valley, as if to testify that the glorious patriarch of that dream valley, that wonderful Saroyanland-Saroyania-Saroyanstan-Saroyank, is not ignorant of the evil that grips the world, the border of his Saroyanland is licked in a couple of places and pushed away, the blissful patriarch of his valley, Wise by birth, he could assimilate his great literary creed at the age of thirteen - "Put aside Edgar Allan Poe and Emerson, their laws are for themselves" - at the beginning of his great creation, he seems to have understood that just as evil destroys life, it will also destroy literature, evil should not be left close to culture - and this is all he tells us all at once that Saroyan himself was a good man and an enemy and an enemy. knew no enmity. It's a fake.
A philosopher who does not recognize enemies and enmity would not so constantly raise the fire of goodness, so would not constantly strive to awaken goodness even in the midst of evil and evil. He had an enemy, and that enemy was his grandiose ambition to control people's destinies, or what is the same, the falsehood that replaces people's lives with truth, the figures and cultures that produced such falsehoods were his enemy, even if they adopted famous names for those canonizations of flawed thoughts or were the birth of famous names themselves, even if they infected the masses with them and took the form of the only universal truth.
He forgave and loved and even honored the weak, the half-hearted, the unfulfilled and the unfulfilled - he disliked, hated Napoleons and Napoleonics, regardless of whether that Napoleon was sitting among a gloriously looking thinker or a gorgeous president of the Women's Aid Society.
In the post-Christian fortunes of the world tomorrow, he attached the first importance to culture, to literature in culture, and to himself in literature, and we must say with him that this is so and we must worry and be angry with him about cultures that encourage national and class discrimination, superman, the nation's world-universal mission, and if it seems to us that the role of culture here is exaggerated, then we must remember that half the world for two thousand years All-encompassing Christianity was the centuries-old experience of mankind, but it came into being through the hands of writers, Matthew, Luke, John, Mark, who were writers, ordinary writers, whose infallibility Leo Tolstoy did not quite believe in and sat down to edit.
With Saroyan, yes, we must beware of narrow-minded, cyclopeanly one-eyed cultures that see only their own national-class interest, and that breed and feed Hitlers-Kemals-Makartis, and Saroyan's achievement was already indisputable as the essence of great literature.