Nothing Beside Remains
On Testimony and the Fall of Empire
I’ve been sitting here with Mary Oliver’s piece for a few days. That final line kept gnawing at me: “the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.”
That is the question. Oliver gives us the prophecy. Rilke makes it a realization. But what is the answer? How do we actually live when we have discovered our community has a heart that is small, and hard, and full of meanness?
I needed to talk to someone. Someone who would not hold back. Someone who would insist on calling things by their proper names, especially when those names are ugly. Someone who wouldn’t pander to me or give me one word answers. I needed someone who hadn’t been compromised by the events of the past ten years and wouldn’t turn the discussion into us versus them.
So I conjured Christopher Hitchens.
Not the man himself. He was spared the horrors of the last few years. He never saw us branded as ‘radical left scum.’ But the Hitchens who lives in my head remains as an intellectual sparring partner. A ghost to look at our current moment and point out truths that make me squirm.
What follows is that conversation. A “Liberal Scum” and a dead polemicist, working through Oliver’s prophecy and Rilke’s question, searching for something that might pass for an answer.
Mary Oliver (from Red Bird, 2008)
We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
I. The Sneer of Cold Command
Liberal Scum: I keep coming back to that opening. “We will be known as a culture that feared death…” And then that final image “the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.”
When Oliver published this in 2008 — financial crisis, dying days of Bush, it meant something. But now? It reads like prophecy. What she diagnosed then has metastasized. The heart hasn’t changed. It just stopped pretending.
Her prose is biting. Direct. It cuts through all the bullshit. The plain indictment. The verdict. Everything else is just evidence.
And that line: “our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart.” That burns through every excuse we make, every rationalization. It just says: No. This is what we wanted. We built the world to match our desires. And our desires were small.
Did Rilke ever write something like this? He watched his world collapse too. The empire dissolved. World War I. That whole Belle Époque world he’d lived in — just gone.
Hitchens: Oliver’s diagnosis has the virtue of being perfectly accurate and utterly inadequate at the same time. Yes, the heart is “small, and hard, and full of meanness.” But my dear fellow, when wasn’t it? Show me the golden age when the American empire had a generous heart and I’ll show you someone who’s been drinking the Kool-Aid. And not metaphorically.
But you ask about Rilke. Good. At least you’re reaching for someone who didn’t console himself with democratic pieties while the world burned. Rilke wasn’t a prophet standing outside the temple. He was a minor aristocrat of the spirit watching his entire civilization reveal itself to have been a confidence trick all along.
The Duino Elegies took him ten years to finish because he was paralyzed by the revelation that all the beauty and culture he’d devoted his life to was irrelevant to the real business of European civilization. Which turned out to be mechanized slaughter on an industrial scale.
His question isn’t philosophical hand-wringing. It is the sound of a man realizing he’d been worshiping at a temple built on a mass grave.
Coroner’s report from Oliver; suicide note from Rilke. Both have their uses.
II. Ye Mighty, and Despair
Liberal Scum: Rilke nails it. He writes the response to Mary Oliver 70 years before she asks the question.
We all see it now. Oliver was right. But none of us know what to DO with that. And Rilke’s response, that existential scream, we don’t know how to live with that level of dread. Even as we come face to face with it.
I’m trying to work through it:
- A is Mary Oliver. The diagnosis.
- B is Rilke. The existential scream.
- C is the missing piece. The answer to Rilke.
I don’t have C yet. That’s what I am trying to dig out. It seems really bleak and honestly, that kind of darkness seems like something you were always more comfortable wrestling with.
Hitchens: A, B, C. Very neat. I approve of the structure even if I suspect the answer won’t be nearly as tidy.
Because that is what you are describing. Not merely injustice. Injustice is banal. It is everywhere. It is the human condition. You are describing a culture that has made a virtue of cruelty and a vice of compassion. That is not politics. That is pathology.
Those are rather different problems.
III. Two Vast and Trunkless Legs
Liberal Scum: I’m paralyzed because I’m standing in a minefield where the foundation of Western Civilization is upside down. That’s Rilke’s question, but now it’s everywhere, all the time.
Human decency is the mark of the beast now. Meanwhile? Murder’s fine. Pedophilia’s negotiable. Insurrection’s patriotic. As long as it serves the cause.
We expected democracy and institutions to protect those values. To do the work for us. You wake up in a world you thought was built on kindness, only to discover your community has a heart that is small, and hard, and full of meanness.
When I tell people there are areas of rural America with no emergency care because of policy decisions, and they say “so what?” — that’s not politics. That’s my existence being threatened. That’s the inversion.
Hitchens: Ah, there it is. “We expected our democracy and our institutions to do the work for us.”
This is where I must be cruel. That expectation was always a fantasy. A rather bourgeois one at that. Democracy was never going to save you from this. Democracy is simply the system whereby the majority gets to express its will. If that will is vicious, small-minded, and mean-well, that is democracy working exactly as advertised.
The American experiment was never about creating a society of virtuous citizens. Read your Federalist Papers. It was about creating a system that could function despite the fact that most people are venal, short-sighted, and self-interested. The whole architecture, checks and balances, separation of powers, is built on the assumption that people are bastards and need to be prevented from acting on their worst impulses.
But here is what Madison and Hamilton didn’t count on. What happens when the people embrace their worst impulses? When they celebrate cruelty? When ‘so what? I’m going to get mine’ isn’t just an answer, but a creed?
Your neighbors aren’t aberrations. They aren’t duped. They aren’t victims of “false consciousness” or whatever Marxist consolation you want to offer yourself. They are telling you exactly who they are. They are saying “so what?” because they genuinely do not care.
The question is: what do you do when you realize you are living among people who fundamentally do not share your basic moral intuitions?
That isn’t anxiety. That is the vertigo of discovering you have been speaking a language nobody else understands.
IV. The Hand That Mocked Them
Liberal Scum: I think you are missing the point. Or maybe I am. I don’t even know what I am paralyzed from doing. I am completely powerless. And it is frustrating.
I watch people I’ve known for years, people who return lost wallets and coach Little League, nod along to the most horrific things. It turns out they would trade the entire Bill of Rights for cheaper gas and the assurance that they stay on top of the pecking order.
The complete disconnection, that’s what breaks me. They quote the Gospels on Sunday and cheer for the cages on Tuesday. That “get mine” creed you mentioned? It has swallowed them whole. They are angry, violent, and consumed by hate for anyone not in their tribe. And worst of all they can’t see it. You explain it and they look at you like you’re crazy or shout whatabout both sides?
Hitchens: No. I wasn’t missing your point. I was trying to avoid it because it is so bloody depressing.
You have just discovered what every serious person eventually discovers. Individual virtue is impotent against mass psychosis.
The vicious cycle you describe where more injustice leads to more normalization isn’t a bug in the system. That is how fascism works. And I use that word precisely. Fascism is what happens when a significant portion of the population decides that cruelty and dominance are more important than justice or truth.
Once that decision is made there is no arguing people out of it. There is no amount of community organizing that will change it.
Because here is the truly unbearable part. They are happy this way. The cruelty is the point. The “so what?” isn’t indifference. To them, it is winning.
So when you ask what you are paralyzed from doing? You are paralyzed from the thing you most want to do. You want to make it stop.
You can’t. The engine dwarfs you. It is speeding up. And your neighbors? They are enjoying the ride.
That isn’t confusion you feel. That is clarity. And clarity, I am afraid, proves utterly fucking useless.
V. Round the Decay
Liberal Scum: I try to do the Epictetus thing. I really do.
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I go through the motions: Focus on what you can control. Tend your garden. Keep your circle small and your virtues high. Love your neighbor, protect your family, stand up for what you believe in, and be a good example.
But God, it feels empty. Like reciting nursery rhymes in a burning building.
And don’t get me started on the people who think the solution is just to “vote harder.” I honestly don’t know what world they are living in. Civilization is buckling under its own weight and they think the answer is waiting patiently for the next Tuesday in November?
I look at the reality. It isn’t a policy dispute anymore. It is paramilitaries kicking down doors. It is citizens being executed in the street for speaking. It is the leadership at the very top openly debating war crimes like they are menu options.
Hitchens: Precisely. You are describing terminal rot. Look at the wreckage, man.
When the state murders citizens in their homes and the President treats allies like hostile acquisitions, you are not watching the “death throes” of a democracy. That is the birth cry of a fascist oligarchy.
Stop using the future tense. The transition has already happened. We all need to update our vocabulary. The fact that the media has joined the fascist bandwagon makes that harder, I’ll admit.
The “get out the vote” crowd? They are bringing a ballot box to a knife fight.
And the Stoics? They are bringing a garden trowel.
“Focus on what you can control” is fine advice for a bad marriage. It is suicide in a police state. When the barbarians are kicking down the doors of private homes, retreating to your “inner citadel” isn’t wisdom. It is capitulation.
It isn’t that Stoicism is wrong. It is that it relies on a hidden order that you no longer believe exists. That is why it rings hollow.
It is a placebo administered to a corpse.
VI. Nothing Beside Remains
Liberal Scum: You’re right. It feels like a parlor trick when the house is burning down. Like grabbing the garden hose for a 5-alarm fire.
What’s the right response? I’ve got nothing. I’m no closer to putting out the fire. I can’t even see through the smoke anymore. I don’t care why it is here. I want to know how to live my life with dignity and purpose.
Hitchens: Now we are getting somewhere. You have realized the garden hose is useless. Good. Excellent, in fact.
You know what the real problem with Stoicism is? It is too noble. Too dignified. It assumes that the proper response to a degraded world is to maintain your personal virtue in dignified isolation. Very admirable. Very Roman. Also completely inadequate to the present crisis.
Because what you are facing isn’t just personal suffering under an unjust regime. You could handle that. What you are facing is the revelation that the entire social and political structure you thought you lived in was a fiction. The “community” you thought you belonged to-the one bound together by shared values-that community never existed. Or if it did, it has been replaced. By something tribal, vicious, and stupid.
And here is the truly unbearable part. There is no “enough.” No action sufficient to the scale of what is happening. No response adequate to collective moral collapse.
Marcus Aurelius could retreat to his inner citadel because the citadel meant something. He was an emperor. He had actual power. When he practiced Stoic detachment, he was choosing to limit his own power.
You are not an emperor. You are a citizen of a failing democracy watching it fail in real-time while your neighbors cheer. The “inner citadel” isn’t a sanctuary from power. It is a hiding place from powerlessness.
So what is enough? Nothing. Absolutely nothing is enough. The empire is falling and you can’t stop it. Your community has revealed itself to be monstrous and you can’t fix it.
The question isn’t, “What is enough?” The question is, “What do you do when you accept that nothing is enough?”
That is where we actually are. And it is considerably darker than most people want to go.
VII. The Lone and Level Sands
Liberal Scum: Dark? I think it might not be dark enough for where we are. Here we are, back to Rilke, and it took all this time to clear away the fumes so we can see our reality. Our choices are limited. I know how others have responded.
Remember Montaigne and Stefan Zweig? They faced situations where they attempted to ride out the darkness and survive the destruction of their cultures.
But they were facing trends. This is an ongoing rush to mass destruction in America and it is swallowing the world in its groundswell.
I don’t know how to stay upbeat, constructive.
There is still a community of good people. There are heroes risking it all in the streets, resisting. I want to support them, I’m one of them, I want to believe.
But how can I be forward-thinking when I know there is nothing, not one thing I can do that will make a difference? Nothing I can do will be enough.
I have given my standard philosophical take and you rightly rejected it as inadequate. So now I have to admit: OK, I’m lost and ask, how are you coping?
I mean, am I wrong? Have we run a full circle without coming any closer to C? It feels like I’m even farther off.
Hitchens: How am I coping? My dear fellow, I’m dead. Cancer got me in 2011. So I am coping rather well, all things considered. No Trump presidency to endure, no pandemic, no watching the American experiment collapse in slow motion while the mob applauds. From a certain perspective, my timing was impeccable.
But to your point. Have we run a full circle? No. We have spiraled down to the bedrock. You had to clear away the fumes of “Stoicism” and “civic duty” and “voting harder” to actually see where you are standing.
And you are right about the distinction. “Trend” versus “groundswell.”
Montaigne faced the Wars of Religion. Appalling, vicious, murderous. But he could see them as a storm that would eventually pass. He could retire to his tower, write his essays, and wait for sanity to reassert itself.
Zweig is your cautionary tale. He faced the groundswell. The rise of fascism wasn’t a trend you could wait out. It was a fundamental transformation of civilization itself. And Zweig, decent man that he was, couldn’t bear it. Brazil, 1942, suicide pact with his wife. He looked at what Europe had become and decided he would rather not live to see what came next.
Those are your two options: Montaigne or Zweig. Wait it out or check out.
But here is the answer to your “C.” You ask how to behave when you know nothing will make a difference.
You are conflating two things. “Nothing will make a difference” and “nothing matters.”
Can you stop the groundswell? No. You have no power to do that.
Can you be adequate to the scale of the horror? No. No individual can be.
But can you refuse to participate in the lie? Can you insist on calling things by their proper names? Can you maintain your capacity for moral disgust in a culture that treats disgust as weakness?
Yes. To all of those.
It won’t save the empire. It won’t redeem the culture. But it prevents you from becoming one of the things you despise. And for that community of good people looking for guidance? That isn’t nothing. That is the only thing left.
VIII. From an Antique Land
Liberal Scum: C isn’t a strategy. It isn’t a plan to save the republic or a way to turn back the groundswell.
C is the Testimony.
If A is the Diagnosis (seeing the horror), and B is the Scream (feeling the horror), then C is the Refusal. The refusal to look away. The refusal to say “so what?” The refusal to let the language be corrupted.
It is the decision to be the agent of record. To say: “I saw this. I know what this is. And I will not pretend it is normal.”
It feels… small. But it also feels like the only thing that is actually true.
Hitchens: It feels small because it is small. You feel like one person against a historical tsunami. But do not mistake smallness for insignificance.
Think of the people we actually admire in history. The ones who lived through the dark times. We don’t admire them because they “fixed” it. They usually didn’t. We admire them because they didn’t succumb. They kept the flame of the truth alive when the rest of the world was busy snuffing it out.
You want to help your community? Then you must start with your own integrity. Don’t give them false hope. Don’t give them “get out the vote” platitudes. Give them the dignity of the truth.
Tell them: “Yes, the house is nearly burned down. Yes, the barbarians are running the gates. But we are here. We are awake. And we are not one of them.”
That is C. It isn’t a victory. It is a stance. And right now, it is all you have.
Liberal Scum: Yes, the house is nearly burned down. Yes, the barbarians are running the gates. But we are here. We are awake. And we are not one of them.
Hitchens’ responses channeled through AI, memory and imagination, as he died in December 2011. He would have been 76 years old had he lived to see this conversation. The section titles are drawn from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a poem Hitchens often invoked when discussing the impermanence of empire and the testimony of those who witness its fall.
This dialogue was originally published in Nothing Beside Remains, a newsletter on testimony and the fall of empire. To get these essays in your inbox, subscribe here.
