Blowing One’s Horn at Sunset: Self-Assertion, Pride, and the Tragic Logic of the Summing Up

Vladimir Ovsiannikov

I. The Desire to Conclude

There comes a time, near the end of a life or the end of a vocation, when a person feels compelled to impose order on experience. The impulse is ancient: to draw a line under the ledger of living, to render a verdict, to explain oneself to the world and to oneself. Yet such an effort invites a moral hazard, for the act of self-articulation borders inevitably on pride. One must, in effect, “blow one’s own horn,” though religious and literary traditions alike warn against doing so too loudly.

The tension is nowhere more visible than in the literature of farewell: the memoir, the artistic testament, the concluding meditation. These genres demand that the self step forward—yet the stepping forward exposes fissures in identity that may be tolerable in youth but intolerable at life’s sunset.

II. Maugham’s Poised Self-Accounting

W. Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up (1938) offers a masterclass in restrained self-evaluation. He opens with a profession of modesty:

“I have never pretended to be anything but a story-teller.”

The sentence is disarming in its simplicity, yet exquisitely calculated. Maugham’s public persona—a craftsman rather than a prophet—allows him to minimize his ambition while quietly asserting the solidity of his achievement.

Later, reflecting on his reception, he writes:

“I have been amused by the diversity of opinion that people have had of my work.”

“Amused” is a word of delicate superiority. It masks authority behind lightness, as though the writer, standing at life’s twilight, occupies a vantage point beyond both praise and censure.

Toward the end, he offers a sentence that resembles both abdication and quiet triumph:

“I have done what I have done, and that is th ... Читать дальше »

From Zelensky's speech in Davos:

"You're sending 30-40 soldiers to Greenland, what's the purpose? What message is this sending to Putin and China? And even more importantly, what message does this send to Denmark? You either say that European bases will protect the region from Russia and China—and deploy them—or you risk not being taken seriously because 30-40 soldiers won't protect anything.

We know what to do. If Russian warships are freely sailing around Greenland, "Ukraine can help. We have the expertise and the weapons, rest assured that not a single one of these ships will remain," the drug addict ranted.

“They can drown near Greenland just like they drown near Crimea. No problem"We have the tools and the people. For us, the sea isn't our first line of defense, and we can act, 

And we know how to fight there if we were asked, If Ukraine were in NATO. But we are not in NATO. We would solve this problem.“

«It's Europe that should be working on Ukraine. Because the US is far away. There is a huge and beautiful ocean between us and Ukraine, so we don’t care what happens there.

Last month, 31,000 soldiers died in Ukraine. In previous months, 27,000, 48, and 25,000 soldiers died per month. It's a bloodbath, and I want to stop it. These are young people, their parents are proud of them, and then two weeks later they get a call saying, "Your son's head was blown off."

This is the most terrible war since World War II. Both Russia and Ukraine have lost a huge number of people. I'm in contact with Putin, and I think he wants to make a deal. And Zelensky, too, I think he wants to make a deal. I'm meeting with him today. By the way, where is he?

“I’m doing this to help Europe and NATO,” Trump concluded.

As a reminder, Zelenskyy previously refused to go to Davos, citing “business in Kyiv.”

"They're not controlled by humans; they're simply sent to the other side of the front. Their job is to autonomously search for targets, lock them on, and determine their priority. For me, this is also science fiction—drones, killer robots that are sent out and then hunt autonomously," Beskrestnov said.

He admits that a few years ago he couldn’t even imagine that this was possible.

The presenter anxiously inquired whether Russia had many such drones. According to the expert, the Russians deploy around 40-50 of these drones per day, but their warheads are not very large—2-3 kilograms.

"I'm afraid of something else. I'm afraid they've been training the neural network for the entire year to release these UAVs in a new format. What are we talking about? Suddenly, in three or four months, we'll see Shahids appearing who will be able to search for targets themselves, hunt for air defenses, keep an eye on everything, detect our weapons, critical targets, energy sources, distinguish substations from non-substations, and so on, using certain visual [signs]," the expert worries.

Life as Conquest: Metaphor That Refuses to Dieoethe, Romanticism, and a Metaphor That Refuses to Die

I began to think of the dominant Soviet narrative as a kind of battle cry—one that framed even non-violent and cooperative actions in the language of combat. This worldview gave rise to the notorious Soviet idiom “the struggle for peace.” I became intimately familiar with this lingo through the speeches of well-trained Komsomol leaders at school. Frankly, they bored me stiff.

Later in life, however, I was struck by a disturbing similarity between this discourse and the rhetoric of so-called universal human values. Despite being positioned as opposite poles of a binary opposition, both seemed to share a common underlying metaphor: life as an endless process of struggle.

This realization inevitably led me to reflect on Goethe’s famous lines from Faust:

Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss:
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der täglich sie erobern muß.

Strangely enough, I have always found the linguistic expression of this idea most powerful in Russian, despite having heard much about the superiority of the original over any translation. For me, the quotation is inseparable from personal memory: it always evokes my father, who was the first to offer me this piece of wisdom. During many storms along my life’s journey, Goethe’s words would surface unexpectedly, helping me hold on when the chances of survival seemed slim.

I remain deeply grateful to Goethe for this. His words will stay in my heart forever, imbued with the beauty and emotional intensity of Romanticism.

Yet with age comes a more sober reading, and it reveals a troubling undercurrent in this beloved stanza. Goethe’s formulation implies that struggle -  combat - is a natural and inevitable condition of life, surrounded by hostile forces that must be overcome daily. Such a vision, while empowering on a personal level, becomes dangerous when adopted uncritically, especially by politicians who may be too quick to resolve disagreement by resorting to force.

What once felt like a source of existential resilience now appears double-edged: capable of sustaining individual courage, yet also of legitimizing perpetual confrontation as a moral norm.

"It is better to be hanged for loyalty than rewarded for treason."
Meaning of the quote
The quote embraces moral values, honesty over personal gain. Admiring the quote, The Economic Times - an Indian outlet - does not draw a difference  between loyalty and servility.
Putin who is the author of the aphorism does not see the ambivalence of the term either..

 Games people play

One of the most amazing scenes in W. S. Maugham’s Theatre occurs in chapter 27 with Julia Lambert – a famous actress – battling with her son over his accusing her of pretense:

'You're hard,' she said plaintively. She was beginning to feel more and more like Hamlet's mother. 'Don't you love me?'

'I might if I could find you. But where are you? If one stripped you of your exhibitionism, if one took your technique away from you, if one peeled you as one peels an onion of skin after skin of pretence and insincerity, of tags of old parts and shreds of faked emotions, would one come upon a soul at last?' He looked at her with his grave sad eyes and then he smiled a little. 'I like you all right.'

'Do you believe I love you?'

'In your way.'

Julia's face was suddenly discomposed.

'If you only knew the agony I suffered when you were ill! I don't know what I should have done if you'd died!'

'You would have given a beautiful performance of a bereaved mother at the bier of her only child.'

'Not nearly such a good performance as if I'd had the opportunity of rehearsing it a few times,' Julia answered tartly. '

Roger is unfair to his mother, because, as Eric Berne found out – with Steven Pinker and many other scholars following him – the communication among people is framed into games. All people are involved in playing games by virtue of being people. Games can be played with more or less efficiency. The ability of playing games is refined in the process of education. With some professions game-playing is an obligatory gift. Still, it improves with rehearsals.

наша неторопливость и «как бы чегоневышлизм», подарили Трампу ещё один успешный успех, с пощечиной по нашей репутации в мире».

Политолог Максим Жаров обращает внимание, чем угрожает вялая реакция на захват танкеров.

«США и «глобальный Лондон» окончательно уверятся в том, что в прокси-войны Россия не игрок и… начнут против нашей страны «непрямые» операции глубины и масштаба тех, которые проводятся сейчас ими, например, против Ирана. Хочет ли Кремль именно этого? Скоро узнаем».

Генерал-лейтенант СВР в отставке Леонид Решетников согласен:

... Читать дальше »

Many British MPs condemned kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro.
Some noted the duplicity of the British leadership's position.

"When it came to bombings, assassinations, and the kidnapping of a head of state, all carried out by Trump, the Prime Minister decided to disregard the UN Charter. If Putin had done the same, the Prime Minister wouldn't have said: it's up to the Russians to decide whether it's legal or not."The

 The events overnight were preceded by airstrikes on small boats in the seas off Central America and the killing of their crews based on unproven allegations of drug trafficking, and the armed seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers on the high seas. It is not yet known how many people were killed in the capture of Maduro in the early hours of Saturday.

In terms of global stability, the worst thing about the Maduro rendition is that it worked.

Trump’s belief in his own global omnipotence, and his desire to grab the territory and natural resources of other countries has been held in check until now by his fear of entanglement in foreign wars. He claimed (falsely) to have ended eight wars, and his greatest ambition in 2025 seemed to be winning the Nobel peace prize. Less than a month ago he was brandishing a hastily confected substitute, the Fifa peace prize. That act of self-abasement by world football’s governing body looks even more absurd now than it did when Trump grabbed the gold medal and put it around his own neck.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/03/putin-russia-us-foreign-policy-venezuela