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Sitting atop my to-do pile of papers, books, CD-ROMs, coupons, jewel cases, notebooks, and paper scraps has sat my battered copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. There are little slips of paper in it marking things that I wanted to briefly talk about, from the months ago that I read it. Here are the notes I wanted to mention.

• 1.I.5.
  

  These young men [who, like Alyosha, tried the monastically studious life but, unlike Alyosha, cannot “hack it”] unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices. They fail to understand that to sacrifice five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth […], is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

  This was at once encouraging and an admonition to me. It was as if I began to question again whether I was supposed to be a professor, whether my end goal really was worthy, or whether I was worthy thereof. This paragraph fragment alone engendered much soul-searching on my part.

• 1.II.3.
  

  Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

  Such a good word. I have thought much of David’s sorrow over the prospect of losing his son; or, more broadly, on the ancient Jewish customs of grief at large. Namely, there is a set period of mourning, and then it’s over with. You move on. You stop complaining and worrying and fussing over it. You are able to look back on X time in your life and you remember that you have fully grieved the loss, whatever it is, and so do not need to continue to be sad. What an enormous insight into the nature of depressive psychology, and how true!

• 1.II.7.
  

  Ivan is above that. He wouldn’t make up to anyone for thousands. It is not money, it’s not comfort Ivan is seeking. Perhaps it’s suffering he is seeking.

  Is not suffering addictive? Like any pain, we may seek it not only for the endorphins it releases (if physical pain), but also because in a dialectical sense, it tells us we are alive. Those that seek pleasure ultimately lose themselves in a dream world, unsure of the sturdiness of their existence; but those that seek pain are, while experiencing it, fully aware that they are experiencing it, quite acutely; and if they are experiencing it, they Are.

• 2.VI.2.g.
  

  At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvellously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

  Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenceless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the
  wicked can.

  What I have been unable to articulate for the life of me, Dostoyevsky sums up via Father Zossima in a couple of paragraphs. This is so true of my experience: kids remember things that you would never dream of them remembering, and it haunts them longer. Let us be careful of ourselves around children, but really, around everyone! If we cultivate lives of loving humility, then even the hardened, jaded adults who think they are unaffected by all things, will possibly be affected for good.

• 4.XI.3.
  

  [Dmitri, to Alyosha] Do you know, perhaps I won’t answer at the trial at all…. And I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies- I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there. Alyosha, my angel, all these philosophies are the death of me.

  As above, the sufferer knows the dark addiction of suffering if only to confirm his existence.

• Ibid. Emphasis mine:
  

  “She [Grushenka, Dmitri’s lover] told me [Alyosha] she was very much grieved by you to-day.”

  “I know. Confound my temper! It was jealousy. I was sorry, I kissed her as she was going. I didn’t ask her forgiveness.”

  “Why didn’t you?” exclaimed Alyosha.

  Suddenly Mitya [that is, Dmitri] laughed almost mirthfully.

  “God preserve you, my dear boy, from ever asking forgiveness for a fault from a woman you love. From one you love especially, however greatly you may have been in fault. For a woman—devil only knows what to make of a woman! I know something about them, anyway. But try acknowledging you are in fault to a woman. Say, ‘I am sorry, forgive me,’ and a shower of reproaches will follow! Nothing will make her forgive you simply and directly, she’ll humble you to the dust, bring forward things that have never happened, recall everything, forget nothing, add something of her own, and only then forgive you. And even the best, the best of them do it.

  Sheer genius, only because it’s absolutely dead-on; though you’d get shot for saying so these days in a book like this. I was having a conversation with a gentleman I work with and he was telling me this essentially same thing. “Women,” he said matter-of-factly, “will always try to get into everything you do. If you screw up, you’re going to know it. They’re bred to trap you: they’ll bring up a string of everything you’ve ever done wrong, what they’ve done for you and your family, and you just have to take it.” He wasn’t angry, he was just giving me advice. I hope I’m not that cynical … or acquiescent! when I’m his age.

• 4.XI.9. The entire conversation between Ivan and the devil is like a century of apologetics wrapped up into one chapter. Astonishing; it would take volumes to go through it all.

There were more, but they don’t seem so profound now as they did when I first marked them.

Sitting atop my to-do pile of papers, books, CD-ROMs, coupons, jewel cases, notebooks, and paper scraps has sat my battered copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. There are little slips of paper in it marking things that I wanted to briefly talk about, from the months ago that I read it. Here are the notes I wanted to mention.

• 1.I.5.
  

  These young men [who, like Alyosha, tried the monastically studious life but, unlike Alyosha, cannot “hack it”] unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices. They fail to understand that to sacrifice five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply ten-fold their powers of serving the truth […], is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

  This was at once encouraging and an admonition to me. It was as if I began to question again whether I was supposed to be a professor, whether my end goal really was worthy, or whether I was worthy thereof. This paragraph fragment alone engendered much soul-searching on my part.

• 1.II.3.
  

  Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

  Such a good word. I have thought much of David’s sorrow over the prospect of losing his son; or, more broadly, on the ancient Jewish customs of grief at large. Namely, there is a set period of mourning, and then it’s over with. You move on. You stop complaining and worrying and fussing over it. You are able to look back on X time in your life and you remember that you have fully grieved the loss, whatever it is, and so do not need to continue to be sad. What an enormous insight into the nature of depressive psychology, and how true!

• 1.II.7.
  

  Ivan is above that. He wouldn’t make up to anyone for thousands. It is not money, it’s not comfort Ivan is seeking. Perhaps it’s suffering he is seeking.

  Is not suffering addictive? Like any pain, we may seek it not only for the endorphins it releases (if physical pain), but also because in a dialectical sense, it tells us we are alive. Those that seek pleasure ultimately lose themselves in a dream world, unsure of the sturdiness of their existence; but those that seek pain are, while experiencing it, fully aware that they are experiencing it, quite acutely; and if they are experiencing it, they Are.

• 2.VI.2.g.
  

  At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvellously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

  Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenceless heart. You don’t know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire, it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labour. For we must love not only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Everyone can love occasionally, even the
  wicked can.

  What I have been unable to articulate for the life of me, Dostoyevsky sums up via Father Zossima in a couple of paragraphs. This is so true of my experience: kids remember things that you would never dream of them remembering, and it haunts them longer. Let us be careful of ourselves around children, but really, around everyone! If we cultivate lives of loving humility, then even the hardened, jaded adults who think they are unaffected by all things, will possibly be affected for good.

• 4.XI.3.
  

  [Dmitri, to Alyosha] Do you know, perhaps I won’t answer at the trial at all…. And I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies- I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there. Alyosha, my angel, all these philosophies are the death of me.

  As above, the sufferer knows the dark addiction of suffering if only to confirm his existence.

• Ibid. Emphasis mine:
  

  “She [Grushenka, Dmitri’s lover] told me [Alyosha] she was very much grieved by you to-day.”

  “I know. Confound my temper! It was jealousy. I was sorry, I kissed her as she was going. I didn’t ask her forgiveness.”

  “Why didn’t you?” exclaimed Alyosha.

  Suddenly Mitya [that is, Dmitri] laughed almost mirthfully.

  “God preserve you, my dear boy, from ever asking forgiveness for a fault from a woman you love. From one you love especially, however greatly you may have been in fault. For a woman—devil only knows what to make of a woman! I know something about them, anyway. But try acknowledging you are in fault to a woman. Say, ‘I am sorry, forgive me,’ and a shower of reproaches will follow! Nothing will make her forgive you simply and directly, she’ll humble you to the dust, bring forward things that have never happened, recall everything, forget nothing, add something of her own, and only then forgive you. And even the best, the best of them do it.

  Sheer genius, only because it’s absolutely dead-on; though you’d get shot for saying so these days in a book like this. I was having a conversation with a gentleman I work with and he was telling me this essentially same thing. “Women,” he said matter-of-factly, “will always try to get into everything you do. If you screw up, you’re going to know it. They’re bred to trap you: they’ll bring up a string of everything you’ve ever done wrong, what they’ve done for you and your family, and you just have to take it.” He wasn’t angry, he was just giving me advice. I hope I’m not that cynical … or acquiescent! when I’m his age.

• 4.XI.9. The entire conversation between Ivan and the devil is like a century of apologetics wrapped up into one chapter. Astonishing; it would take volumes to go through it all.

There were more, but they don’t seem so profound now as they did when I first marked them.