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The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Signet Classics edition 2007 translated by Constance Garnett
p15 ...Ivan was staying in the house of such a father, [Fyodor Karamazov] had been living with him for two months, and they were on the best possible terms.
This last fact was a cause of wonder to many others as well as to me...
I include the above only as a way of introducing the non-omniscient narrator of our story. There will also be an omniscient narrator at times.
p20 ...Peter Miusov, a man very sensitive on the subject of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the following judgement after getting to know Alyosha: [the 3rd and youngest Karamazov brother] “Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might leave alone without a penny, in the center of an unknown town of a million inhabitants, and he would not come to harm. He would not die of cold and hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once; and if he were not, he would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him no effort or humiliation. And to shelter him would be no burden, but, on the contrary, would probably be looked on as a pleasure.”
...
p25 Some of my readers may imagine that Alyosha was a sickly, ecstatic, poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive dreamer. On the contrary, he was at this time a well-grown, clear-eyed young man of nineteen, radiant with health. He was handsome, too, graceful, moderately tall, with dark brown hair, with a regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark gray eyes. He was very thoughtful and very serene.
I shall be told, perhaps, that radiant health is not incompatible with fanaticism and mysticism; but I believe that Alyosha was more of a realist than anyone. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that prompt realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said: “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle that forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said: “I do not believe till I see.”
...
p26 The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: “I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.” In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the Tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth...
That last is well put.
p27 ... An elder [at an Orthodox monastery] was one who took your soul, your will, into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete self-abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible school of abnegation, is undertaken voluntarily, in the hope of self-conquest, of self-mastery, in order, after a life of obedience, to attain perfect freedom, that is, from self: to escape the lot of those who have lived their whole life without finding their true selves in themselves...
We will return to these ideas in “The Grand Inquisitor” section. This passage also made me think of Ram Dass and his dependence on his guru.
Religion. I'll bet Mann's copy of this is marked up, possibly dogeared and full of notes. It occurs to me that, unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Austen and Proust and even Charlotte Bronte say little or nothing about religion.
Small Victories by Anne Lamott
Riverhead Books/Penguin edition 2014
p66 Getting found almost always means being lost for a while.
...Here I wanted to bring my goddamn solace, and all the visiting solace rooms were taken! It so sucked.
...
p67 Then, as is almost always the case, God sent along a minder, who had noticed our distressed milling. It would have been hard not to: we looked like exhausted moose...
...
p68 The garage gave us a taste of normality, which none of us had felt for a while because of all the grief and strangeness. You have to be grateful whenever you get to someplace safe and okay, even if it turns out it wasn’t quite where you were heading. The light you see when people are in the tunnel of deep trouble is domestic flashes of recognition and kitchen comforts, not Blake’s radiance, which would be my preference.
... The sky had shifted again when we stepped outside to the dusk. There were hints of the dying sunset. The three of us stood at the open door, admiring the sky. When you’re in the dark, you have to try to remember that it’s a dance -- dark, light, dark, light, dim...
And of course this is the first religious chapter in Small Victories, though not as religious as the passage about Alyosha's "elder"/guru/saint. But what Dostoyevsky says about people making a choice for belief is seconded here. The circumstances of their lives (alcoholism, mental and physical illness, etc.) could just as reasonably point them in the direction of disbelief. The Opiate of the Masses. It wouldn't make any less sense to me if people worshiped and sought solace from Morris Dancing. In fact that would be quite charming.
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