Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: The Brothers K. Bk V. 2. & True confession
The Brothers Karamazov
p259 [Alyosha to Ivan] “...you are just as young as other young men of twenty-three... you are young and fresh and nice, green in fact! Now, have I insulted you?”
“On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence,” cried Ivan good-humoredly. “...since that scene with Katerina, I have thought of nothing else but my youthful greenness. And just as though you guessed that, you begin talking about it. Do you know I’ve been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment -- still I would want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away -- where I don’t know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything -- every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty. Some driveling consumptive moralists -- and poets especially -- call that thirst for life base. It’s a feature of the Karamazovs it’s true, that thirst for life regardless of everything. You probably have it too. But why is it base? The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a strong longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them. Yet from habit one’s heart prizes them... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there. Every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science. I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them even though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears. I shall steep my soul in my emotions. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky -- that’s all it is. [Is this a comment on Romanticism?] It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. Do you understand anything of what I am saying...”
What’s odd about this is that, in many ways, “youth” often has a more tenuous grip on life than does old age. Teens and people in their twenties seem more eager to throw their lives away for a cause or simply out of despair. People well past 30, who would seem to have no reason to cling to life, and many reasons to abandon it, seem the most desperate to hold on to those spring leaves and blue sky.
p260 “I understand too well, Ivan. One longs to love with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. You said that so well and I am awfully glad that you have such a longing for life,” cried Alyosha. “I think everyone should love life above everything in the world.”
“Love life more than the meaning of it?”
“Certainly. Love it, regardless of logic as you say. It must be regardless of logic. It’s only then one can understand the meaning of it. I have thought so a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan. You love life. Now you’ve only to do the second half and you are saved.”
“You are trying to save me but perhaps I am not lost! And what does your second half mean?”
“Why, one has to raise up your dead, who perhaps have not died after all... “
“You are inspired. I am awfully fond of such professions of faith from such -- novices. You are a steadfast person, Alyosha...”
...
p261 [Ivan] “...Father doesn’t want to turn aside from his cup till he is seventy. He dreams of hanging on to eighty in fact, so he says. He means it seriously, although he is a buffoon. He stands on a firm rock, too. He stands on his sensuality -- after we are thirty there may be nothing else to stand on. . . . But to hang on until seventy is wrong, better only until thirty. One may retain “a shadow of nobility’ by deceiving oneself... ”
I don’t really follow this business about “thirty” except that the young have curious notions of the future. But Dostoyevsky was in his late 50s when he wrote this, so what does he mean by it? I recall thinking that there was no point in thinking of a future for myself beyond the year 2000 when I would be unimaginably old.
p263 [Ivan] “...It’s different for other people. But we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all... Young Russia is talking about nothing but the eternal questions now. Just when the older generation is all taken up with practical questions. Why have you been looking at me in expectation for the last three months? To ask me ‘what do you believe, or don’t you believe at all?’ That’s what your eyes have been meaning for these three moths, haven’t they?”
p264 “Perhaps so,” smiled Alyosha. “You are not laughing at me, now, Ivan?”
“...I am just as much a little boy as you are, only not a novice. And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I mean? ... what do they talk about... Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism and anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same. They’re the same questions turned inside out. And masses, masses of the most original Russians do nothing but talk of the eternal questions! Isn’t it so?”
...
p265 ...perhaps I too accept God,” laughed Ivan. “That’s a surprise for you, isn’t it?”
...
“...You know, Alyosha, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented. And man has actually invented God. And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man. So holy is it, so touching, so wise and so great a credit is to man. As for me I’ve long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man. And I won’t go through all the axioms laid down by Russians on that subject, all stemming from European hypotheses... I omit all the hypotheses... I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature, that is what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope... And therefore I tell you that I accept God simply... I have come to the conclusion that... I can’t expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions... how can I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions. And so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more I accept His wisdom, His purpose -- which is completely beyond our knowledge. I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life. I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity... [Modeled on the Nicene Creed, I suppose.] Yet would you believe it, in the final result I don’t accept this world of God’s. Although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept. Let me make it plane. I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for. I believe that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a mirage, like the despicable fabrications of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man. I believe that at the world’s end, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that has been shed. I believe that it will not only be possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened -- but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t accept it... That’s what’s at the root of me, Alyosha. That’s my creed. I mean what I say... You didn’t want to hear about God; you only wanted to know what the brother you love lives by. And so I’ve told you.”
I’m surprised that Ivan is the spokesman for Christian theology here. I would have expected Zossima to have said much of this. Even rejecting the world has a good Naphtha-like Christian ring to it. So far, I like what he’s said and where he seems to be going.
...
p267 “Will you explain why you don’t accept the world?” asked Alyosha.
“Yes, I will. It’s not a secret. That’s what I’ve been leading up to. But Alyosha, I don’t want to corrupt you or to turn you from your stronghold. Perhaps I even want to be healed by you.” Ivan smiled suddenly like a gentle child. Alyosha had never seen such a smile on his face before.
It would be natural to go on to the next section, but it is a long one and leads to a still longer one. So I will break here.
The past
Today we had our first real rain of the season. The air smells wonderful. To be honest, I could admit that the air reeks less of urine, which is also true, since the streets have now gotten their first good washing since spring, but, besides that, the air has a delightful tang to it; like you sometimes get late at night or first thing in the morning.
Yesterday I remembered a breakfast place in the neighborhood (China Basin) where I often worked in the '90s. It turned out they were closed on Sunday, but I went back today for the same dish I always ordered back then. Originally the Primo Patio Cafe simply had tables on a crude patio in back of a tiny building on the street housing the kitchen. Over time, they added awnings and then a poly-carbonate roof to shelter patrons from rain and fog and wind. The roof was a bit oppressive and, since that was about when I stopped working in the area, I rarely returned. Now the roof is gone and they have a big awning on one side and umbrellas on the other. Much more pleasant.
I suspect their being closed on Sunday is left over from those early days when this was a light industrial area with no full time residents. It was a bit of a ghost town on weekends. No more. The new baseball stadium is a block away and residential buildings have been added everywhere. Thousands of people now live down here. After eating, I decided to walk over to Crossroads Cafe, another old hangout of mine this time in South Beach. On the way I passed another building I worked in for years and was astounded to see every gap in the urban fabric around it filled with new construction. The derelict, one story building next door was now the facade for a large residential project nearing completion. Where there had been a billiards hall and a large parking lot they were just finishing a new commercial building of a scale similar to everything else in the neighborhood. (The rain-screen on the new facade was not quite completed so it was easy to see how it worked and how it was attached. I still don't understand why these are not called sun-screens.) Next door to that new building is an older building that continues to hold the Brannan Street Cafe; yet another place I used to eat all the time. Since this was turning into a culinary stroll down memory lane, I returned to Brannan Street after reading in the garden at Crossroads, and ordered my favorite sandwich, a veggie Rubin with avocado and cheese instead of meat. Still as good as I remembered.
Then I walked on to South Park and sat in the sun there and read another chapter of my book. The actual little park at South Park, is nicer than I remember. There are a few new, and modern appearing, buildings facing the park, but the two primary cafes: South Park Cafe -- the French anchor of the area for decades now -- and Cafe Centro are still there. Cafe Centro was the place to be during the first (Wired) boom, when Wired magazine was just getting started at the 2nd street end of the park. As much as this area has changed, the continuity of these eating establishments is a little surprising -- though it may just be that there was so little here at the time they have faced less competition. Pier 40 Cafe, another favorite of mine, is long gone but they had a funky business model and they were on an edge with potential customers on only two sides, and that's counting the boats in the yacht harbor.
The neighborhood was changing rapidly even in the '90s, but now it is fully transformed. Enough of the older buildings remain, at least as facades, to give some of the previous flavor, but all the railroad tracks are gone and I doubt there are any sweatshops still active.
"What was he reading?" I imagine you wondering with not a little trepidation.
The answer to that question is On the Move by Oliver Sacks. I'm still pretty early on in Sacks' book, but he's covered his internship at Mount Zion Hospital -- just down the street from where I first lived here. And in South Park I was reading about his years at UCLA, which also included time spend riding his motorcycle around California and Arizona. I was pleased to notice that we just barely overlapped in SoCal. He was still living in Topanga Canyon when my family moved to the San Fernando Valley. My mother got a job at UCLA so we were most likely on campus at the same time at least once. The best way I know to get a feeling for this time in SoCal is to watch the film A Single Man. (Richard Feynman had already been at CalTech for over a decade at this point. Even Gell-Mann had been at CalTech a decade in '65.)
Sacks comments that, as much as he loved California at the time, he never really returned after he moved to New York, and that he also stopped riding his bike so much as roads in the East started getting more crowded. The late '50s and early '60s really were a brief, ephemeral Golden Age for a particular dream of Mid-century America.
Actually, I think '65 is even pushing it a bit. He may be forgetting a few things. Traffic in the LA Basin was already nightmarish by this time and the smog was impossible. When you recall that most of the Case Study Houses -- and almost all the most famous architecture and furniture design work of Charles and Ray Eames -- was done in the late '40s, you could say that the true Golden Age was over by the time Sacks arrived. Still, there was something wonderful about that SoCal.
Anyway, I think On the Move is going to get mixed in with my coverage of God's Hotel, as these doctors tell some similar stories. But the thing that stopped me in my tracks today was a passage that had nothing to do with SoCal or God's Hotel. Here it is:
p149 Another patient at the headache clinic was a young mathematician who... had Sunday migraines. He would start to get nervous and irritable on Wednesday, and this would become worse on Thursday, by Friday, he could not work. On Saturday he felt tormented, and on Sunday he would have a terrible migraine. But then, towards the afternoon, the migraine would melt away. Sometimes as a migraine disappears, the person may break out in a gentle sweat or pass pints of pale urine; it is almost as if there is a catharsis at both physiological and emotional levels. As the migraine and the tension drained out of this man, he would feel himself refreshed and renewed, calm and creative, and on Sunday evening, Monday, and Tuesday he did highly original work in mathematics. Then he would start getting irritable again.
When I gave this man medication and cured him of his migraines, I also cured him of his mathematics, disrupting this strange weekly cycle of illness and misery followed by a transcendent sort of health and creativity.
This isn't just Mann's imagination, I'm afraid. This is a doctor's observation.
Jump to Next: TBK. Bk V. 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment