The Brothers Karamazov (3)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 1879/1880. New York: Airmont Publishing Co. 1966.

Why read it? First, it’s a mystery. Who killed Fyodor Karamazov? He deserved it. He was a tyrant. Plot: “An old profligate, Fyodor Karamazov, is murdered and his eldest son is tried and convicted for the crime; all the sons of the Karamazov family, however, each In his own way, feel complicity and the need to atone for their part in the death of the old man.” p. 7.

“The ‘punishment’ that comes to each of the brothers involved in the crime against their father is self-realization.” p, 9. [Introduction. O. H. Rudzik.]

The family? A group of people who work to help and support each other? Or a disjointed group of individuals with distinctly different personalities and motives?

“…emergence into light of the hurtful hostility felt by all sons to all fathers, by all men to all imposed authority.” p. 10. [Introduction. O. H. Rudzik.]

A study of character—symbolic of the essential traits of the Russian people? All the brothers’ personalities combine to compose a single complex human being?

Sample quotes and ideas:

“I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon; so I say let me play the buffoon, for you are, every one of you, stupider and lower than I.” p. 81.

“That’s the trouble, for everything in the world is a riddle.” p. 100.

“God and the devil are fighting…and the battlefield is the hearts of man.” p. 101.

“…to hell with all who pry into the human heart.” p. 107.

“…with fearful hatred—that hate which is only a hair’s breadth from love, from the maddest love.” p. 107.

“Brother, let me ask one thing more: has any man a right to look at other men and decide which is worthy to live?” p. 132.

“Connoisseurs of Russian beauty could have foretold with certainty that this fresh, still youthful, beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty…that the face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very soon appear upon her forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would grow coarse and red perhaps—in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment, the fleeting beauty often met with in Russian women.” p. 138.

“…he seemed anxious before the moment of death to say everything he had not said in his life, and not simply for the sake of instructing them, but as though thirsting to share with all men and all creation his joy and ecstasy.” p. 149.

“Because we have come here and shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are outside….” p. 149.

“For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian idea, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of men and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.” p. 156.

“For I mean to go on in my sins to the end….” p. 158. “For sin is sweet, all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it on the sly, and I openly…and your paradise is not to my taste.” p. 158.

“I believe that I fall asleep and don’t wake up again, and that’s all.” p. 158.

To be continued.

The Brothers Karamazov (2)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 1879/1880. New York: Airmont Publishing Co. 1966.

Why read it? First, it’s a mystery. Who killed Fyodor Karamazov? He deserved it. He was a tyrant. Plot: “An old profligate, Fyodor Karamazov, is murdered and his eldest son is tried and convicted for the crime; all the sons of the Karamazov family, however, each In his own way, feel complicity and the need to atone for their part in the death of the old man.” p. 7.

“The ‘punishment’ that comes to each of the brothers involved in the crime against their father is self-realization.” p, 9. [Introduction. O. H. Rudzik.]

The family? A group of people who work to help and support each other? Or a disjointed group of individuals with distinctly different personalities and motives? “…emergence into light of the hurtful hostility felt by all sons to all fathers, by all men to all imposed authority.” p. 10. [Introduction. O. H. Rudzik.]

A study of character—symbolic of the essential traits of the Russian people? All the brothers’ personalities combine to compose a single complex human being?

Sample Quotes and Ideas:

Fyodor: “But I have been lying…my whole life long, every day and hour of it…. I am a lie, and the father of lies.” p. 44.

To Fyodor: “You defile everything you touch.” p. 45.

“Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more…. Such grief does not desire consolation…feeds on the sense of its hopelessness…. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.” p. 47.

“Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God.” p. 50.

“For men are made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on Earth.’ ” p. 53.

“And if the patient whose wounds you are washing did not greet you with gratitude, but worried you with his whims, without valuing or remarking your charitable services, began abusing you and rudely commanding you, and complaining to the superior authorities of you (which often happens when people are in great suffering)…would you persevere in your love…?” p. 55.

“The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” p. 55.

“In my dreams…I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity….and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together…. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom…. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me.” p. 55.

“…it has always happened that the more I detest men individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.” p. 55.

“If you have been talking to me so sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness….” p. 55.

“The…criminal, they say, rarely repents, for the very doctrines of today confirm him in the idea that his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction against an unjustly oppressive force.” p. 62.

“There is no virtue if there is no immortality.” p. 67.

“With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears of emotion in earnest, although at that very moment…they are able to whisper to themselves, ‘You know you are lying.. You’re acting now….’ ” p. 70.

“He is one of those who don’t want millions, but an answer to their questions.” p. 77.

Comment: Dostoevsky, the novelist of the complex personality. RayS.

To be continued.

The Brothers Karamazov (1)

The Brothers Karamazov (1). Fyodor Dostoyevsky. 1879/1880. New York: Airmont Publishing Co. 1966.

Why read it? First, it’s a mystery. Who killed Fyodor Karamazov? He deserved it. He was a tyrant.

Plot: “An old profligate, Fyodor Karamazov, is murdered and his eldest son is tried and convicted for the crime; all the sons of the Karamazov family, however, each In his own way, feel complicity and the need to atone for their part in the death of the old man.” p. 7. “The ‘punishment’ that comes to each of the brothers involved in the crime against their father is self-realization.” p, 9. [Introduction. O. H. Rudzik.]

The family? A group of people who work to help and support each other? Or a disjointed group of individuals with distinctly different personalities and motives?

“…emergence into light of the hurtful hostility felt by all sons to all fathers, by all men to all imposed authority.” p. 10. [Introduction. O. H. Rudzik.]

A study of character—symbolic of the essential traits of the Russian people? All the brothers’ personalities combine to compose a single complex human being?

Sample Quotes and Ideas:

“Immediately after the elopement Adelaida Ivanovna discerned in a flash that she had no feeling for her husband but contempt. …rumor had it that Fyodor Pavlovitch did not beat his wife but was beaten by her.” p. 12.

“He [Fyodor Karamazov] completely abandoned the child of his marriage with Adelaida Ivanovna, not from malice, not because of his matrimonial grievances, but simply because he forgot him.” p. 13.

“Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing an unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even to his direct disadvantage.” p. 14.

“At her [his second wife’s] death almost exactly the same thing happened to the two little boys as to their elder brother, Mitya…completely forgotten and abandoned by their father.” p. 17.

“There was something about him [Alyosha] which made one feel at once…that he did not care to be a judge of others—that he would never take it upon himself to criticize and would never condemn anyone for anything. He never resented an insult.” p. 22.

Fyodor to Alysosha: “I feel that you’re the only creature in the world who has not condemned me.” p. 27.

“Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, 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 and the cause they have set before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.” p. 28.

“When you choose an elder, you renounce your own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete self-abnegation…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.” p. 29.

“…he [the elder, Zossima] had acquired the keenest intuition and could tell from an unknown face what a newcomer wanted, and what was the suffering on his conscience…sometimes astounded and almost alarmed his visitors by his knowledge of their secrets before they had spoken a word.”

Comment by RayS. You can tell from these quotes that Dostoevsky is a serious philosophical novelist who explores his characters in complex detail. The reader turns the pages in order to follow the revelations of character. The novel is not easy reading.

To be continued.

The Magic Mountain (3). Thomas Mann.

Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library 1924 (1952).

Why Read It? Want to know what the hereafter will be like? In my opinion, Hans Castorp’s experience in the tuberculosis sanatorium was very much like the popular belief of life after death—life without time. On the mountain, time does not exist. Events repeat themselves. Experiences repeat themselves. The patients have satisfied appetites. All of the patients’ desires are met. Regularity and routine are the everyday, undeviating experiences. On the mountain, one floats over the real world down below, the world of accomplishment and achievement.

The basic plot of the novel is simple, but it requires 700+ pages to work it out. Hans Castorp decides to visit his cousin in a tuberculosis sanatorium on the mountain for three weeks. He soon shows symptoms of the disease and spends seven years there. Cured, he returns to the world below to fight for the German army in World War I. During his stay on the mountain, he encounters a humanist and a traditional believer in Christianity and their various arguments about the meaning of life take up considerable pages of abstract thought. Castorp studies biology and, therefore, life and gradually begins to develop his own personality, rather than being in the shadow of other, stronger personalities who at first dominate him with their thought. RayS.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man.” p. 465.

“The recklessness of death is in life, it would not be life without it….” p. 495.

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.” p. 496.

“The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of Central Europe to the cause of humanity.” p. 516.

“Speech is civilization itself…. It is silence which isolates.” p. 517.

“…it was again impossible to distinguish which side was in the right, where God stood and where the Devil….” p. 525.

“But it is more moral to lose your life than to save it.” p. 557.

“…one doesn’t know oneself, no one can know that precisely and certainly.” p. 593.

“Hans Castorp looked about him. He saw on every side the uncanny and the malign, and he knew what it was he saw: life without time, life without care or hope, life as depravity, assiduous stagnation: life as dead.” p. 626.

“…the overpowering melancholy that lay in eternity, forever turning on itself without permanence of direction at any given moment….” p. 629.

“He affronted you. But he did not insult you. There is a difference…. It was a matter of abstractions, and intellectual disagreement. On intellectual topics he could affront you, perhaps, but not insult you.” p. 697.

“The whole affair was in the intellectual sphere, and has nothing to do with the personal, and insult can only be personal. The intellectual can never be personal.” p. 697.

“…that even the simplest events always worked out differently from what one would have thought beforehand.” p. 701.

“ ‘Coward!’ Naphta shrieked; and with this human shriek confessing that it takes more courage to fire than be fired upon, raised his pistol in a way that had nothing to do with dueling and shot himself in the head.” p. 704.

“There are authors whose names are associated with a single great work, because they have been able to give themselves complete expression in it. Dante is the Divina Commedia, Cervantes is Don Quixote.” p. 717.

“But there are others—and I must count myself among them—whose single works do not possess this complete significance, being only parts of the whole which makes up the author’s lifework. And not only his life work, but actually his life itself, his personality.” p. 718.

“…it may be unfair to the single work to look at it by itself, disregarding its connection with the others, and not taking into account the frame of reference.” p. 718.

“A work of art must not be a task or an effort; it must not be undertaken against one’s will. It is meant to give pleasure, to entertain and enliven.” p. 722.

“What he comes to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health: in just the same way that one must have a knowledge of sin in order to find redemption.” p. 724.

“It is this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health and life that makes The Magic Mountain a novel of initiation. This description is not original with me. I got it recently from a critic and make use of it in discussing The Magic Mountain…because I consider it a mistake to think that the author himself is the best judge of his work.” p. 725.

Comment: What more can I say? Life on the “Magic Mountain” is a similar state to that which is usually thought of as the afterlife—if one is in Heaven. The experience is primarily intellectual. People interact and read and grow in understanding themselves and the world from which they have come. I suppose I am on shaky ground, but that’s how I interpret this novel. RayS.

The Magic Mountain (2). Thomas Mann.

Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library 1924 (1952).

Why Read It? Want to know what the hereafter will be like? In my opinion, Hans Castorp’s experience in the tuberculosis sanatorium was very much like the popular belief of life after death—life without time. On the mountain, time does not exist. Events repeat themselves. Experiences repeat themselves. The patients have satisfied appetites. All of the patients’ desires are met. Regularity and routine are the everyday, undeviating experiences. On the mountain, one floats over the real world down below, the world of accomplishment and achievement.

The basic plot of the novel is simple, but it requires 700+ pages to work it out. Hans Castorp decides to visit a tuberculosis sanatorium on the mountain for three weeks. He soon shows symptoms of the disease and spends seven years there. Cured, he returns to the world below to fight for the German army in World War I. During his stay on the mountain, he encounters a humanist and a traditional believer in Christianity and their various arguments about the meaning of life take up considerable pages of abstract thought. Castorp studies biology and therefore life and gradually begins to develop his own personality, rather than being in the shadow of other, stronger personalities who at first dominate him with their thought. RayS.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“Oh, what a schoolmaster…. He never leaves off setting you right—first by means of anecdotes, then by abstractions.” p. 201.

“Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good…but it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action….” p. 221.

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.” p. 224.

“I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism.” p. 248.

“By all means I am a humanist, because I am a friend of mankind, like Prometheus, a lover of humanity and human nobility. That nobility is comprehended in the mind, in the reason….” p. 248.

“Tut, living consists in dying, no use mincing the matter.” p. 265.

“…there may have been those who employed the hours of the rest-cure with some serious intellectual occupation, some conceivably profitable study, either by way of keeping in touch with life in the lowlands, or in order to give weight and depth to the passing hour, that it might not be pure time and nothing else besides.” p. 272.

“It seemed forbidden to life that it should understand itself.” p. 280.

“Dualism, antithesis, is the moving, the passionate, the dialectic principle of all spirit. To see the world as cleft into two opposing poles—that is spirit. All monism is tedious.” p. 374.

“The Orient abhors activity. Lao-Tse taught that inaction is more profitable than anything else between heaven and earth. When all mankind shall have ceased to do anything whatever, then only will perfect repose and bliss reign upon this earth.” p. 376.

“Democracy has no meaning whatever if not that of an individualistic corrective to state absolutism of every kind.” p. 399.

“…conceives of humanity not as a conflict between the ego and society but as a conflict between the ego and God, between the flesh and the spirit….” p. 404.

“No, death was neither specter nor mystery. It was a simple, acceptable, and physiologically necessary phenomenon; to dwell upon it longer than decency required was to rob life of its due.” p. 457.

To be continued.

The Magic Mountain (1). Thomas Mann.

Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library 1924 (1952).

Why Read It? Want to know what the hereafter will be like? In my opinion, Hans Castorp’s experience in the tuberculosis sanatorium was very much like the popular belief of life after death—life without time. On the mountain, time does not exist. Events repeat themselves. Experiences repeat themselves. The patients have satisfied appetites. All of the patients’ desires are met. Regularity and routine are the everyday, undeviating experiences. On the mountain, one floats over the real world down below, the world of accomplishment and achievement.

The basic plot of the novel is simple, but it requires 700+ pages to work it out. Hans Castorp decides to visit a tuberculosis sanatorium on the mountain for three weeks. He soon shows symptoms of the disease and spends seven years there. Cured, he returns to the world below to fight for the German army in World War I. During his stay on the mountain, he encounters a humanist and a traditional believer in Christianity and their various arguments about the meaning of life take up considerable pages of abstract thought. Castorp studies biology and therefore life and gradually begins to develop his own personality, rather than being in the shadow of other, stronger personalities who at first dominate him with their thought.

The author, Thomas Mann, says Castorp is a seeker, a “questor” after what? Knowledge, self-knowledge. He goes through sickness and death to reach self-knowledge.

The author admits that he is not the best judge of his own work. The suggestion that Hans Castorp is a “questor,” he borrows from a critic.

Well, I have my own view of what his story means. It’s a description of life in the hereafter. Is this theme worth 700+ pages? I think so. I have always thought of the hereafter as being a place with no growth and therefore without the fire that animates us in the world.

At first the experience seems static. However, there are any number of stories and characters to keep the reader turning the pages. But for me, even though the author never mentions the symbolism of the hereafter as part of his meaning, the explicit description of the way of life on the “Magic Mountain” is enough to make me realize that the hereafter is a place of intellectual growth. An intellectual growth that helps Hans Castorp to learn who he is, to develop his understanding of his own independent personality. He grows to discover and understand the nature and mystery of his life. [Why do we read? To discover the nature and the meaning of the mystery of life and humanity.] For me, this novel is an interesting view of the experience of life in the hereafter. RayS.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“You can’t call it time—and you can’t call it living either!” p. 12.

“A year is so important at our age. Down below, one goes through so many changes, and makes so much progress, in a single year of life. And I have to stagnate up here—yes, just stagnate like a filthy puddle; it isn’t too crass a comparison.” p. 13.

“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.” p. 14.

“When ‘accused’ of being a talented artist…Hans Castorp only laughed good-humoredly, and not for a moment considered letting himself in for a career of being eccentric and not getting enough to eat.” p. 31.

“I can tell by looking at people, you know, whether they’ll make good patients or not; it takes talent, everything takes talent…. …maybe he shows up on the parade-ground for aught I know; but he’s no good at being ill.” p. 44.

“…when one is interested the understanding follows.” p. 49.

“Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment.” p. 59.

“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.” p. 95.

“I don’t like music if it’s supposed to be good for me.” p. 111.

Music puts us to sleep when our purpose is to awaken the reason. p. 111.

“And then a wedding ring seems so prosaic, it is almost repellent. It is a symbol of possession; it is always saying, ‘Hands off!’; it turns every woman into a nun.” p. 135.

“Herr Settembrini seemed to bring together in a single breath categories which in the young man’s mind had heretofore been as the poles asunder—for example, technology and morals.” p. 154.

“Two principles, according to the Settembrini cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.” p. 155.

To be continued.

The Outermost House (5). Henry Beston.

The Outermost House (5): A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).

Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.

Sample ideas and quotes:

“Now came flash after stabbing flash amid a roaring of rain, and heavy thunder that rolled on till its last echoes were swallowed up in vast detonations which jarred the walls.” p. 186.

“Stars came out after the storm, and when I woke again before sunrise I found the heavens and the earth rain-washed, cool, and clear.” p. 188.

“Had I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on the sense of smell.” p. 189.

“I like a good smell—the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm morning after a night of April rain, the clove-like aroma of our wild Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the good reek of hot salt grass and low-tide blowing from these meadows late on summer afternoons.” p. 189.

“The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun.” p. 194.

“ ‘June bugs’…strike my screens with a formidable look and linger there buzzing; let me but open the door, and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon the cloth.” p. 197.

“…the creation is still going on….” p. 220.

“Creation is here and now.” p. 220.

“So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony….” p. 220.

“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science.” p. 221.

“It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.” p. 221.

“ ‘Nature—that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang…’ Whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes, I know that some passerby has been getting life from books.” p.221.

“The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life—all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.” p. 221.

“…beloved birds of the great beach, and of their beauty and their zest of living.” p. 221.

“A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual.” p. 221.

“…rest your spirit in her [Nature’s] solitary places.” p. 222.

Comment: Beston’s book is a combination of image and abstract thought suggested by the image. Not as easy to read as you would expect of a nature study. It could more properly be called a meditation. It provides many an idea about the sea, nature. solitude and humanity. RayS.