architecture, shyness, polarity

Tolstoy was very clever to write War and Peace as a preliminary exercise to include, through great detail, through many characters, many scenes, the variety of human experience worth treating with fiction. And then, as he knew himself, he began with his first real novel. There is architecture to it. Levin, who is Tolstoy's self-portrait, on his way to being married, meets Anna Karenina but once in the story. No one is as alive, no one's consciousness so explored as hers, even as we read of marvelous things like Levin scything grain with the peasants on a hot day. We have two pillars, whose arch and vault we do not even see, not seeing in common experience and record a significant meeting of the two. Within the architecture, well, it's like a parking garage. We can drive a truck of all our own experiences into it, plenty of room, so vague, so huge, so encompassing, so familiar, so full of windows and protective roof, nave and bench, that we feel comfortable curling up with it, letting it reflect some form of our experience if we had to put our experiences into words.

The marketplace for the literary is so burdened with marketing dumbocracies that few can save us from the onslaught of puerile stupidity of architecture that we can see, that we feel comfortable with, the McMansion taking up increasingly its dreadful space next to its clones, that the only thing to save ourselves is, like you have done, remembering how to read, remembering that we all have our own tastes and choices, and that we need not to have to be told that the latest piece of admissions and crap is fine literature, as literature breathes quietly, like that bird on a branch up in a tree, a natural creature, with its own motions and habits peculiar to it. No need for mechanical versions of it. The live thing is better.

Some form of deregulation and greed has eased its common way into the publishing world, and anyone taking ideas seriously, fond of the natural richness of culture, would be concerned.




Shyness is not an attribute we might typically assign to Dostoevsky. (He was a nervous man, we are told, and an epileptic.) We know that he was, more or less, a participant in a radical student group, at least a follower of its intrigues. He knew them personally, well enough to get himself hauled in front of a firing squad for revolutionary activities, then marched off to a penal colony in Siberia.

He had written earlier a sketch of peasant life, making clear his sympathies, in literary form. But it is his Notes From the House of the Dead, his record of prison life that sends him on his way, a first bloom of the literary breadth we know him for. Had it taken such a shocking experience for him to move with a literary confidence new and fresh for him? The Gambler would be next for him, taken from his experience as an addictive gambler set in Baden-Baden.

Moving to the end of his career, he crystallizes his experience as a writer in the character of Alyosha Karamazov. While he is giving us a kind of religious propaganda in this figure of a young monk, rendered with the apparent intention of aiding the Russian nation undergo a spiritual rebirth, Dostoevsky leaves in his portrait of the young monk a fossil record of his own literary career. The book shimmers with the free prose and a bustle of defining moments that took a normal person involved in the discussions of the day and made him a fiction writer. The spiritual rebirth, cloaked in terms of joining in with the First Miracle, is a rendering of the emotional boldness through which the writer claims self-expression.

Get over your shyness; come to the human joy offered by God’s love, as God loves human joy, thus the wine of the First Miracle, the wedding of the poor in Cana. The old High Monk Father Zosima has been laid out for the faithful to keep a vigil over, and Alyosha, his young disciple, exhausted, falls into a dreaming sleep. Within his dream, along with the old monk, he sees that First Miracle scene laid out before him. It’s almost like we have the Giotto fresco laid out before us. We see, through the dream in which the old monk is speaking to Alyosha, Mary encouraging Jesus, and a shy reluctance on the part of Christ; we get the banquet manager, puzzled, then imbibing the new stuff, the essential rendered with familiarity. At the end of the dream Dostoevsky gives us Alyosha leaving the monastery, falling to the ground beneath the stars, and rising the fighter that he will be the rest of his life.

To Dostoevsky, it was all something that sounded familiar, enough so that we get a comfortable twinge of comic humor along with the sacred seriousness. Along with the almost tongue-in-cheek propaganda, we get an almost telegraphic message home of plot, theme and ending that only the bravest, boldest, stupidest, most foolish and schlocky, and yet most clever writer would allow himself. The reader has a sense of the master laying down a theme he will encompass and embellish in great virtuosity, as only the confident writer could. We are drawn along, through the seriousness and oceanic depths with which Dostoevsky treats a writer breaking free to find his voice. (Good to claim our own human oceans, to report on their health.) We see the same urge, finally, in every character of his, yet without the slightest monotony, each an individual with different eyes, a different voice, a different situation, this breadth and diversity no small part of the great virtuosity one might allude to concerning him. As if to say, all, atheist, sinner, sensualist, monk, all have the same struggle. Which is different from a topical political message.

Yes, we can imagine Dostoevsky as a shy very nervous man who rose at one in the afternoon and wrote at night at his desk by candlelight, disliking the glow of electric lamps, when all was quiet, when the claim of the conversations he would fastidiously record as an observer in notebooks had quieted down, reverberating in the perspective brought by the silence of night.



I’ve always found the things writers have to say about writing interesting, sometimes the top of their game. Hemingway, for instance, was fascinated with the subject. He shares his opinions, experience, wisdom and his secrets all through his writing. He valued writing about writing as much as writing fiction, both an achievement.

A writer is someone who never knows quite what to do with himself. A writer is someone who questions, who hardly finds anything justified. He has an overactive mind, prone to anxiety, to careful consideration, a sorrowful two-sidedness to just about everything. It is in a way an awful talent to have, and yet one natural to the human being. A writer is an agreement, as it were, with the Taoist notion of polarity, in that a particular attribute may be the source of good one day and ill the next.

Worrying, anxiousness, nervousness and confusion and things of the like, even as they be the cause of suffering, are natural to go through, not necessarily a sign of a lack of confidence. The mind must wander and wonder aloud at things, or it will feel disconnected within.

Shakespeare was brilliant with capturing this array of thought. “Nothing is, but thinking makes it so,” Prince Hamlet tells us. The combining of good and ill, the mistaken impression, the false conclusion, the correct assessments and proper readings of people and matters, the confusion, all placed within the dramatic setting. Shakespeare is particularly fine at rendering a character’s realization of neglectfulness, as Lear realizes his neglect of Cordelia, as if to indicate that a sense of guilt over just about everything is the primary characteristic of personality.

Writing is a lasting therapy to outline the faceted nature of all we go through.

A writer has a chance to discover the false assumptions and other fallacies hidden beneath the treatment of life and ideas.