Thoughts on Turgenev

Do you remember that obscure little Turgenev quote posted back in July? It's from On the Eve, written by Turgenev in 1859. I've excerpted a few paragraphs from the intro. It's a brilliant analysis. I have to confess that only after reading the intro did I resolve to read the book. Like most Russian novels, the character development in this book is astounding. But the theme is even more impacting. To me the entire book can be summarized in Shubin's humble question, "Will there ever be men among us?" Here's the introduction...

quote from jane eyre

Maybe my aunt's house is boring, but she just sat there on the sofa, moping about and complaining. I couldn't help but think about that paragraph in Jane Eyre. It's one of those paragraphs that jumps out and slaps you in the face, and this was the perfect opportunity...

Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and wishing over and over again that her aunt Gibson would send her an invitation up to town...One day, however, as she put away her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus -

"Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered - you must have music, dancing, and society - or you languish, you die away..."

I read it slowly, letting each word drop carefully like a well placed arrow. She promptly left the sofa and quickly became occupied with something more meaningful. 


Today is my sister's birthday. Happy birthday Sarah!

Herman Melville on FTTA

"For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable." 

Dabbling into Dickens

Everyone knows the heart-gripping, painful conclusion of Tale of Two Cities. And everyone, of course, knows this is one of my favorite and most revered chapters in the narrow sphere of secular literature that I can ever recall reading. Here's a snippet:

I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both...It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

These to me are perhaps the most powerful lyrics of the entire piece. Yet they pale, fade, wither, etc. when compared to a single phrase uttered by Jesus on the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is interpreted, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Here is the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate price, for behind it we find the most meaningful purpose of all creation. Perhaps this is where Dicken's novel is so touching; here, where it climaxes with asymptotic approach the ultimate sacrifice ever known to mankind.

And then we have the classic, epic, (and potentially hackneyed) opening stanza to this book, in which Dickens poetically recounts in the most superfluous fashion:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Here it seems as if Dickens was gathering some inspiration from Paul's testimony in 2 Corinthians 6:9-11, where the apostle describes a life of ministry as one who is being poured out on behalf of the souls of those for whom he labored. Where in other places the apostle describes the new covenant ministry (4:1, etc), here he portrays the living of the new covenant ministers:

As unknown and yet well known; as dying and yet behold we live; as being disciplined and yet not being put to death; As made sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as poor yet enriching many; as having nothing and yet possessing all things. Our mouth is opened to you, Corinthians; our heart is enlarged. 

For all the verbosity that is Charles Dickens, what I most appreciate about this chapter is his narrative personification (de rigueur?) of Fate and Death, the Woodman and the Farmer. The harbingers of revolution are bustling about, but they work unceasingly; they work silently. And it is this tantalizing art that makes A Tale of Two Cities into such a classic. So we end here tonight, with an excerpt from what now happens to be my favorite chapter in English literature:

It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrels of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.